008: CG Artists Love Unreal, Samurais and Game Modding

This week we have Poliigon's CG Report, an in-depth interview with Ninja Theory and a Houdini upgrade.

Ollie Judge

03 Aug 2024 — 3 min read

Welcome back to the Outpost. It’s the 10th August 2024.

It’s a big week with a mega CG report, free assets and a deep dive into one of Unreal’s biggest games this year. Lots to be reading through this weekend with a couple of toys, one especially for the Houdini users out there.

If you have a great story that you want to tell, a new plugin you want to share or art you want to show off, reach out to me here.

The Latest

Unreal Pulls Ahead of Unity In The State of CG

Andrew Price and Poliigon have put out their State of CG report for 2024. It’s a great read to find out where the DCC’s sit alongside each other. Unreal scored particularly well in desirability and rendering. While the report is not focused on game development it gives a pretty good indication of where the engine sits alongside other software in this category.

Digital Foundry Dig Deep on Senua’s Saga

Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 has been held up as somewhat of an Unreal Engine 5 tech demo this year. I really like to dig into pitfalls or watch outs for these kind of projects to avoid rolling them into my own and this interview is the perfect example of that. If you’re looking into deep insight into how the Engine works, how the game was built and choices that were made don’t miss this.

Get Your Free Assets For August 2024!

As always a brand new set of free assets have been released. Make sure you go pick them up from the marketplace. From dungeons to futuristic cities there’s likely something for you here.

Toolbox

The Outpost’s Toolbox is for new or updated tools to help make your Unreal Engine experience a little bit easier.

UnrealAutoMod

For those in the modding community a new version of UnrealAutoMod has been released. The app allows for easier mod management, streamlined tools for automating mod admin or even support for games a little trickier to mod. The modding community is always invaluable to game dev and these tools could make it easier to open the modding community to your next game.

HoudiniEngineForUnreal

This is an alternate to the official Houdini engine for Unreal that runs up to 40x faster in certain scenarios with native world partition and better tools for procedural landscapes.

While the official Houdini Engine runs well if you’re running into performance bottlenecks or a more robust toolset for landscapes a quick swap in may solve your issues.

Pinboard

Check out the latest art we have been keeping a lookout for this week.

Bartosz Titkin’s new environment test displays a great command of lighting and foliage work. On his Artstation you’ll find a full breakdown, video and a closer look at some of the assets used.