UDK January Beta Released
interpolator
Some cool new features 
January UDK Beta Upgrade Notes
Simplygon Mesh Proxy Tool
- New Simplygon Merge Tool for combining static meshes
- Grouped static meshes can be combined into a single static mesh
- This can greatly improve rendering performance
- Materials/textures are automatically collapsed and new UVs are generated
- This tool is fully "non-destructive" - you can modify meshes and remerge, and roll back changes if needed
- Documentation can be found here
Unreal Landscape
- Allows you to paint textures on static meshes interactively in the level viewport
[*]Added the ability to save foliage settings to packages and to share them between levels
- Holes of any shape can be cut into the landscape, allowing designers to create entrances to caverns and other features under the landscape
- The visibility tool can remove or replace individual quads at the highest LOD resolution, with collision added or removed accordingly
- Holes are rendered per-pixel, independently of LOD, so distant holes retain their shape
[*]Added tool to change component size for existing landscapes
[*]Hide unused landscape UI when no landscapes are available
Pivot Painter
- A new 3ds Max tool that automatically generates pivot points for mesh vertices, allowing for advanced foliage animation and other effects
- Documentation can be found here
iOS Rendering
- Added support for color grading
- Documentation can be found here
Unreal Editor
- Added a "Reconnect" button to the "Checkout packages" dialog
- The function is disabled when a valid connection is established
- Upon reconnect, the login screen will appear if the connection failed
- Once the connection is restored, the "Checkout" dialog is reloaded
- Altered behavior of the "Convert to Static Mesh" operation
- It not only builds a model from the selected static brushes
- It also builds dynamic brushes (which includes volumes) and builds from the builder brush (if selected)
- It treats these as if they were like additive BSP brushes
- The autosave time is now simply paused during PIE instead of reset
- The editor is now more responsive during lighting builds
- Added a context menu option when selecting multiple actors for assigning the material selected from the content browser
- Auto content saving is now enabled by default for new users and 'content packages to save' can now be specified in the ini
- Lens flare visualizations will now appear when a lens flare actor is created and will update if any visualization properties are changed on the template lens flare
- Made the color picker dialog not modal when changing preview background color for textures
- Unreal Matinee slow-mo tracks will no longer effect viewports in other sub-editor windows (such as Unreal Cascade)
- Made the wireframe rendering in orthographic viewports consistent in both DX9 and DX11
- New packages in Unreal Content Browser are now removed from the New Packages collection once they've been saved
- Fixed the Touch Input Kismet event in Unreal Kismet so that it sends the proper X and Y values
- When in Kismets hit-testing mode, the Kismet block nubs are drawn bigger to make them easier to select without taking up more screen space visually
- Enabled the Paste Here right-click menu option for nodes in the Material Editor
Misc
- Added support for importing multiple animations from a single FBX file: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/FBXAnimationPipeline.html
- Added new option to ignore missing bones when importing
- Fixed FBX issues with morph curves and animation ranges
Replies
Hmm, I wonder if something similar, but meant to be used with meshes seen upclose could be useful. For instance, let's say you have fifty modular rocks that rely on the same tilling texture. According to my understanding, you still end up with multiple drawcalls for having the rocks rendered as individual meshes. Wouldn't combining these meshes into one object have a positive effect on the performance? Or would that be redundant due to instancing?
On the other hands if this tool bakes down advanced material effects to the diffuse (vertex color based texture blends, etc.) then it could have the benfit of lowering the material instruction count on LOD's, while reducing the visual inconsistencies between LOD's.
In any case, I will try this out tomorrow; the documentation is a little bit confusing right now.
Edit:
Ugh, I'm not even sure if that post makes any sense :poly142: Time to get some sleep I guess.
The only problem with this is that you lose the ability to cull the 49 other rocks when only one is on screen. Where it would work great is if you have a bunch of rocks that use the same material that are in close together.
Impressive, need to DL this.
EDIT: Yeah, it works just fine!
, too bad it uses udk organic UV auto unwrap ( I have to workaround export to other 3d applicaton to have proper hard surface unwrap then re-import)
otherwise, we can use original material with UV coordinate tiling in UDK. ( as long as the texture image is seamless)
I think it will be more practical and easier if you do organic stuff like mountain rock, just use the original material, and UV tile it. :-3 ( instead of using baked material)
this is the original baked version ( baked into blurry 512 pixel texture >.<)
COmputron, where are those?
I'd imagine it's used for reducing draw calls on mobile hardware by batching meshes as a single mesh.
Surely this has been around for quite a while? :x
I used it in my env, the forest diorama. Now, I've worked on that one as a side-project every now and then for a long time.. so I'm sure I did it quiiite a while ago.
used it on hte older terrian system or the newer landscape system though.
Hehe, true. Of course, you would still need to use common sense and just like you say it would work best for assets that create a larger structure. I feel that something like this would be great for merging small deco assets though.
ambershee:
Yeah, with all these features aimed at Mobile I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. Unfortunately, for the time being it seems like it's limited to batching LOD's since there doesn't seem to be an option to retaain the original unwrap (though there are some workarounds like Xvampire had shown). According to the documentation:
"As you can see the quality can vary depending on the settings you use in the dialog, the more complex a merged mesh you wish to use the longer it will take to generate it, the above test was done with an On Screen Size of 400 (double the default) to preserve more intricate geometry data, but with a Texture Resolution of 1024 (default) so all the textures for the individual geometry had to be compressed into a smaller amount of space. Therefore it's ideally used for merging instances of the same object (or like textured objects) at distance."
Computron:
Could you link these tutorials? That sounds interesting.
I just had a look at that pivot painter tool and it looks like it could be extremely useful too.
Nope. Last UE that allowed you to cut single quads out from terrain was UE 2.5. In UE 3 terrain it depended on the max tessellation level, meaning if you used agressive lodding on terrain you could only cut gigantic chunks away.
Now you can cut single quads from landscape.
You could cut single triangles/quads away using the old Terrain system in UDK. You're right that with Landscape you could only take out large sections though.
That's the tutorial I was talking about, take a look at all three videos, they added their own maxscript with a ton of helpful other tools.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/PivotPainterTool.html