Development Update – Engine Upgrade and Major Code Refactoring

Infinite Studio team have implemented a plethora of updates in preparation for the 3.8.0 release.

Engine Upgrade

With the next release of Infinite Studio, the engine will be upgraded to Unreal Engine 4.24. This update includes some exciting improvements to Ray Tracing which will further enhance our particle systems.

For a full breakdown of what that engine upgrade includes, please see the Unreal Engine website.

MODTRAN Upgrade

Infinite Studio now supports MODTRAN version 6.0.2. We also included some code refactoring to reduce memory usage when generating atmospheres.

Camera Refactor

We’ve identified a number of improvements to be made on our existing camera model, which have now been implemented as part of our camera refactor. This led to us researching to better understand the processing of a digital camera and come up with an alternate model. We wanted to ensure a flexible approach to the model where different noise types can be easily inserted into the pipeline. 

The below diagram show the processing steps of the model.  Each block is configurable, allowing the user to define parameters such as:

• Radiance To Photons
  • Shutter Speed
  • Aperture
  • Pixel Pitch
• Digital Level
  • ADC Gain (e-/ADU)
  • Offset (e-)
  • ADC Bits
• Photons to Electrons:
  • Quantum efficiency (mean + stdev, or supply your own map)
  • Well Capacity
  • Dark Current (e-/sec)
  • Read Noise (e-)

Wake Development

We have now implemented low fidelity, high performance wakes within Infinite Studio. The wake patterns implemented are Turbulent and Kelvin and below are multiple screenshots demonstrating their implementation.

For the Kelvin Wake system, the approach taken was to use a decal to paint normals onto the ocean surface, giving the appearance of waves. The Turbulent Wake system uses a ribbon particle system with a texture applied as this was found to be the least performance intensive method, whilst still looking realistic.

Ocean Update – Code and Transparency

There have been multiple updates to our Infinite Ocean. We have improved the code and performance of the ocean grid, and also have converted the ocean Blueprint to a C++ class.

Additionally, work was completed to successfully implement a transparent ocean, and create realistic look silhouettes of submerged objects.

Vehicle Changes

A large update is coming soon with our vehicle system which aims to improve how the vehicles work in a High Tick multi-player networking environment.

Each component of the drive train is being reconfigured into an individual asset to allow for higher customisation of vehicles. This will allow the user for example, to add an Engine asset to their blueprint and simply edit the inputs to match the specifications of the vehicle being modelled.

There will also be an option integrated to allow for an Automatic transmission if driving a Manual transmission vehicle is not for you!