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| ritojo |
 Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 2:06 am Post subject: Unreal Development Kit |
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Joined: 23 Apr 2009
Posts: 2
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I saw on your main site that you have an exporter for the Unreal 3
Engine available on the UDN website. Now that epic has released UDK,
are you going to release the plugin for the public?
-Thanks |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 8:04 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi, unfortunately the Epic license don't allow us to release this to the public. Only the commercial clients of Unreal3 can have access to this. Plus, the exporters/importers for Unreal3 was developed by one of our partners, and it uses internal source code of Unreal3 engine (cannot be offered with full source code and I don't think it can function with the public UDK).
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| GrimMoroe |
| Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 7:25 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 13 Jun 2008
Posts: 7
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I really wish you and epic could come to some agreement on this.
This would be a good thing for everyone, and sadly since I switched to UDK for my game project I can no longer use grome.
Sucks because I really was looking forward to buying and using Grome2. |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Wed Dec 09, 2009 8:32 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi,
Please have a look at this:
http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=707402
It seems that a Grome / Unreal user made this introduction tutorial:
http://rs247.rapidshare.com/files/317576655/From_GROME_to_Unreal_Developer_Kit.pdf
(Thank you Jo for the tutorial! Looking forward to hear more from you 
We are also looking at the UDK. We want to offer a simpler way to export to Unreal so at least some steps from that tutorial are automatically done. But without access to the Unreal source, the user will need to use the UnrealEd to setup his materials and layers. We may be able to provide some sample materials, but the combination of layers is very large and for some terrains the user may need to write his own customized materials.
So it is possible to have Grome terrain into Unreal with the current exporters and we work to make this integration a lot easier without the need to break Epic Games licensing terms.
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| GrimMoroe |
| Posted: Fri Dec 11, 2009 7:42 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 13 Jun 2008
Posts: 7
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| This is great news. Thanks for the info and the link. |
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| joskj |
| Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2009 2:45 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 16 Oct 2007
Posts: 11
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First, a new link (no rapidshare) to this tutorial (with a few small changes): http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~joskj/stuff/From_GROME_to_UDK.pdf
Second, yes, a simpler way to export to Unreal would be realy nice
For instance, being able to save the heightmaps and alphas directly to
G16 would make things alot easier.
Also, if you could add an option to use the same scaling for all zones
when exporting using "export only selected zones", it would make things
a ALOT easier when working with large terrains (i.e. scale with the overall
terrain's min/max instead of each zones min/max height).
(And finally, yes Adrian, you might host the tutorial here also if you still
want to, although it shouldn be so frustrating downloading it now )
-Jo |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2009 3:18 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi Jo,
Thank for the update. I plan to personally allocate some time in the next few days to make a new export plugin that will make UDK export easier. One of this indeed would be to have heightmaps and alphamaps saved directly to greyscale 16bit.
About scale, I don't know if I correctly understand the situation. Are you using Global Large Date Sets exporter? Are you referring to the resolution of the export (the sampling step)?
For the UDK exporter I plan to use a simpler approach. Basically most of the users will edit the heightmaps in sizes of power of two tiles (patches as they call them in UDK) so the size of the heightmap will be power-of-two + 1 anyway (exactly as UDK wants them), without any need for sampling. But the alpha maps (which are power of two) will need to be resampled at power of two + 1.
I will let know how the progress goes. I may need some help too since you seemed to have more experience than me with UDK.
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| joskj |
| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 1:45 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 16 Oct 2007
Posts: 11
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Hi Adrian,
My problem only apply if you got a terrain that is larger then UDK easaly can handle (513x513 heightmap for G16ed and HMCS2 i think, and UDK doesnt realy like too large single terrains either). If so, you want to use sereral zones in GROME, that you put together as several terrains in UDK (that should fitt together nicely and you can then stream the terrains inn and out of memory "as needed").
I'm using the General Exporter For Large Data Sets. When I have several zones, i tried to export these (heightmap+alpha) one zone at a time, instead of as a single large terrain.
However, when you export only selected zones, your General exporter scales the heights to use the full range of 16 bit (using _GetHMScaleBiasFromRange as in the SDK ExpGeneral example or something like that), based on the min/max height for the selected zones (or is this per zone?) and not the min/max of the whole terrain, so I get something like this when exporting two zones in separate export steps:
Zone1: min/max heights of 122 to 1022, scales to use the full 16bit (unsigned) range.
Zone2: min/max heights of 222 to 1222, scales to use the full 16bit (unsigned) range.
When I then try to import these into UDK (after going through G16ed), its nearly impossible in UDK to scale the zones/terrains to fitt perfectly together (scaling bact to min/max heights for each zone), probably becouse of numeric inacurancy or to many import/export steps.
So, what i would like is to get all the heightmaps 16bit scaled based on 122 as min and 1222 as max for this example.
Now, I can fix this by exporting as one large heightmap and cutting it into smaler pieces in photoshop, but it would be nice to have some better control over the 16 bit scaling.
If your plan is to write a separate UDK exporter insted of adding G16 as a file format into the general exporter, I guess you could alow the user to select to use the min/max height for the whole terrain for the 16bit scaling, if the user only exports a single or selected zones (or maybe just make this the default behaviour)
Finally, of course this might not realy be a real problem. It could be that I'm just too huge a noob to get the re-scaling right in UDK 
| ALicu wrote: |
Hi Jo,
Thank for the update. I plan to personally allocate some time in the next few days to make a new export plugin that will make UDK export easier. One of this indeed would be to have heightmaps and alphamaps saved directly to greyscale 16bit.
About scale, I don't know if I correctly understand the situation. Are you using Global Large Date Sets exporter? Are you referring to the resolution of the export (the sampling step)?
For the UDK exporter I plan to use a simpler approach. Basically most of the users will edit the heightmaps in sizes of power of two tiles (patches as they call them in UDK) so the size of the heightmap will be power-of-two + 1 anyway (exactly as UDK wants them), without any need for sampling. But the alpha maps (which are power of two) will need to be resampled at power of two + 1.
I will let know how the progress goes. I may need some help too since you seemed to have more experience than me with UDK.
Regards,
Adrian L. |
[/list] |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Wed Dec 16, 2009 2:08 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi Jo,
Yes, the exporter scales according to selection. Maybe an option should be added there.
Anyway, I will make a new exporter which will remove these issues since you will work with multiple zones in Grome and export a one-to-one correspondence to Unreal. So you will need to create your Grome scene with zones no bigger than 513x513 (next Grome also has the possibility to split zones and change their resolutions).
The exporter will save the heightmaps scaled to the entire range or the range inserted by the user. You can already do something similar with text exporter, just choose to export the heightmap as raw and press on the advance options button. For now you can use the text exporter to save the heightmaps.
The exporter will save G16 (very strange that they've chosen this format ?!) so you will skip the conversion steps.
I will keep you posted with the progress.
Regards,
Adrian |
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| joskj |
| Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:39 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 16 Oct 2007
Posts: 11
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Hi Adrian,
text exporter... *smacks forhead*
the whole reason i knew what was wrong with my exports from the general exporter was that i played around with this functionalliy in the text exporter and the sdk not to long ago. Strange how fast one forgets. Thanks for reminding me, should make testing quite alot faster 
By the way, i'm pretty sure UDK supports larger terrain/zones then 513 withouth to much problem, the max 513-problem seems to be with the G16 conversion programs (but the UDK online manual is down atm so i'm not 100%).
Regards,
Jo |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2009 10:50 am Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi Jo,
Yes, text exporter can help with the scaling. I believe that it can also export all the other needed files (masks, tiles etc).
I am currently looking over the G16 bmp format. I can't seem to find if this is normal bmp format (but with only 1 channel of 16 bit) or a custom Unreal3 specific format. I've saved some g16 from an utility program (G16ed.exe) and the format seems to differ somewhat to bmp. If you have any info about this format it may save me a lot of searching.
Also, later today I will create a dedicated forum section for UDK (and move this post there).
Regards,
Adrian L. |
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| PuckerFactor |
| Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 6:00 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 28 Dec 2009
Posts: 2
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Thanks for working on this guys ...I'm looking forward to the UDK plug-in.
Out of curiosity ...does the new DLLBind feature in the December 16 release of the UDK help in anyway with the Grome plug-in development? |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2009 8:39 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi,
We are not using the unreal script within the integration. The plugin will save the necessary data (16bit bmp files for heightmap and textures in proper sizes) using a Grome exporter create with our SDK. So we are not using that particular feature.
The plugin should be probably ready to be tested in the first days of 2010. The entire source code of the plugin will be provided.
Regards,
Adrian |
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| joskj |
| Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 2:17 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 16 Oct 2007
Posts: 11
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| ALicu wrote: |
Hi Jo,
Yes, text exporter can help with the scaling. I believe that it can also export all the other needed files (masks, tiles etc).
I am currently looking over the G16 bmp format. I can't seem to find if this is normal bmp format (but with only 1 channel of 16 bit) or a custom Unreal3 specific format. I've saved some g16 from an utility program (G16ed.exe) and the format seems to differ somewhat to bmp. If you have any info about this format it may save me a lot of searching.
Also, later today I will create a dedicated forum section for UDK (and move this post there).
Regards,
Adrian L. |
Hi Adrian,
Just in case you havent gotten around to this yet...
I also played around a bitt with a hex-editor and a G16 file, this is what i came up with (if i remember correclty)...
Based on the bmp format (as explained in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMP_file_format ):
Header
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magic number: BM
size of the file: in bytes
reserver: 0
reserved: 0
offset: to after the DIB header (start of data)
Windows V3 DIB header
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sizeofheader: 40 bytes
width: (in pixels)
height: (in pixels)
number of planes: 1
bits per plane: 16
compression metod: 0
size: raw bitmap data size, not file size
hor resolution:0
vert resolution:0
number of colors in palette:0
number of important colo..: 0
data...
(hmm, dont think you should need to padd the data for 16 bit?)
So, at least the files I tested seemes to use 16 bpp in one layer. |
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| ALicu |
| Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2010 8:34 pm Post subject: |
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Joined: 12 Feb 2007
Posts: 1330
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Hi Jo,
I've talked with Martin Bell, the author of the G16ed and he was very kind and explained the format to me (which is actually a normal BMP but greyscale and with 16 bits per channel). Unfortunately some urgent issues keep me away from office this weekend so I will not be able to finish the exporter myself (I will ask another programmer to try to finish it). I will keep you posted with the progress.
Regards,
Adrian |
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