Talisman Documentation is FULL of goodies!

At GDC 2024, Epic showed off the UEFN Talisman demo to showcases the power and flexibility of their engine. There newly released documentation and demo files are here to share and we highlight our favorite snippets.

Source: Epic Documentation

Talisman is HUGE and really is an amazing resource

For those who didn’t catch the GDC (Game Developers Conference), from this year, check the recording here. You can also go through the full documentation here.

Otherwise, the Talisman demo is a short, single player experience where you’re guided through the humungous space ship ,“Talisman”. The experience has custom HUDs, custom sound effects, camera switches and so much more. It is truly an impressive display of the Metahuman tool and the rendering capabilities of the UEFN toolset.

The team at Epic came up with some creative solutions and techniques to achieve this demo within the UEFN and FNCreative constraints, and they’ve been nice enough to share these tips and the working files , with the world.

Here are our favorite take aways from the documentation and the example project:

Modular workflow!

When you look through the Talisman art gallery you’ll notice how impressively small the overall kit is and this is part of the special sauce that allows the Talisman Demo to keep such a small project size.

By utilizing modular assets, and reusing where possible, the Talisman Demo is able to load relatively small amounts of assets into memory and render the scene quickly through reduced amounts of draw calls.

In addition to this, they were able to leverage Mesh Decals to add complexity to their object and continue to keep the file size small.

“Mid-poly meshes with face weighted normals were used to save memory, and Mesh Decals were used to add small details.”

What streaming budget?

How can the demo be so extensive and high quality, while staying within the 100,000 memory unit restriction many Creators run into?

The team came to a solution of combing the power of Data Layers, Sequencer and Mutator Zones (although Mutator Zones would not be appropriate for multiplayer experiences, they were removed from the project files) to keep within the limit.

By grouping areas of the ship into Data Layers, the team are able to unload and load assets based on the player location, making sure only essential elements are using the streaming budget. The Mutator Zones, one for each room, is used to trigger the loading and unloading within the Level Sequencer

“Each room has its own corresponding data layer and Mutator Zones spread throughout the ship that trigger events in the Level Sequence.“

Source: Epic Documentation

All platforms are welcome!

Our last tip we found interesting from the documentation was the attention the Epic team went too, to ensure the demo is playable on a variety of platforms.

As Fortnite is playable on over 7 different levels of platform power, ranging from high end PC’s to Androids, the team built their scenes from low-end limitations upwards. Utilizing the LOD system, you are able to set specific detail levels for your objects, targeting specific hardware. For example, Nanite was left to just the most powerful machines and removed from the lower tiers and mesh decals were removed for some of the lowest power tiers.

You can also gradually reduce the polygons and material counts of these meshes for each LOD level, to keep draw times low where needed.

Source: Epic Documentation

This documentation shows some great tips and the working files are full of goodies for any team. Even if your not looking to do a hyper realistic sci-fi project, there’s something for every one. We already cooking up some ideas from some of approaches shared by Epic.

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