EVE-VR Art/Design Breakdown
polycounter lvl 9
I've always wanted to contribute more to Polycount since I joined. Its been so instrumental in me becoming a better game artist and the community shares so much, I hope with this I might finally have a chance to give a little back. There has been some interest about the Oculus Rift here on the forums I wanted to share my experience of creating a VR project as an artist.
Quick background - A small group of enthusiastic CCP Devs grabbed the kickstarter kits the company purchased and worked after hours all night every night to make EVE-VR a six versus six multiplayer dog fighting space sim wrapped round the EVE universe. Its not a CCP product, we didn't even tell them till recently, just a few programmers and an artists getting together to make something different and apply our skills to some new hardware. Break out of the standard development routine.
Catch the trailer we made here: http://youtu.be/M1KtdwzXRxA
Onto the good stuff - The Rift is a ton of fun to develop for but it has some challenges. Working with something so new there is little in the way of best practise yet just rapid prototyping with lots of trial and error. The pipeline is not far removed from my usual (we used Unity with only a few tweaks) but it was a change to the way I thought about the work. The approach feels more personal than first person on a flat screen and the small details really count. From the internal viewpoint of virtual reality the subtle additions you persue in your work really give the world punch. From and artist perspective its a dream. Environments and assets have so much depth, its a very tactile way to view game art.
The aim of the game was a fighter drone battle. In EVE these assets are tiny and have next to no screen space (sub 600tri 512maps). So I rebuilt the ships from the ground up to hold up better at close inspection. In the end we made around 80% of the assets so they where fit for purpose in VR. Trying to shoe-horn in established assets didn't feel right in the scene, they where designed with another viewpoint in mind.
I built out the Minmatar wings based on what the player could see (and culled what they couldn't) constantly testing and checking in engine with the Rift on. The Detailing was done in 3D coat and previewing with the base photoshop textures in Marmoset before again tweaking in engine with the hardware. Models where kept quite low-poly as its essential the refresh rate maintains 60fps in both eyes.
This is some early High Poly WIP on the Minmatar and Amarr fighter rebuilding the wing innards close to the pilots feild of view.
Scale was incredibly important and knowing the focal distance ran about eight meters in unity the view from the cockpit was designed with this in mind. When we placed the character it became clear matching the height to the real world height of a sitting player both grounded you in the world and eliminated a huge portion of the simulator sickness. Checking your feet, knowing that distance then looking out to the wings gives you a virtual measuring stick reinforcing the spacial awareness.
Leveraging the environment scale we designed two game areas to become a visual narrative through the three minute demo. The first is a period of adjustment set inside the carrier of a larger ship. A tight and constricted launch tube give you time to look around while stationary, get a feel for VR. From there you are shot into space quickly transitioning from the closed conditions to the vastness of open space. This is to deliberately overwhelm the player and is directly lifted from an old architectural technique (I'm an architecture nerd, feel free to ask me for more about this but I would ramble on for hours). From player feedback back, it worked!
Soon as you leave the hanger bullets fly past your face. Its a great feeling in VR.
It was a gigantic effort for the team to show this at Fanfest 2013, the EVE online player gathering, basically 5 core members and a few contributors pushed this together in 6 weeks (no sleep, just art!) out of office hours. The response has been more than I could ever hoped.
I hope this little breakdown has been insightful and might aid your own VR project. You can ask me anything here or in PM about working with the Rift and I will try and help. I cut down a lot to keep the post reasonable in length but poke me to expand on anything.
As I said I'll be at E3 so if any polycounters want a game give me a shout and I'll get you a booth invite. Can't wait to put faces to names at the meetup. I'll leave you with a little mutual friend on the Amarr fighter.
*I will try and do a larger art dump after E3 is over and I get some free time to polish up some images.
Quick background - A small group of enthusiastic CCP Devs grabbed the kickstarter kits the company purchased and worked after hours all night every night to make EVE-VR a six versus six multiplayer dog fighting space sim wrapped round the EVE universe. Its not a CCP product, we didn't even tell them till recently, just a few programmers and an artists getting together to make something different and apply our skills to some new hardware. Break out of the standard development routine.
Catch the trailer we made here: http://youtu.be/M1KtdwzXRxA
Onto the good stuff - The Rift is a ton of fun to develop for but it has some challenges. Working with something so new there is little in the way of best practise yet just rapid prototyping with lots of trial and error. The pipeline is not far removed from my usual (we used Unity with only a few tweaks) but it was a change to the way I thought about the work. The approach feels more personal than first person on a flat screen and the small details really count. From the internal viewpoint of virtual reality the subtle additions you persue in your work really give the world punch. From and artist perspective its a dream. Environments and assets have so much depth, its a very tactile way to view game art.
The aim of the game was a fighter drone battle. In EVE these assets are tiny and have next to no screen space (sub 600tri 512maps). So I rebuilt the ships from the ground up to hold up better at close inspection. In the end we made around 80% of the assets so they where fit for purpose in VR. Trying to shoe-horn in established assets didn't feel right in the scene, they where designed with another viewpoint in mind.
I built out the Minmatar wings based on what the player could see (and culled what they couldn't) constantly testing and checking in engine with the Rift on. The Detailing was done in 3D coat and previewing with the base photoshop textures in Marmoset before again tweaking in engine with the hardware. Models where kept quite low-poly as its essential the refresh rate maintains 60fps in both eyes.
This is some early High Poly WIP on the Minmatar and Amarr fighter rebuilding the wing innards close to the pilots feild of view.
Scale was incredibly important and knowing the focal distance ran about eight meters in unity the view from the cockpit was designed with this in mind. When we placed the character it became clear matching the height to the real world height of a sitting player both grounded you in the world and eliminated a huge portion of the simulator sickness. Checking your feet, knowing that distance then looking out to the wings gives you a virtual measuring stick reinforcing the spacial awareness.
Leveraging the environment scale we designed two game areas to become a visual narrative through the three minute demo. The first is a period of adjustment set inside the carrier of a larger ship. A tight and constricted launch tube give you time to look around while stationary, get a feel for VR. From there you are shot into space quickly transitioning from the closed conditions to the vastness of open space. This is to deliberately overwhelm the player and is directly lifted from an old architectural technique (I'm an architecture nerd, feel free to ask me for more about this but I would ramble on for hours). From player feedback back, it worked!
Soon as you leave the hanger bullets fly past your face. Its a great feeling in VR.
It was a gigantic effort for the team to show this at Fanfest 2013, the EVE online player gathering, basically 5 core members and a few contributors pushed this together in 6 weeks (no sleep, just art!) out of office hours. The response has been more than I could ever hoped.
I hope this little breakdown has been insightful and might aid your own VR project. You can ask me anything here or in PM about working with the Rift and I will try and help. I cut down a lot to keep the post reasonable in length but poke me to expand on anything.
As I said I'll be at E3 so if any polycounters want a game give me a shout and I'll get you a booth invite. Can't wait to put faces to names at the meetup. I'll leave you with a little mutual friend on the Amarr fighter.
*I will try and do a larger art dump after E3 is over and I get some free time to polish up some images.
Replies
I kid I kid... nice one Andy.. hope things go well at E3