EVOLVE environment models
polycounter lvl 3
Hey guys,
This is an art dump of some of the modeling work I did for EVOLVE. I was in charge of anything and everything man-made for the environments. My biggest job was building all of the main objective structures for the maps. I also made a lot of props including most of the vehicles and ships.
vehicles:
This isn't actually a vehicle, this is "Bullet Bob". He was an ammo supply drone that followed the hunters around the map. He was cut from the game when ammo became infinite.
This is an art dump of some of the modeling work I did for EVOLVE. I was in charge of anything and everything man-made for the environments. My biggest job was building all of the main objective structures for the maps. I also made a lot of props including most of the vehicles and ships.
vehicles:
This isn't actually a vehicle, this is "Bullet Bob". He was an ammo supply drone that followed the hunters around the map. He was cut from the game when ammo became infinite.
Replies
This stuff is really inspirational,thanks for making my day!
And thanks a bunch for sharing this.Great work!
Reminds me of the nebuchadnezzar from Matrix. I remember that one also having those round magnets all over the hull. I like it.
+1
Great work !
This is a "space" tugboat. We thought it made sense that these large ships that came down to the planet would need help docking just as a ship does in the ocean.
I took the screen shot form the wrong side, so you can't see the name on the hull...go me. Here's a screen that's in the Art of EVOLVE book:
For the structures, we had a huge amount of reference sheets of industrial machines and locomotives. The main structures had a simple level design block-out and a rough proxy model to help guide the overall form. Design changes and performance would sometimes guide us in a different direction, so quite often they were designed on the fly. I helped develop the "Locotech" aesthetic so creating these structures on the fly was pretty straight forward.
I'm working on a breakdown of my basic process, I will post it soon!
The first thing I made before building any of the structures in the game was to establish a texture set that was flexible enough to build anything and everything we needed for man-made structures and machines. It started with basic tile-able metal panels and tile-able metal trims. This is an organic process, so as I began to establish my LEGO set, the textures would evolve with them as needed. I try not to get married to any given element because I want the flexibility to change things as needed. At this point I start to gather modeled elements to compile into my LEGO set. Because of all the pre-production look-dev work I had already done on the project, I had a pretty hearty supply of assets to add to my set. Below is the master LEGO set that everything was initially built from:
As the project went on, this master LEGO set grew into this. If you look closely, you can see all the structures mixed in there:
This process helps me build things very quickly because I can obviously pull from a huge library of assets so I don't have to repeat things. For instance, if I know I've already built a set of support beams that would fit under a catwalk system I need to make, then I can quickly grab them and use them or at the very least alter them to get what I need. This can be at the very granular level such as a simple metal brace or coupling to a very broad level when I need a cylindrical machine element at the top of a tower. Many times I can just re-use a model and simply shift the UVs to a different section of the texture atlas or swap the tile-able metal to something completely different. I try to build my texture sets with that in mind, it makes them much more versatile. For example, if I mapped some pipes to the red portion of the vertical trim texture but I was not happy with it in game because the rest of the structure is red and I wanted to add some contrast, I would just shift the UVs to the yellow or white portion of the trim texture.
Here is an example reference sheet we used for the man-made objects as well as the texture set used for the example structure seen below. Whenever possible, I try to put as much texture into a large atlas as possible to reduce the amount of textures used and to help bring the draw call count down:
This is the pmb (personal med-bay) launcher platform. The pmb is a pill shaped module that plugs into the top of the rocket where the gap is. The rocket can hold 4 of these pmb modules. In the image below, you can see the proxy model in grey on the left. This wasn't necessarily a concept but more a guide to establish a silhouette:
This shows what the repeated elements are. Since the platform is round, each element's pivot point is at the center so it was very easy to mirror the launcher by just duplicating it in the editor and rotating it around:
Here is the final in game model:
As far as actually building the launcher was concerned, there are no tricks or secrets, I just modeled it. The LEGO set is starting point and from there it's just kit-bash to your heart's content until you get the desired look.
Please feel to ask any questions, I'll try to answer them as best I can!
Thanks for all the kind words everyone, cheers!
Incredible stuff!
and special thx for the breakdown!
So does the diffuse texture atlas have a corresponding normal map atlas? Or is all the geometric detail done with actual polygons/displacement?
what resolution did you tend to work at for each modular piece?
Great work!
Olly.
Yes, each texture has a corresponding normal map and spec map. The gloss map is stored in the normal map's alpha channel. There are a few LEGO pieces that have baked normals but for the most part the normal map serves as a bump map, the rest is pure geometry. As we move forward I'm doing more of a hybrid between the 2. The main purposes for using the atlas method is to keep texture counts down which in turn keeps your drawcalls down.
As far as resolution goes, I don't have a strict hard method for maintaining texel density, it's mostly by eye. I know how far I can push a texture before it starts to breakdown. For tiling textures, I usually keep 1024x1024 to 6m. I can sometimes stretch it a bit further, but that's the closet to a "rule" I use for texel density.
Hope that answers your questions
cheers
The thing that's really confusing me right now is the map with the alphabet and numbers. I don't think I've seen anything like that before. Could you explain or point me to a resource that explains what that is, how it works, and how to use it?