Questions about ILIAD

[Elodie]

I'm ansering that topic from Unreal Engine forum (which won't allow me to post long messages Oo)

Hello ! Thank you all for watching the livestream yesterday ! It is available on Twitch, so feel free to share it around you :

So, let me answer the questions the best I could (today is a holiday in France, so I don't want to bother my colleagues ^^) :

- Masks for the layers.

Obviously ! And Stencils and Preserve alpha mode as well.

- Do the same for these masks as you've done for the brushes: be able to create them using blueprints. This way the users can make lots of procedural masks.

Indeed ! This topic should be discussed with the dev team ^^

- Be able to paint over the meshes, in the 3D viewport. And in a dedicated UI/Editor, so that the user can show/hide mesh parts, based on materials. [Click and drag to move]

You've shown drawing in 2D and the texture applied in 3D directly updating. Is there a plan to be able to draw on assets in 3D and for the 2D asset to be updated?

As I said, it's not a priority*, but indeed, it would be cool to have this in the future. I think the 1st thing to be done, would be a preview of the stamp both on the texture AND the 3D viewport, in order to know precisely where to stamp / draw stuff.

- Some sort of thing where you can paint a height map with tessellation enabled, just to preview the effect of heightmaps.

I think if we can have the stamp preview, we could have the heightmap preview too.

- Paint in many textures/'channels' at once (roughness, AO etc). Or you paint in one and the plugin propagate to the others, as in the rust in the barrel, in the youtube video.

Yup, at the moment, the solution is to work through materials and duplicate the texture to be used several times (like we did with the barrel and the pumpkin).
However, something we also thought (just a thought, nothing more) would be the possibility to paint on several layers at the same time within ILIAD (for instance, making a "Diffuse layer" + a "Normal layer", and what you paint on the Diffuse layer would create a Normal layer simultaneously. If we use also Blueprint to make masks / stencils, perhaps we can use it too to make "normal" layers based on a diffuse layer, depending on the lights and shadow of the drawing... (Again, it is just speculation, this is clearly the type of conversation that should be done with developers -which I'm not ^^).

- Use subsystems for the plugins, and an easy way to get rid of the samples and example assets of the plugin once you build, cook your game. To avoid bloating people's projects.

Ok ! (clearly, I know nothing about subsystems, so thank you for the tip)

- Stencil tool that sample from textures. That you can rotate, scale etc. Like Zbrush's spotlight, Mari and S. Painter also have it (I've tested both for my game project, currently using S. Painter). And also warp the stencil, like in Mari.

Unless I misunderstand you, it's already the case : you can already take any 2D texture to stamp it within another texture in ILIAD. Any stamps used by Odyssey brushes are 2D textures. So the ability to rotate, resize (uniformly or not) can be managed in Blueprint when you create your Odyssey Brush.

- Be able to export the Iliad Texture file, with its layers, to PSD.

Hell yeah.

Are you planning on releasing this to the community? If so, when is this likely to be?

Nah, we just wanted to brag and keep it for ourselves. Just kidding, we will share it with the Marketplace with the release of UE 4.24 on December. It will be a free beta version, for a limited time.

------

*Our priorities are to :
• finish our Graphic Library (which will allow making larger textures, like 16k * 16k, to use other color models such as LAB, to offer more smoothing line options, to manage anti-aliasing etc.)
• add an Undo stack to cancel strokes
• add bunch of tools, like shapes (line, rectangle, circle), procedural penbrush, select tools and transform tools (pan, rotate, resize)
• find a way to keep layers within 2D textures edited with ILIAD

After that, we will be probably working on things like :
• developing a plugin to make tablets compatible for Linux and Mac + Wintab API on Windows
• starting to work on an animation layer + animation tools (onion skinning, shift and trace, etc)

Thanks again for your enthusiasm and your kindness !

[mysteryblues]

Thanks for the answer, Elodie.

My focus currently is more on realistic texturing stuff because of my project - you prob. guessed by my questions. But I'm also interested in tools for sketching compositions for level locations right inside of UE4 Editor, and also the Storyboard tool (same thing: sketch, for cutscenes. I currently do it on paper or After Effects). But for people doing stylized creations your tool is already great.
Hope you improve also tools for realistic texturing later, after you've reached the current to-do features.
I'll keep an eye on Illiad.
Ah, my game project, by the way (solo dev for now):
www.atarugame.com
www.facebook.com/atarugame

Edit: typos.

[Elodie]

Thank you for the explanations, it's important for us to know people's bakcgrounds to understand or anticipate the needs !

Hope you improve also tools for realistic texturing later, after you've reached the current to-do features.

As you said in UE4 forums : just like Zbrush was a 2.5 painting software (or like Photoshop, which was a software used to edit photographes), software may evolve to a direction that was not planned at the beginning.
At the moment, pushing realism into our tools is not a priority, but who know what the future is going to be ?

Ah, my game project, by the way (solo dev for now):
www.atarugame.com
www.facebook.com/atarugame

Wow  Oo
That's impressive !
How long have you been working on this project ?

[mysteryblues]

At the moment, pushing realism into our tools is not a priority, but who know what the future is going to be ?

Sure. As always, the use will dictate the shaping. Thinking here, even for animators, not making a game, having a plugin capable of 2D animation + 3D, parallax etc + no render times, is already very interesting.

Wow  Oo
That's impressive !
How long have you been working on this project ?

Thanks for the feedback, means a lot for a solo developer.
Some long years of pre-production including historical research and lack of objectivity, focus ... But then since a year and a half now I'm fully dedicated to it (inbetween doing freelance work). And into production, I mean. Assets.

[Elodie]

Haha ^^
I wish you good luck with your project then ! ^^

[Fabrice]

@mysteryblues
Great work on both your website and facebook.
Have you painted everything by yourself ? Was it with Photoshop or some other product ?

[Elodie]

FYI : our team will be on (well-deserved) vacations for 2 weeks. We might watch the forum from time to time, but do not expect immediate answers.
Since accounts must be manually activated to post on the forum, you can, at the moment, ask your questions on Unreal Forum : https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal- ... wing/page2

Enjoy your holidays and see you "next year"

[D. Nethery]

Joyeux Noël to all of you at Praxinos.

If you do check in here and feel like answering a question, here is one :

I downloaded the Unreal engine and the brush plug-in. But I can not install it.
It appears to be for Windows only. Is a Mac version coming soon ? (You may have previouslyannounced this, but I have missed it. Sorry.)

EDIT: re-reading this thread I now notice you listed under priorities :

" developing a plugin to make tablets compatible for Linux and Mac " so I should have realized it is not yet ready for Mac .

[Fabrice]

Hi David,
Happy Christmas to you : )

Well, I can confirm the plugin already works on Mac here in the Praxinos office.
But without handling pressure, altitude, twist, etc. it's not relevant to use it.
We are going to write a new roadmap for 2020 early in January, I will then let you know when you can expect the Mac version.

[D. Nethery]

Thank you, Fabrice.