Senior unreal developer at one of those aerospace companies. PlayStation developer #syntheticdata #UE5 #UEFN #Epicgames
Huntsville, AL
Joined March 2015
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I was able to load a 10 million polygon photoscan of Ziggy in the @UnrealEngine. Using #UE5's Nanite meshes I was able to load 1000 instances of it at 60fps before I got bored. That's 10 billion polygons and it didn't even blink. It could have handled a lot more than this.
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
You never see a farm in Dune because the Fremen pay the most powerful company in the galaxy to hide a 350-year secret.
In the books, the Spacing Guild runs everything in orbit, and the Fremen hand it a fortune in spice to keep satellites off their part of the sky. Nobody gets to look down.
Under that blind spot, they're farming.
They plant tough poverty grasses on the downwind side of dunes so the sand stops moving. Deep in the rock, the sietches have sealed gardens growing dates and figs. Hunters bring in desert hares and birds. And all over the planet, they're stashing water in hidden underground basins, one liter at a time.
Food on Arrakis is really just water in a different form, and the book does the math. A date palm drinks 40 liters a day. A person needs about 8. So every palm you plant costs you five people's water. A good stillsuit loses about a thimbleful a day, and when a Fremen dies, the tribe reclaims his water. Every calorie on that planet gets priced in liters before anyone eats it.
And they know exactly how long it'll take. Pardot Kynes, the first planetologist, calculated that once 3% of the planet's plant life was cycling carbon, the whole ecosystem would tip and start sustaining itself. A Fremen asked him how long that would take. Around 350 years, he told him. They signed up anyway, which means generations of people dug gardens for great-great-grandkids they'd never meet.
There's a catch built into the whole plan, too. Spice comes from the sandworms, and water kills sandworms. So every liter the Fremen hide in those caves points straight at the creature whose spice is paying to keep the caves hidden.
Herbert got the idea from a real place. In 1957 he chartered a plane to Florence, Oregon, where the USDA was planting European beachgrass to stop dunes from burying roads and houses. He pitched a magazine story called "They Stopped the Moving Sands," never finished it, and spent the next five years writing Dune instead.
That grass held the sand so well that Oregon is now pulling it out to bring the dunes back.
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
We know the equation for how light moves through a cloud. Solving it just takes way too long for a game.
So, I trained a tiny neural network to learn the answer and put it inside a neural shader. Watch the middle number.
charlesgrassi.dev/blog/neura…
#shaders #gamedev
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
Unreal Engine X, upcoming update.
A Visibility Buffer pipeline in the style of Guerrilla’s Deferred Texturing 🌴
Following Guerrilla’s “Adventures with Deferred Texturing in Horizon Forbidden West” (GDC 2022), dense foliage is rasterised into a visibility buffer. Its materials are then classified, binned and shaded on async compute, beside BasePass and shadow depths. Deferred lights wait just 0.03 ms for it.
Two more changes keep that async window working:
Artist-friendly Volumetric Light replaces Epic’s fog and light shafts but why?
• Epic’s Volumetric Fog was soft and blurry, Light Shafts were a separate screen-space effect, and both ran on the graphics queue.
• I wanted crisp shafts from the sun, spot lights and point lights, controls I can use directly, and a design built to run beside the Visibility Buffer.
How:
• Prepare, shadow min/max and integration run on async compute beside deferred lighting, which doesn’t slow down (1.35 vs 1.34 ms).
• The only graphics-queue cost is a 0.13 ms composite.
🌿 Foliage shadow caching
Why:
• Unreal redraws wind-animated foliage (World Position Offset) into every shadow cascade every frame.
• That heavy shadow raster competed with the async material resolve.
How:
• Foliage now goes into the cached static shadow maps.
• Cascade 0 drops from 0.45 to 0.07 ms and cascade 1 from 0.69 to 0.07 ms.
• All shadow depths drop from 1.72 to about 0.75 ms, roughly 1 ms saved.
📊 Same trace, RTX 3060 @ 1080p, median GPU frame:
• Legacy renderer + Epic fog: 8.91 ms
• Visibility Buffer + Epic fog: 8.82 ms
• Visibility Buffer + Volumetric Light: 8.16 ms
➡️ -0.75 ms against legacy, of which -0.66 ms comes from removing Epic fog and light shafts
⚡ Current frame with everything on: 7.46 ms, with about 4.3 ms of async compute overlapping each frame.
References
• Far cascades redraw moving objects every Nth frame, after MachineGames’ Indiana Jones (REAC 2025) and Treyarch’s Cold War (GDC 2021)
• Post processing overlapping the next frame, as in id Software’s DOOM: The Dark Ages same idea is supported by advancements in Ubisoft engine.
#UnrealEngine #UE5 #gamedev #rendering #realtimerendering
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
UnVault Launcher was reviewed on YT!
With Epic announcing that their new launcher is vibe coded, I decided to go check out alternative launchers if you're primarily using it for #UnrealEngine.
There's a lot of options that can fit basically anyone's needs, and I show off the ones I could find.
youtu.be/v10fjK1ymVY
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
Not satisfied with your current loadout? Pay the Blacksmith a visit and forge something more of your liking
Components matter, they aren't just for aesthetics
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
CMAA2 (Anti-Aliasing) plugin has recently received a new update with improved performance - about 30% faster compared to a previous version.
Also UE4 support is back!
fab.com/listings/74b323b8-26…
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
My "Screen Space Fog Scattering" plugin for #UE5 has been actually featured in a SILENT HILL game!!! 🤯🥳
And a new update 1.32 for it has been released recently, with a great help from @FilippoTarpini
fab.com/listings/a670ac7b-39…
SILENT HILL: Townfall is out now on PS5, Steam and Epic Game Store.
Simon Ordell is called back to the island of St. Amelia to "put things right," encountering a town lying quiet beneath a heavy fog, seemingly abandoned but not at rest.
konami.com/games/silenthill/…
#SILENTHILL #Townfall
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
We are releasing → classcad.ai today: AI driven embeddable CAD. If you ever enjoyed my OSS projects (zustand, react-spring, r3f, pmndrs), these all came out of CC. 🍻
A small 🇨🇭 team has been working on CAD for so many years, release seemed always out of reach. This is a huge milestone for us and i'd appreciate a RT. 🙏
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
Boeing HQ receiving praise for one of their aircraft -
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
Als je de rook weghaalt en ziet hoe de torens daadwerkelijk instortten, ziet het er opeens heel logisch uit en neemt het alle redenen om vraagtekens te zetten weg
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
One more time about the DLSS and unnecessary hysteria around it. This is Katherine from KCD. She is the well-known Czech actress Kristýna Leichtová. The first image shows a photo of her. This is how we 3D-scanned her. We then manually adjusted her appearance and textures, because we don’t use any makeup during the 3D scan, and the in-game model has to meet a whole range of parameters. The second image shows her appearance in the vanilla game, the third shows DLSS5 when it’s set correctly (in my opinion), and the last one shows what happens when random idiot sets all the sliders to max. We can discuss whether you prefer the slightly “smoothed-out” original look from image 2 or the more natural one from image 3; in any case, in image 3, the in-game model is clearly the most similar to the real actress who plays Katherine and whom we scanned. It’s also much better lit, and the details of the nose, eyes, hair texture, and subtle shadows, or the bones on the neck definitely look more natural and realistic, and DLSS5 isn’t adding anything artificial there. Those details are present in both the model and the texture; it’s just that due to the engine’s lighting, they aren’t as visible, and DLSS5 “fixes” this fairly accurately based on the normal map and other factors. On top of that, this particular technology will not steal anyones job. So, for me, Image 3 is an improvement and much closer to how I’d wanted the lighting to work from the start and it was not possible. If we had this tech two years ago, and I would like the character to look "younger" but with DLSS5 shadows and lighting, we would tweak the model and made it so. Of course, this raises the issue of the uncanny valley. It sometimes starts to look almost too realistic—similar to the “soap opera” effect in movies when you turn on frame interpolation on a TV. As creators, we’ll have to deal with that. But it’s a new technology, and I’m absolutely certain it will improve.
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
DLSS 5 introduces 3D-Guided Neural Rendering, which uses AI to infuse game scenes with lifelike lighting and materials. Developers tune the final output for each game to bring their artistic vision to life.
Sgt. Gary Freeman of the UNC #UE5 retweeted
I finally got some time to try DLSS 5 on my own game, and here are my thoughts:
First and foremost, I consider myself an artist long before I'm a dev (let alone a coder), so I deeply care about artistic visions, especially my own.
I wanted to state this because I heard so much negativity from both fellow game artists and gamers about how this tool "destroys the original vision" or "kills art direction."
Let's remember this is an OPTIONAL plugin, and it comes with sliders you can tweak to adjust the effect's intensity. I'm sure more controls will be added by the time the tool is ready, especially in the engine.
Speaking of control, one huge advantage of this tech no one is talking about is its ability to show what's missing to take your lighting to the next level.
So many times I've been in a situation where the lighting on a scene felt off, but I didn't know what else to tweak to get it just right.
I feel this tool will help tremendously with that.
I was personally quite intrigued when it was first shown, even if the whole presentation was a mess, which led most people to believe that it was just an "AI filter" applied on top of the render.
In fact, it's not that, as it uses geometry and shader data to push the render even further. Not much different from Ray Tracing, really.
In my experience, Albedo textures don't change AT ALL, especially text, for example (and, trust me, there are many in my game).
What's being enhanced is mostly Ambient Occlusion, Global Illumination, and Sky Ambient Light.
On the PBR side of the material, I noticed changes in Normal intensity and a boost to Roughness, Specular, and Metallic maps.
I've seen many character screenshots from other games, so I'll focus on environments and vehicles in my test.
In this first set of screenshots, you can see the difference with and without DLSS 5 applied (in general, check the LAT ms in the top right; if it's higher, DLSS 5 is enabled).
I believe this is one of the most impressive changes, as you can see AO being properly generated in the left area, around the yellow door. You can also notice more warm light bouncing from the tunnel's illumination on the right side of the entrance.
The rock formation is more defined, with better contrast and a nice highlight boost, likely on the Specular. Concrete is also noticeably more detailed.
Metallic barriers also get a visible improvement.
Overall, the artistic vision stays the same. In fact, I'd argue this is closer to what I envisioned!
Here you can check the two images with a slider:
diffchecker.com/image-compar…
Follows a long thread with many more examples!
