1954 Nautilus-Based Minisub WIP
polycounter lvl 10
For a very very long time I've wanted to make a submarine game with subs in the style of the 1954 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea movie - it's an incredibly iconic design, and utterly gorgeous. However, I'm also a massively *lazy* artist, and the thought of sitting down and manually placing rivets by hand...ugh. No. I couldn't convince myself. Especially, since if I did so, I'd have to make tons of LOD levels for these gameplay models just for sheer performance reasons (Imagine the average boat would have 10,000 rivets on it - at the barest possible "rivet" shape, a triangular pyramid, that's 30,000 triangles for rivets alone! And those rivets would look like poop if you got close enough to appreciate the fact that they're actually 3-dimensional)
I started many times, but never got anywhere, just for the sheer enormity of the task.
But since you're reading this, you must have concluded I found a way to maintain my laziness! CORRECT. Displacement maps! The shader I use only subdivides the clean, workable underlying mesh. Based on a combination of distance from the camera (Automatic Level of Detail! Whoot), and the length of the edges on screen. Since I'm using the Unity Engine for my experiments, here's some shader code and further examples for the more technically-minded among you.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-Surf ... ation.html
Anyhow, that's a long run up to the cool bit - the picture of a WIP, displaced Nautilus-inspired minisub. I do want to emphasize that this is only hours of work - there are many things I can to improve how it looks and feels. Specifically, one thing I'd like to duplicate is the hand-beaten in a caldera metal panel feel the original 11ft brass model has. I think that's very important to the overall shading of how this thing catches the light - you'll notice it looks far too clean as is. Okay, here you go:
Yeah. Rough. But it looks better in motion. Here's a video that shows the water and environment shading and movement, as well as how the displacement maps affect the shape of the boat. In short, it's an *incredible* tool for quickly adding details to a model that hold up extremely closely. You can walk up to within feet of those rivets and they hold up - and I'm not even maxing out the resolution of displacement that the material shaders can handle.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B75poH ... sp=sharing
Anyhow, that's what I've been doodling with. I'll try to throw updates up here as I can. Enjoy!
I started many times, but never got anywhere, just for the sheer enormity of the task.
But since you're reading this, you must have concluded I found a way to maintain my laziness! CORRECT. Displacement maps! The shader I use only subdivides the clean, workable underlying mesh. Based on a combination of distance from the camera (Automatic Level of Detail! Whoot), and the length of the edges on screen. Since I'm using the Unity Engine for my experiments, here's some shader code and further examples for the more technically-minded among you.
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/SL-Surf ... ation.html
Anyhow, that's a long run up to the cool bit - the picture of a WIP, displaced Nautilus-inspired minisub. I do want to emphasize that this is only hours of work - there are many things I can to improve how it looks and feels. Specifically, one thing I'd like to duplicate is the hand-beaten in a caldera metal panel feel the original 11ft brass model has. I think that's very important to the overall shading of how this thing catches the light - you'll notice it looks far too clean as is. Okay, here you go:
Yeah. Rough. But it looks better in motion. Here's a video that shows the water and environment shading and movement, as well as how the displacement maps affect the shape of the boat. In short, it's an *incredible* tool for quickly adding details to a model that hold up extremely closely. You can walk up to within feet of those rivets and they hold up - and I'm not even maxing out the resolution of displacement that the material shaders can handle.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B75poH ... sp=sharing
Anyhow, that's what I've been doodling with. I'll try to throw updates up here as I can. Enjoy!
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