Unreal Engine Naughty Sandbox - an erotica sim with cinematic visuals - the Devlog

[NSUDEV]

Current dev status: Pre-release - no playable build yet​

Hey everyone,


I'm on a mission to create an ero game with the best graphics possible. I was surprised to see such a strong and friendly dev community here, and I thought I'd join in with a thread to blog my progress, write about some of the tech I'm developing for Naughty Sandbox, and to get feedback and inspiration from anyone who'd like to offer it.

The software I'm using is UE4 for rendering & gameplay • Maya LT for rigging & modeling • Substance Painter & Designer for texturing / material authoring • Zbrush (when I can afford a license) for anatomy sculpting.

One of my goals for the project is to develop a skin shader that's unmatched in any realtime game, that I hope to make look very close to photorealistic if possible. I have an

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of skin closeups. All shots are in UE4 and render at 60+ fps!



All the assets have been made from scratch, aside from some of the backgrounds in screenshots. I plan to make all the lewdy assets myself - particularly the

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, which needs to be modeled and UV'd in a specific way to work with some of the tech I'm planning. I also wanted some special features for my base mesh, such as a

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obviously, since it's a sex game!



I'm aiming to reach very high visual quality for the sex toys and equipment - I've made a

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already that I'm really proud of. The Rodeo Machine is programmed and

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, as soon as I have my base mesh rigged.



And lastly, the thing that I think needs the most work is

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, which is super challenging to get right, but I think I'm making good progress. The hair is currently an Epic Games asset that I'm using as a placeholder.



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The gameplay of Naughty Sandbox will at first be small scenes which focus on the character having lewd stuff done to them, which you can control to some extent in order to maximize her pleasure. First scene I plan to release will be a scene where she's riding the rodeo machine, which the speed and pattern of rotation can be controlled by the you as the player. Scenes will be fully 3D with VR support, and the player will be able to walk around, but there will be limited physical interaction for now between the player and character. I plan to add

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soon after I release the initial builds, which I'm working on the tech for now!

I'm going to keep this thread updated with my progress, and I'd like to also do tech writeups of some of the systems I'm designing if there's an audience for it. I don't know how much of a crossover there is between the software I use and the software other developers use, but hopefully things might still be interesting to the more nerdy devs here.

 

[Saki_Sliz]

Very Cool!
Your work looks amazing <3
I know that out of all the game engines, UE4 has the best graphics pipeline, and you certainly are doing wonders with it!

I think we've all wanted to try to make something like this once and a while, but for one excuse reason or another, life had other plans. It's awesome to see someone with the talent, or discipline to self learn, to do this kind of work and to keep working at it. Projects like these takes a great deal of time and energy, often with no end in sites due to we always want to keep adding more before we've even taken our first steps. So if anything, the thing I respect most is the very act of returning to keep working. Often in the indie/hobby game dev community, consistency and commitment tends to always be in flux since most of what we do is on the side, when we are free; so its always nice to find a gem like this, a passion project.

Wish you all the best!

 

[TomberryDude]

I live for the day games look as good as those blender animations on pornhub lol. All my support.

 

[kinrean]

don't see many hentai game make in unreal. always unity for some reason.
i a unreal user too, did you download and see the simple that they give in unreal ? it show you how to make real skin , it also got the material for you to use. just need to change the texture ( although making the texture can be hard).

what i can see base of the image , if you want to make it look real, you will need to put in alot more texture. as i can see you only put in one basic texture, like normal , color, .


and i will recommend you to use the unreal bone, if you haven't .

although i will worry more about hair then skin, as hair can be harder then skin ( for looking real)

and just to say, i have about same ideal as you , in making a game that look real.

 

[caLTD]

Your game does not have story, multiple characters, scenes etc.

You can focus on your character and visual details. Unreal graphics pipeline best for this kind of stuff.

Well balanced and good craftsmanship. Keep up good work. I think you can reach whatever you aim.

 

[NSUDEV]

Very Cool!
Your work looks amazing <3
I know that out of all the game engines, UE4 has the best graphics pipeline, and you certainly are doing wonders with it!

...

Wish you all the best!

Thanks so much!

I live for the day games look as good as those blender animations on pornhub lol. All my support.

Same, and I think technically it's achievable today. just that no one is tackling it. Really, an engine like UE4 can prebake environments and static scenes so it's entirely possible to match pre-rendered scene quality in UE4 almost without question, the problem comes with characters and dynamics and other things like that which are hard for realtime to do.

So I think it's possible, depending on what type of content you're making. Most ero clips don't do anything too complicated that a realtime engine couldn't do.

what i can see base of the image , if you want to make it look real, you will need to put in alot more texture. as i can see you only put in one basic texture, like normal , color, .

...

although i will worry more about hair then skin, as hair can be harder then skin ( for looking real)

For sure, hair is one of Unreal's weak point IMO, or rather it is the thing that probably takes the most skill to look good. The software itself doesn't do many favors for you for hair, you have to be really good.

Thanks for the skin texture tip, others have pointed this out too. Will have more variation eventually, I'm using Substance Source's texture library and they have most skin textures "scanned" or however they make them.

Your game does not have story, multiple characters, scenes etc.

You can focus on your character and visual details. Unreal graphics pipeline best for this kind of stuff.

Well balanced and good craftsmanship. Keep up good work. I think you can reach whatever you aim.

That means a lot to hear and yep you hit the nail on the head, I have a very concise goal so I don't stretch myself too thin with development.

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I got a trial of Zbrush, and did some test sculpting on my model. I think it's coming along quite well in most areas, some sections of the body look near photoreal to me, and IMO I'm reaching and surpassing a lot of DAZ stuff already. I can imagine the finished result looking quite production worthy if I don't mess up, but there is a long way to go.

The mesh is subdivided 3 or 4 times and then sculpted on in Zbrush, and Substance Painter uses the high resolution mesh to bake normals into the game-resolution mesh. So all of the bone definition and such is just a normal map, to keep it light.

To help with adding procedural detail, Substance Painter can also use the normal map to generate additional maps such as AO and curvature maps. So sculpting in back dimples, Painter can then generate some subtle AO there as if the dimple has a bit of shadow, or sculpting out a bone like for the clavicle, Painter could use the curvature map to make skin there a little shinier - since bone sticking out is stretching the skin tighter and thinner, stuff like that.








Any feedback let me know! Despite being unfinished, if there's anything looking super off I'd love to hear it so I can improve.

 

[kinrean]

just wonder , if you don't mind shareing some information, how big the poly count are? , and how many texture part you have ( etc , head one body one ,so 2 texture part.)

zbrush got it strong point, but one of the thing that i hate is that you can't texture paint, can only vertex paint ( just to say i long time haven't update the zbrush) and some time it is best to make your own texture for some area, to look nice. 2 mesh to bake texture got it own limit.
and as for the hair, is not much with unreal, but more like can you make a good hair texture,

 

[NSUDEV]

just wonder , if you don't mind shareing some information, how big the poly count are? , and how many texture part you have ( etc , head one body one ,so 2 texture part.)

zbrush got it strong point, but one of the thing that i hate is that you can't texture paint, can only vertex paint ( just to say i long time haven't update the zbrush) and some time it is best to make your own texture for some area, to look nice. 2 mesh to bake texture got it own limit.
and as for the hair, is not much with unreal, but more like can you make a good hair texture,

Polycount for the body meshes not including hair is ~180,000 for the LOD0. Hair will push it to around 200,000 which is my max budget.

I'm using 6 materials / texture parts as you call them, so I have a lot of texture space.

And I agree, that's my main dislike of Zbrush. I'm using Substance Painter for painting which is much more flexible. Only using Zbrush for macro sized surface details.

 

[L0thar]

Good luck with this project

 

[kinrean]

Polycount for the body meshes not including hair is ~180,000 for the LOD0. Hair will push it to around 200,000 which is my max budget.

I'm using 6 materials / texture parts as you call them, so I have a lot of texture space.

that is alot of poly......... and do you plan to add clothing?
i hope you plan to set a setting to lock it at lod1 or 2 , for low pc .

and your texture is 4k , so 4k x 6 set , wow ,you plan to make this game very high setting. it should look very nice if your pc got the power.

 

[Egglock]

Well considering there isn't much going on in the scene 200k isn't much. It's not like the game is going to spawn many actors at a time, so it's reasonable. Judging by the scenes, I don't think the player is going to be traversing too extensively either so a lot of the resources can go to what matters. Game engines have come a long way, so poly count isn't so much of an issue as oppose to the draw calls. Though granted poly count should still be minimize where possible.

 

[kinrean]

Well considering there isn't much going on in the scene 200k isn't much. It's not like the game is going to spawn many actors at a time, so it's reasonable. Judging by the scenes, I don't think the player is going to be traversing too extensively either so a lot of the resources can go to what matters. Game engines have come a long way, so poly count isn't so much of an issue as oppose to the draw calls. Though granted poly count should still be minimize where possible.

well maybe, but there will be sex toy, and who know how many there will be and how high it will be. and too many 4k texture does cost power .
and not sure about the clothing too, if add clothing, the clothing poly need to be about the same as the body.

and, i will not be shock , if the game need to spawn more then 1 woman.

my guess is that every texture will be 4 k , so there will be around 50 image of 4k texture run at once. ( this is just a guess work)
and just to say some people in the word are using pc that is so bad that this game may kill their pc. lol

 

[PJWhoopie]

this is just a guess work)
and just to say some people in the word are using pc that is so bad that this game may kill their

I don't think you can make a game of the quality you are shooting for, AND make it playable for those with low end systems (so I wouldn't bother trying)

What you have done looks impressive so far.... are you just a "one man" team?

 

[NSUDEV]

that is alot of poly......... and do you plan to add clothing?
i hope you plan to set a setting to lock it at lod1 or 2 , for low pc .

and your texture is 4k , so 4k x 6 set , wow ,you plan to make this game very high setting. it should look very nice if your pc got the power.

well maybe, but there will be sex toy, and who know how many there will be and how high it will be. and too many 4k texture does cost power .
and not sure about the clothing too, if add clothing, the clothing poly need to be about the same as the body.

and, i will not be shock , if the game need to spawn more then 1 woman.

my guess is that every texture will be 4 k , so there will be around 50 image of 4k texture run at once. ( this is just a guess work)
and just to say some people in the word are using pc that is so bad that this game may kill their pc. lol

200,000 tris isn't a lot at all really! Compared to some hero characters of modern games, it's even less. I don't know where you pulled the number of 50 4k images from, but mipmaps and LODs and such will take care of a lot. Also as I understand it, texture lookups don't happen twice for the same texture. If I had multiple girls in the scene, it won't load their textures multiple times, as they share em.

Egglock is correct, the scope of the environment makes up for the high quality of the assets. Interiors, while being highly detailed, aren't gonna come close to the cost of environments of open world games, and those types of games run on consoles just fine. You're underestimating the power of modern gpus I think! And I will of course optimize heavily.

I don't think you can make a game of the quality you are shooting for, AND make it playable for those with low end systems (so I wouldn't bother trying)

What you have done looks impressive so far.... are you just a "one man" team?

Possibly, I'm not gonna sacrifice art to make it playable for low end systems, but I think it can be optimized well. My own development machine isn't exactly a high end system, and my performance has been great so far.

I am a one man team yep! Thanks for the kind words

 

[Egglock]

well maybe, but there will be sex toy, and who know how many there will be and how high it will be. and too many 4k texture does cost power .

Even taking into consideration the poly count of other objects in the scene, the player wouldn't notice the difference. That's of course the player isn't using outdated hardware to run this game. Hardware now days can handle millions of polys with no issue. And considering that the player isn't going to be moving from scene to scene there isn't the performance hit of loading/unloading asset.

my guess is that every texture will be 4 k , so there will be around 50 image of 4k texture run at once.

Have you used UE4? Or at least know how UE4 handles textures? I highly doubt at any given time NSUDEV is going to load that many textures into the scene. Textures are only loaded when the material utilizing that texture is called or at least that's how I've come to understand it. The only issue I see here is if the player doesn't have enough ram to load them in. Other wise all the textures going to do is increase the file size.

if add clothing, the clothing poly need to be about the same as the body.

Sorry come again? Clothing poly needs to be the same as the body? Not sure where that idea came from, but that's a good example of bad 3D modeling. If the clothing has the same amount of poly as the body that 3D modeler made some bad decisions.

NSUDEV how are you doing your hair? 20k poly hair seems a bit much don't you think?

 

[NSUDEV]

NSUDEV how are you doing your hair? 20k poly hair seems a bit much don't you think?

I don't think so but maybe. I've been looking at hair from some of Epic's assets and the more detailed ones range from 10k to 14.2k, and I'd like to have less facets / more resolution than their hair and possibly a lot more fly-away hairs.

I'll be using a combination of hair cards and individual strands probably. I'll be happy if I do get under 20K. Honestly I've never done hair before, so it may come to less, or it may be more, depends on the style. I want to try and push the hair though, because a technical bottleneck that UE4 has as a renderer is translucency. Raytracing can do hair really really well, soft stroke-able looking hair isnt something I've really seen in realtime yet.

 

[Egglock]

Yeah hair is a pain in the ass in real time. If the industry had an answer modern games today wouldn't still be using hair cards. Translucency isn't an issue if you keep the dead zones to a minimal. But that itself posses another issue if the hair cards are shape differently.

But damn assets from the UE4 marketplace have hair in the 14k poly. Seems a bit too much if I have to say. Then again a lot of the assets found on the marketplace aren't really optimized either. Are you by chance trying to have physics assets added to the hair?

 

[NSUDEV]

I'm talking about Epic's own assets, their Paragon characters! I have no idea about physics yet but I'd love to have it. I've seen some great hair physics, but this is stuff I've yet to look into.

 

[kinrean]

200,000 tris isn't a lot at all really! Compared to some hero characters of modern games, it's even less. I don't know where you pulled the number of 50 4k images from, but mipmaps and LODs and such will take care of a lot. Also as I understand it, texture lookups don't happen twice for the same texture. If I had multiple girls in the scene, it won't load their textures multiple times, as they share em.

200,000 tris? you count as tris? well, then the number is diff then. triis 200,000 is high but not very high.

for 50 texture, where i get that is , 6 body part x5 (5 are =color, ao, normal, roughness , specular) = 30 , + 5 (hair) =35
35 for a human, and sex toy, background. so around 50 .

so , there will be only one set of skin texture? no add on, not able to change/add the normal map?

Have you used UE4? Or at least know how UE4 handles textures? I highly doubt at any given time NSUDEV is going to load that many textures into the scene. Textures are only loaded when the material utilizing that texture is called or at least that's how I've come to understand it. The only issue I see here is if the player doesn't have enough ram to load them in. Other wise all the textures going to do is increase the file size.

that is because ue4 got lod for the texture too, if is far it will set it lower , but we are talking in close range, so there will be no lod for the texture.

Sorry come again? Clothing poly needs to be the same as the body? Not sure where that idea came from, but that's a good example of bad 3D modeling. If the clothing has the same amount of poly as the body that 3D modeler made some bad decisions.

............ so tell me, how do you make the clothing 3d model? or what is good modeling are ?

 

[NSUDEV]

200,000 tris? you count as tris? well, then the number is diff then. triis 200,000 is high but not very high.

for 50 texture, where i get that is , 6 body part x5 (5 are =color, ao, normal, roughness , specular) = 30 , + 5 (hair) =35
35 for a human, and sex toy, background. so around 50 .

so , there will be only one set of skin texture? no add on, not able to change/add the normal map?

Yep tris Generally if we're talking gamedev we're talking tris. I'm so used to saying polycount in triangles that I didn't specify sorry.

You're assuming that all body parts will use 4K textures but that's probably not the case, some will probably need 2K. And you don't have separate maps for roughness, specular and AO in gamedev. You pack all of those into one single texture, along with metallic if you have a metal map. You can get all four of those into a single texture.