Final Push

These last two weeks we've focused on finishing up stuff that got pushed back, namely the monorail and animation, and the city behind the wall.

I started off by drawing up some designs for the buildings for Dan to model

I mainly focused on internal and external silhouette, because these would be at a distance you'd never seen any great detail other than the outer silhouette and the internal shapes from the glowing lights

The buildings in engine brought up a few problems, because of their scale and distance from the players view, the global fog mostly drowned out any detail they had, so to counter this I've had to place large ambient lights near the buildings with very high intensity diffuse settings. The only problem is, because of the rains glossines, it's creating quite a harsh purple reflection on a lot of the assets near the wall. I've done the best I could to strike a balance and don't think it's horribly noticable.

Monorail Car

We also have a working animated monorail! Dan and I teamed up on this to speed things up, after I laid out the initial track pieces scale for the animation tests a while back, he took these and finalised them along with the struts, giving me time to work up a quick design for the monorail and then model, texture and animate it myself and bring it into engine.

Because Cryengine doesn't accept anything other than TCB contstraints, and I was trying to animate along path constraints, I had to bake out the animation in max and import to another file which I could then export to Cryengine.

We're now focusing on tweaks and polish, adding decals, particles and as much clutter as we can to the level.

However I did start experiencing heavy framerate drops this week which was worrying. I've had to go round and at least half the texture size of all my assetts, and Dan will probably have to do the same with his. There's barely a difference in texture quality change and the framerate has risen which is all good, though I'm worried excess particles may bring it down again.

I still feel like there's a lot we could do with the lighting and atmosphere, so we'll spend some time on that this remaining week.

Improvements, improvements everywhere.

This last week and a bit has seen some small, but major improvements in our level.

Last Friday (4th April) we had our last assessment with our tutors before our final hand in. We got some great feedback for the level. The main criticism we got was the lighting needed to be pushed further, to get more contrast between light and dark areas, as well as increasing depth. After that we sat down with one of the tutors and tweaked the lighting towards the right direction. We brought down the ambient light to almost zero, so all the light sources are from local lights and holograms. Doing this also improved the light reflections from the puddles, which adds so much more atmosphere. Below shows the before and after shots for these lighting changes:

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Using Google maps to see how the streets of the ‘City of God’ in Rio actually look gave us a good indication of how much varied clutter there is in the streets, which we want to reflect in our level. So we came up another set of props for both of us to tackle. After producing them we started to litter the streets with them, which started to add so much more character to the level.

Litter

We feel like we have most of the final level done, we just have to move onto polishing and adding those little touches which add a lot to the environment. One of those major things is movement. I've spent a few days getting an oscillating camera working which we are placing around the level a lot to really sell the big brother vibe. I got tarps and clotheslines blowing in the wind, which was a bit tricky to get working realistically, but with the help of vertex painting I solved that issue

Tarps and Clotheslines moving

Cameras

We also came up with a way to add a bit more life to our holograms by making them look broken. We did this by duplicating the hologram model and placing it slightly in front of the original hologram. Then we created a new material for it where we played with the oscillating and colour settings giving us a nice broken hologram effect.

Both of us have been building out the level more as well as blocking of areas from the player in a realistic way.

Propper Jobs

This week Dan and I have been busting out all the props, amongst other things. We've got a lot to get through, but we're about halfway through the list we set ourselves last week.

I spent some time tweaking the mood and lighting of the level last week to better suit our vision of a grimey, wet looking city. I also added in placeholder cityblocks either side of the wall which REALLY helps sell the scale of the place already, they are very overbearing and it feels like a city already.

City blocks, before lighting tweaks

Added raised highways, fog and a nice wet sheen

Bin designs to push the futurism a little

Starting to litter the area

We're kinda of tweaking the lighting as we go at the moment. There are definitely areas and elements that are suffering at the moment, (that tree looks horribly green in the courtyard) and we'll have to do multiple passes and make sure the lighting suits the composition of elements in the scene and leads the player around the level nicely.

Cryengine's hologram shader does a nice job for the futuristic advertisements. I've also made some animated textures for the pulsating glow on certain props, which could be applied to ads and tv broadcasts with scrolling text.

Next up, more props and signs! And hopefully an animated monorail...

Level Building

Since our last update we have started to slowly replace the original white box with designer boxes. These designer boxes were original planned to be used as a base so we could import the designer buildings back into max to make the final buildings. But due to a bug in cry we couldn’t export the designer buildings, so we’ve made the decision to make these buildings purely in designer. While this has made things difficult as we can’t use vertex painting to blend between 2 different textures, it’s has allowed us to build the level very quickly and because we have a lot of modular models to break up the textures it has worked out surprisingly well. Using these designer buildings as bases we used all of our props and modular assets to start building loads of unique buildings.

To make building the level as efficient as possible between the 2 of us we started to use the layer system in cry. We did have a few problems at the start of the project when trying to use the layer system with models and textures showing for one person but not the other, but we resolved it by making sure we had the same file directories.

We have a layer each to work on which relates to a certain part of the level which we are responsible for creating. Luc is focusing on the courtyard area, while I’m focusing on the commercial/police area. This has allowed us to produce the level very quickly.

As we started to build up the level we felt some small things we’re missing which would give us a lot of atmosphere. So to get a better idea of things we started to use cry engines default models, such as particle effects, water effects and vegetation.

We are moving onto the props this week, so we can’t start adding in the much needed character for the level. We have come up with prop list and divided what props which are doing:

Attack of the Shacks

The past two weeks we've focused on getting more large pieces finalised and in engine. We decided to go back and block out the bigger forms in cryengine, as the whitebox we initially used was one big mesh imported from max, we couldn't move things around and change scales of objects.
The modular sci fi assets are done. Some prefab buildings have been made ready to populate the levels.

 We've since decided to scrap the playable sewer area because it felt unnecessary, and also due to time, but will still keep the sewer pipe spewing out waste into the slums

I gathered some more ref to get a better feel for how the streets feel at eye level.

Dan's road is in place, making the level look 100x better already.

He also made a new cinderblock texture that resembles the brickwork in the Rio slums more.

 I've been working on a series of favelas to be placed around the sewer/low end areas, and using the blend layer system in cryengine we get a really nice worn plaster look using vertex paint modifiers.

Quick blockout of the monorail system above. The next stage is trying to get the path constraint animation that the monorail car follows into Cryengine, which has proved difficult because Cry only accepts TCB controllers

I've drawn up a quick sketch of the wall and am in the process of texturing

Modular buildings part 2 + Attack of the sickness bug.

Last week was hectic for both of us –Luc fell ill at the start of the week and I fell ill at the end of it. We both got hit hard with our colds so the week wasn't as productive as we hoped, plus for one full day we had to type up an article about our Pudding Lane/Off The Map project. So apologies for the late blog update. Luckily we planned for a buffer week at the end of this project so if anything like this did happened it wouldn't affect the quality of our work overall.

The work we did do last week was carrying on from the week before, which were the modular pieces so we could start producing all the buildings. Luckily we got everything done to a standard where we can start putting together the buildings. Some pieces aren't fully textured yet or need further tweaking but it’s enough for us to get a good idea of how the buildings are going to look.

One big decision we made last week was to scrap the idea of doing building interiors, which we were schedule to do last week. We really liked the interior idea and wanted to have it in, but after talking we felt only a week to make several interiors for different buildings wouldn't be enough time to get it up to the standard we wanted. As the idea for the interiors would to pretty much have all the furnishings and objects you would have in a house but all cramped in a little space, we felt it was too much to do in a week and we didn't want to eat into another week which was dedicated to something else and we didn't want to attempt it half arse – go hard or go home basically.  Another reason for dropping it was because after a few weeks working with the buildings and textures we felt we needed another week to really get it up to the standard we wanted, as the building exteriors are a key part of our level.

So far with got some basic buildings built, with some placeholder geometry and textures to represent larger structures. We've done this so we can get a better idea of how different buildings are working with each other and how well the level plays now. Whereas if we just put our final buildings in straight away without testing, we would probably find a lot of the buildings don’t work well. Wasting time for us. After we are happy with these place holder buildings we will then start to replace them with the final buildings with in the coming weeks.

One of the basic high end shacks

Some place holder buildings in the courtyard

This week we hope to start producing the road and monorail system, along with making a start to the terrain.
Should have more to show next time as we have both recovered

Modular Buildings

This week our focus has mainly been on getting the modular sections of the buildings done, which includes metal panelling and trim for the high end buildings, and doors, windows and other fixtures for the shacks.

Dans modular panels

Dans early modular panels

Lucs corrugated metal

Lucs shack modular items

Some of the placeholder bashkits have been put into engine to get a better feel for how things will look. Upon initially importing however, we noticed the buildings were way too small. We were working to a 1x1 meter scale for the modular sections, but have since changed that to 1.25x1.25 to make sure everything is the correct height.

We've also started thinking more about key shots within the level and how we're going to control what the player sees with some concepts drawn up from the whitebox. This is a really key aspect, especially since our scope is quite large, we need to give the illusion of scale but do it in a very controlled way, to make sure we don't get too ambitious with playable areas. Hopefully in the next week we'll delve further into this before we start building the modular assets up in engine.

Lucs concept

This week and next, on the side, we need to start thinking about dynamic elements such as the holographic projections and cameras in the level and how the player interacts with them, we'll be doing tests in engine soon.