Airbørn
veteran polycounter
Soooo after a good decade we have removed the dust of this very special project that sorta kickstarted many of our careers.
I am happy to call many of the people we worked with back then my friends and colleagues. It has been quite a ride.
Follow me to the last page for the latest updates
https://polycount.com/discussion/62779/airborn#latest
https://linktr.ee/airborn.art
As we are moving closer to our first demo, i thought it might be time to start a dump for all our stuff over here...
So first of all what is Airbørn (not Airborne, more like born in the air, with a propeller as the o, awsum isn't it?
)?
Airborn is a universe we are working for well, humm... quite some time i think 2 of us started experimenting with the world in 2006 maybe late 2005 i'm not sure, so it went quite a long way from the first ideas and artworks to what it is now.
Airborn plays in a steampunkish (sort off early industrial, more brutal then the fine victorian steampunk) world quite a while after the World collapsed from over exploitation.
Our first Demo will take place in a story around Piño (he got the name after he was designed, as at first his projectname was just "boy" and a lot of people said "oh he looks just like Pinocchio" and also posta and niño - courier boy)
it's been done with Unreal Tournament 3, we created almost every asset from ground up, as the unreal assets didn't help us much (as opposed to some other mods that are way further but can reuse assets, like animations, shader etc) the only assets we reused are sounds, but even those will be replaced if we win at least a little amount of money at MSUC
http://nonpublic.airbørn.de/wip/neox/boy01/09.jpg an earlier design from 2006
newer image should update to the latest build but i'm too lazy :P we worked on the colors and changed some details
the zbrush sculpt
he wants to be a postman just like his father was (more about that story part later ), he is living with his grandparents
only one of them is modelled yet.
the first demo will take place on one small part of his home island, the harbour of said island
we are currently working to get the rough framework to be ready to add more
environment and gameplay, so the first demo will mostly be just about the artdirection, you will be able to walk around look at stuff, do some veeeeeeeery basic gameplay (really not much, so don't expect too much).
so i guess i just opened a junk yard for all our stuff, going to post a brief history of the enemy design later in a seperate post, i guess this is enough for now to give an overview.
you can see some of the other stuff over at moddB:
http://ww
w.moddb.com/mods/airborn
I am happy to call many of the people we worked with back then my friends and colleagues. It has been quite a ride.
Follow me to the last page for the latest updates
https://polycount.com/discussion/62779/airborn#latest
https://linktr.ee/airborn.art
Here is where the history lesson starts:
Snip
Snip
As we are moving closer to our first demo, i thought it might be time to start a dump for all our stuff over here...
So first of all what is Airbørn (not Airborne, more like born in the air, with a propeller as the o, awsum isn't it?
)?Airborn is a universe we are working for well, humm... quite some time i think 2 of us started experimenting with the world in 2006 maybe late 2005 i'm not sure, so it went quite a long way from the first ideas and artworks to what it is now.
Airborn plays in a steampunkish (sort off early industrial, more brutal then the fine victorian steampunk) world quite a while after the World collapsed from over exploitation.
Our first Demo will take place in a story around Piño (he got the name after he was designed, as at first his projectname was just "boy" and a lot of people said "oh he looks just like Pinocchio" and also posta and niño - courier boy)
it's been done with Unreal Tournament 3, we created almost every asset from ground up, as the unreal assets didn't help us much (as opposed to some other mods that are way further but can reuse assets, like animations, shader etc) the only assets we reused are sounds, but even those will be replaced if we win at least a little amount of money at MSUC
http://nonpublic.airbørn.de/wip/neox/boy01/09.jpg an earlier design from 2006
newer image should update to the latest build but i'm too lazy :P we worked on the colors and changed some details the zbrush sculpthe wants to be a postman just like his father was (more about that story part later
), he is living with his grandparentsonly one of them is modelled yet.
the first demo will take place on one small part of his home island, the harbour of said island
we are currently working to get the rough framework to be ready to add more
environment and gameplay, so the first demo will mostly be just about the artdirection, you will be able to walk around look at stuff, do some veeeeeeeery basic gameplay (really not much, so don't expect too much).
so i guess i just opened a junk yard for all our stuff, going to post a brief history of the enemy design later in a seperate post, i guess this is enough for now to give an overview.
you can see some of the other stuff over at moddB:
http://ww
w.moddb.com/mods/airborn
Replies
You guys have done some great work. Hope it all comes together as planned, should be fun. I should ask Flavius to show me some stuff, is he still doing shaders or scripting for you?
Great job and good luck!
so it all started with a steamgun for them by me
then a first idea that fit into the universe
and based on this new elements for the uniforms some of them made it in the final designs, even if it's just the idea and not the original shape we had in this sketch by dario
then johannes started doing some uniform and ship sketches which went more into the direction we liked
so based on that we developed a scout unit which is skinnier and a bit taller then the usual soldier, has light weapons but flies his own scoutship
based on that i played a bit more with the shapes and values to get a more military feeling
an overpaint of the mask
the basemesh
and a first sculpt
and the latest version, i tweaked the spec a bit more bt no screenshots of that for now
and some more designs
a supportclass that generates steam for the other soldiers guns and has the ammunition, the idea of his is a movable ammunitionbox ingame, this guy has more armor but is slow and once you have him down, the others will get out of ammo over time
and the brute, as the name says this guy hurts big times, when he hit's you you are almost gone, so better get out of his way, but he will be wuite slow, so you can get past him (hiow slow is tweaking, we will work on this once we have the first fighting basics settled)
and i did a first sculptsketch of him in mudbox for a autodesk presentation was surprised about the optical quality of mudbox, some really nice features, but i'll work more on him in zbrush, i just need my retopo tools
@Mop: shaders are mostly my part, flavius is the awesome dude that ties all this together, really i doubt we could even walk around without his help
This guy is my favourite!
beautiful stuff guys
I wish I could download the demo on the first day, new laptop first methinks lol.
i have like 35fps constantly on my laptop, and there is nothing optimized yet, no lod or anything, we might add some simple options for now, but not sure about that.
Those sketch strokes are directly paint on the texture or is it some shading trick?
I suppose you baked the lighting in a separate program since it's not possible to bake global illumination using the lighting system in the UT3 editor build.
How were you able to set up the scene in the program you baked the lightmaps in, and then set it up exactly the same in the unreal editor after you imported it in so that the lightmaps you created would match up perfectly.
Also, do the lightmaps you baked outside the unreal editor act correctly? For example, if a dynamic object were to land into a shadowed area of the lightmap would the object darken?
asian trader
only a ruff wip...shame on me
Can't wait to see more!
I can't run the UT3 editor or Unreal Tournament III on my laptop...might Airborn work?
Great character pixelchaot, he has a lot of character, especially in the eyes!
I can feel the "Les gardiens du Mazer" from frezzato touch here and there, and it's great. One of my favorite "EU comics" ever.
Now I want to finish my pirate !
Keep rockin !
Keep it up guys, great teamwork
@johnnyraptor: it's a mod, so it is free (hehe if anyone comes with a big bag full of money, we wouldn't mind, but seriously it's more likely that someone of us or all together get hit bi a lightning), but really don't expect too much the first release will be FAR from finished, we try to polish what we can in time but it's really not going to be much, it is more a glimpse of what may come
@whats_true: not yet but yes, the rough roadmap is first island get the ground gameplay settled, then start with the air gameplay, but this will take some time and i'm not sure if we can add a huge airship in that time.
@frubes: your word is my order
http://www.moddb.com/mods/airborn/videos/making-of-tokachuroo#imagebox
about the game: this episode around pino is planned to be a mix of action adventure (like zelda) and 3rd person flight action, we will have a border between those two but it's unclear how thin it will be, right now we planned for obvious worktime reasons to have the flightmode on some sort of minimap, so we don't need to detail every island as much as we would need it to be when you can walk around on them. but with realscale dogfights inbetween.
It's not sure how good this will work out but right now we don't see that we can make anything in a reasonable time if we have to detail every tiny bit of an island you just fly over, your jet won't be able to stop so there won't be much time to look around while flying anyways.
Amusingly enough Champions does something similar with its outlining, I think it lends to a really awesome overall look.
I'm curious about this as well. Any info you could give on the lighting solution you guys are using?
Manuel is baking the lightmaps with maya, i built a directional lightmap shader that takes the normalmap into account for blending the lightmaps, i did this with the help of some technical documents from siggraph i think, most of nthe stuff we did is based on the research in siggraph papers, most of it didn't work out in motion
as for the second question, we just have 2 UV Layouts one with the tzextures and one for the lightmaps and blend those together in a shader, there might be a slight offset between the ingame lighting and the prerendered lightmaps, but really unless it's like a big angle its a non existing issue to me.
the lighting won't effect the player models as far as i'm concerned but we could trigger that once we have the lighting settled, i think this is the way they did it in Naruto Ultimate Ninjastorm on PS3 too, it has a slight blend to dark once you hit the shadowline no matter if it's only your foot or the whole body in that shadow.
I don't think we will get that functionality in that milestone, but i think it is the easiest ways (besides using beast which we don't own