Signs and Floors

In the past four days I've been focusing on my signs and shopfronts. I've finished the signs and I'm creating adverts that suit the universe my level is set in, focusing a lot on the high sea level concerns and what can be done about it. I've had to rely on fairly simplistic sentences and Google Translate here, as they do actually (probably poorly) translate to things like 'help restore Earth' and 'remember fields of green?' in the chance that anyone who can read Chinese sees my level. I've also thrown some references to friends FMP's in, just to break up all the Chinese (because there is actually an awful lot of English on Chinese adverts and signs).

So these aren't done yet, I'm probably going to change the EARTH logo I created (which is a shame because I even went to the effort of painting the Earth and covering large portions of China and Australia up in water). Below are the finished signs though, which I've started placing around the level. Below that is just a shot of how the main area of my FMP is (finally) fleshing out. I really need to look into how to realistically roof the buildings, as I've almost exhausted my current routine of 'put flats on top or the Chinese roof pieces'.

One thing I did which I probably should have left until later is add some street art and graffiti with the decals tool. That being said it does add a lot of character to the level, helping lift that grimy unclean look that had started to dawn on the place. I used some graffiti and street art from around Leicester that I sourced myself and created the rest from photos from external sources (either by painting a study of it and making it look more pop-art, or altering the photo within Photoshop with filters and various other tools).

I fiddled with the lighting again and returned it to being sunny, so I'm going to look into rolling cloud textures today, as the dawn lighting was simply far too moody and gloomy compared to what I want. I also edited my neon signs again so the glow is more realistic. Now that it is sunny again these are kind of washed out, but I'm going to keep them at least dimly lit, just to show that they are lit and I didn't just make static neon signs.

Lastly, I finally got my floor texture in, as my placeholder concrete one was driving me crazy with how ugly it was. I created the base tiling texture from some photos, then vertex painted a cracked texture on top. I used more photos for the cracks, and painted in and out some other cracks. It was very hard to get this one to tile nicely, so in the sake of time I left it tiling at a mediocre standard, and just carefully painted it over the base texture. I also tried to use CryEngine's displacement/parallax mapping and add some fake depth to it, which seems to have worked reasonably well. I would've liked to push it a little more but this created some nasty shadow banding so it's fine for now. 

Signs and Backdrops

Well, one month remains and I am in 100% lets-work-all-day-except-for-eating mode. It's extremely draining, but everyone works better under pressure and this is the final month before Uni is completely over, so one more month of intense work and May 6th is gonna be extremely satisfying to relax on.

Above was me just fiddling with glass shaders, as it was previously on Illum and not properly reflecting the cubemaps either. Below were my parameters I was fiddling with; I'm still not 100% done with them yet as I'd rather get more of the level assembled before doing the polishing work.

Basically my plan for this month is just to plow through my asset list. I've made some quick plans in my trusty notebook detailing what I am having on each texture sheet, which is very useful and reassuring as I don't need to worry as much about what to put on each texture sheet anymore. Below are some shots where I've started to add assets like the pipes, wires, aerials and using CryEngine's rope tool liberally for the docks (which as I've said before is great because it lets me break up the modularity without needing to model loads of slightly different length and taut ropes).

Another crucial thing I'm working on is the tram. Before I finish the model and texture it I want to make sure it actually moves through the level alright. While the animation won't be too difficult to do, just time-consuming, actually letting the player get in it has proved troublesome. I would keep clipping through the proxy no matter how slow it was going, unless I was constantly moving. So now I am going to look at having the player trigger a 'cutscene' as they walk into the tram, where the camera would place itself in the right place and follow the tram path up the top, where the player will be given control again.

Modelling a load of planks meant that the unwrap got extremely messy, but to keep it efficient I made a general wood texture that had been worn in the middle, to simulate the path most people take over a bridge (the centre), and moved all the planks around slightly on the unwrap.

After our final assessment I got straight to modelling signs as my level, apart from the rooftops and bridges, was lacking anything substantially Chinese. I keep worrying about my tri-limit, but I also keep forgetting CryEngine (and most other engines) can handle an intense amount of tri's - it's the textures that consume tonnes more memory. Plus, CryEngine's water is constantly hovering around 350,000 polys, so I don't think a few wires on some signs will make too much of a dent in that (and besides, the wires make it look so much more dynamic).

In order to add more contre-jour elements and strong chiaroscuro to the level I fiddled with the lighting again. After failing miserably at a sunset feel (which made the sky super ugly and the ground super orange) I settled on an early dawn-ish time, with some fog/smog (because it wouldn't be China without some level of pollution). While the day-time lighting kept the level looking happy and positive, like I wanted, it's extremely difficult to get nice contrasts in lighting with it. I may revert back to it if I get the time to add clouds and their shadows (something I was reading up on in CryDev earlier) as they would add some nice dynamic shadows to it all.

That being said I added some mountain planes to the backdrop so it wasn't just endless ocean which actually looked a lot nicer than I thought as the fog I had already created added a really nice silhouette to the ones against the sun. I used photo's online of the Zhangjiajie National Park as they have some really striking mountains and spliced them into a long panorama. Then I masked them out for the alpha and crushed it into a 1024x1024 (which kept the details surprisingly well) and applied it to a huge cylinder around my level. Below is the first result - I removed some of the mountains, fixed the fringing and duplicated and pushed it out some more to create even more depth, without cluttering it with too many mountains.

Luc rightly pointed out that these particular mountains are formed by river erosion so probably aren't as tall as other more viable Chinese mountains, but I'll keep them for now as they are really great silhouettes.

Right now I'm working on the non-neon signs and possibly adding some low poly mountains a little closer to the city. Once the signs are done I'm going to create the boats as I can't possibly leave the level finished with a completely vacant dock. I originally wanted to put sails on the boats but I'll see how that goes, as I can't afford to get wrapped up in little details now.

Woops

Not updated in a long time...hopefully the work I've done since then is satisfactory then! Ever since the last assessment, getting the whole level together was my top priority, so I've spent a large portion of my time ensuring the ground is in properly, alongside bordering off the non-traversable areas.

I also began work on my general assets for the level, in order of priority. Below you can see that I've added wind turbines (which surprisingly didn't take long at all) and the tram supports in. The turbines were the first things I didn't add a normal map for; mostly because I did some basic ones (as turbines themselves are very minimal) and they looked rubbish, but also because I then realized I need to speed up my asset creation and normal maps on something that you never get very close to is pointless.

Sorry about the horrendous quality, I hated camstudio and filming off my screen was the quickest. It was in 720p but I guess Blogger had other plans...

I also began to look at animations, something I wasn't particularly looking forward to, 1. Because I'm a Game Artist, not an animator, and 2. Because CryEngine doesn't have UDK's Matinee, meaning I had to animate in 3DS Max and export into CryEngine. It turns out animating is the easy bit, it was the endless exporting with slightly different configurations and settings that was the hardest part and after now having five or six unique object animations, I'm still not 100% sure what the exact set up is. I've now began to look at animating my tram properly, as last time just went completely wrong. Below is the set-up for the animation on my air conditioners. As Auto-Key in 3DS Max doesn't allow pivot points to be edited on the fly, I had to detach things that moved independently from the main mesh, using the schematic view to attach them to the parent node.

I'm a little worried that this is all a bit too colourful, that it looks more like an amusement park than a Chinese City. Once my assets and decals are in, if it still looks childish I'll look into colour grading it to be a little more desaturated or tinted to a certain colour.

CryEngine's rope tool also proved hugely beneficial as it means I don't have to spend ages intricately placing specifically modeled hanging wires. I can also use them to add a little more variation to my docks. Below I've started to make my modular pipe pieces as another thing to break up the alleys and buildings.

Assessment Feedback and stuff

Whoops, I didn't realise it had been nearly a week since my last update. Last time I mentioned how I was trying to find a solution to my blending issues. Due to the time we have left I decided to just take the more memory intensive route and create four individually coloured textures in Photoshop for each tiling texture that needed it, therefore not using CryEngine's colouring tool for those specific textures.

While this does mean I had to use an extra 36mb or so of textures instead of 12kb (ouch) worth of material files, it also means that my buildings look a lot more realistic, and the paint effect wearing off near the water and other areas adds a huge degree of verisimilitude to the overall scene.

Here's a shot of my level before assessment, not much has changed here since last time though. Assessment was a realization that I really need to get the rest of my level done as soon as possible. I am falling behind on schedule, but I think getting all my basic building shapes in by Friday will help quell some of those worries.

Over the weekend I also got my trim pieces done for things like stairs, window frames, door frames and vents to break up all the space on the buildings. I think I'll need to make some tiles too to break up the floors when I get them in and also for roof area's that might be visible.

Finally, I threw together a watermill with existing texture sheets, making that patch of missing paint make a lot more sense now! Hopefully this'll look great once I get it animated and throwing up water particles.