A recording of my talk at UnrealFest 2022 a few weeks ago has been posted: youtube.com/watch?v=pEC3kr It has short demos of modeling & geometry scripting, and an intro bit about /why/ we are building Modeling Tools in UE
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This is my quick example of "why" Modeling in UE. It's a million-triangle mesh from the Quixel asset library and I just need to bend it a bit. Round-tripping back through a DCC to do this would take /so/ much longer. Instead I can try many variations, in-context, very quickly.
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At a technical level, this is one of our big motivations. None of the major DCCs were designed for working with unstructured triangle meshes that might be millions of triangles. But that's what you get from 3D Scanning & Asset Stores (where meshes usually have been "optimized")
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Looking ahead, "AI" asset generation is clearly coming. But ultimately an ML-generated mesh will be similar to a 3D scan - you'll get something that is pretty good, but not exactly what you want, and you'll need to be able to "clean it up", tailor it to your use case, etc.
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This is why we are pursuing "Polygroups" (which can be added to an existing mesh and generalize to arbitrarily-complex "patches") rather than Polygons (which require modeling from scratch, or resampling/remeshing that is just not that reliable).
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This is also why much of our 'Modeling' is closer to 'Processing'. The bit that starts here: youtu.be/pEC3krOwcbM?t= demos the new AutoLOD pipeline we have been building out, which can fully automate a "high-res source asset to lowpoly baked LOD" process (more on this soon)
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Many people tend to think of Modeling in the context of "an object" or maybe "a scene". This is what DCCs have traditionally been built for - VFX shots, not enormous 3D worlds. So we have focused on what makes the most sense to do in-context in those worlds.
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Not every Modeling problem is an in-huge-world-context or unstructured-triangle-mesh problem, though. If your problem is to SubD PolyModel your main Character from scratch, that's a problem that external DCCs are already great at solving!
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In the talk I mentioned the Quixel Medieval Village Sample, where the artists used Modeling Mode much like I described above, to tailor Quixel asset library content to make some beautiful stuff. More details here:
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The Blockout and Asset Production demo by , from the State of Unreal 2022 presentation series, is another great example of what a skilled artist can quickly assemble in ~30 mins using Modeling Mode and Geometry Script: youtube.com/watch?v=R5Tsbn (N/N)
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i hope y'all aren't just building tools, but also have people working on a good UX for using them. like, the help text is in exactly one spot, and b/c i do not have an 8k monitor, that spot is not large enough to contain all the text. don't forget about 1080p users!
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thanks I will pass this on to our UX team, I guess it could show the same text in a tooltip/etc