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Starfighter Inc. - Creating Next-gen Spaceships

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TheAxiom polycounter lvl 3
Hey! Art director from Impeller Studios here, I wanted to share some assets from our game, Starfighter Inc. that recently went live on Kickstarter.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/impellerstudios/starfighter-inc-0

The game is a heavily narrative and combat based dog-fighting simulator using real science in our real solar system. Here are a couple of assets for the game that I made recently.

Meridion Station - Space Elevator


Dromedary - Heavy Fuel Tanker


[This workflow is still a work in progress, may not be final and may not be have fully accurate information.]
These assets were created in Maya using a modular medium poly workflow.



We use with decal mapping planes, trim sheets and custom weighted normals.




This is a similar method used in Star Citizen and Alien Isolation. It allows us to reduce unique textures and allow extensive customisation. It means that assets are rather high in tri count but are further optimised with decent LOD's once in engine. This is necessary in the game we are creating, due to the immense size of the spaceships and stations.

One of the most detailed parts of our workflow is with our naming conventions. We need to make sure our assets are future-proof and highly modular. For instance, would we have the name of a spaceship in an engine that it uses when that engine may be used on many other ships.


I hope some of you find this interesting and please comment if you have any suggestions on how this workflow could be improved.

Replies

  • Prime8
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    Prime8 interpolator
    I was excited to read your slides, but unfortunately for the most interesting part regarding decal mapping "We use a shader in UE4" you are still trying to figure it out.

    The screenshots are done in Unity, which is a bit confusing.
    I like your presentation style.
  • Drgreenethumb
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    Drgreenethumb polycounter lvl 9
    Looks awesome! love the direction
  • TheAxiom
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    TheAxiom polycounter lvl 3
    Prime8 said:
    I was excited to read your slides, but unfortunately for the most interesting part regarding decal mapping "We use a shader in UE4" you are still trying to figure it out.

    The screenshots are done in Unity, which is a bit confusing.
    I like your presentation style.
    Thanks! Yeah we have been working on creating a shader for a while and have been talking to Epic about implementing something that might help us, to our amazement a few patches back they actually released this integration so you can layer texture types ontop of each other. It's very easy not with a little shader work to get efficient texture blending and decal mapping working.
  • Prime8
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    Prime8 interpolator
    TheAxiom said:
    Prime8 said:
    I was excited to read your slides, but unfortunately for the most interesting part regarding decal mapping "We use a shader in UE4" you are still trying to figure it out.

    The screenshots are done in Unity, which is a bit confusing.
    I like your presentation style.
    Thanks! Yeah we have been working on creating a shader for a while and have been talking to Epic about implementing something that might help us, to our amazement a few patches back they actually released this integration so you can layer texture types ontop of each other. It's very easy not with a little shader work to get efficient texture blending and decal mapping working.
    Oh good, I didn't recognise any change to the decal system. Would you mind to share a bit more details? I'm sure other guys over here http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2555698#Comment_2555698 will be very interested in that as well.
  • LiuYang
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    LiuYang null
    TheAxiom said:
    Prime8 said:
    I was excited to read your slides, but unfortunately for the most interesting part regarding decal mapping "We use a shader in UE4" you are still trying to figure it out.

    The screenshots are done in Unity, which is a bit confusing.
    I like your presentation style.
    Thanks! Yeah we have been working on creating a shader for a while and have been talking to Epic about implementing something that might help us, to our amazement a few patches back they actually released this integration so you can layer texture types ontop of each other. It's very easy not with a little shader work to get efficient texture blending and decal mapping working.
    Hi,  really awesome work here. I'm currenty working on figuring out this work flow.   I noticed that you mentioned "layer texture types" .   Is it possible to have something like normal without any color/roughness in one layer and curvature detail like some edge worn on another layer?  

    Thank  you. 
  • Ubuska
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    Ubuska polycounter lvl 8
    Prime8 said:
    TheAxiom said:
    Prime8 said:
    I was excited to read your slides, but unfortunately for the most interesting part regarding decal mapping "We use a shader in UE4" you are still trying to figure it out.

    The screenshots are done in Unity, which is a bit confusing.
    I like your presentation style.
    Thanks! Yeah we have been working on creating a shader for a while and have been talking to Epic about implementing something that might help us, to our amazement a few patches back they actually released this integration so you can layer texture types ontop of each other. It's very easy not with a little shader work to get efficient texture blending and decal mapping working.
    Oh good, I didn't recognise any change to the decal system. Would you mind to share a bit more details? I'm sure other guys over here http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2555698#Comment_2555698 will be very interested in that as well.
    I'd like to know about know-how part of the UE4 shader too. Now UE4 deferred decals have limitations like straight uniform overriding base color/roughness/metalness without blending and lack of metalness support.
  • Johnnynapalmsc
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    Johnnynapalmsc interpolator
    Any news on this?
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