[UDK] Rhea - USC Oculus Rift Game
Hello,
I (Neilson) will be posting on behalf of the Rhea team so we can get feedback on the environments from Polycount and just in general have a place where we can show our progress on the project.
Rhea is an open world exploration game with Oculus Rift integration, the core mechanic being flight! The world is based mostly on destroyed Greco-Roman architecture and a cavern/rainforest aesthetic. The Rhea team is mainly University of Southern California students and some Gnomon + LCAD artists.
At the moment we have started greyboxing areas and modeling simple assets. I'll post week to week.
Here are some images from the project (all over the place).
Concepts from LCAD artist David Heidhoff
Concept from LCAD artist Sam Joo Son
Early asset work by me.
Asset by Mike Longley
First main area of the game, the city centre. Most of the posts will be about this area moving forward.
Thanks for reading,
Neilson
Replies
early blockout is looking pretty good, although a bit bare between the island and the canyon walls (but judging from the concept that's going to get filled in with some nice vegetation).
is your team using unity for this?
Are you guys using smoothing groups at all? I just ask because it looks like everything is all triangulated/no smoothing. I recognize it's just an early blockin, but it couldn't hurt to help debug any possible lighting/shading errors with the geometry.
As the title suggests this actually is being built in UDK! The blockout is definitely bare, we still have to add a market area and possible gardens/public forum area
@Deathstick
We were going to use Unity but ended up in UDK, luckily our engineers are doing great work and we have a flying prototype working with the Oculus, I even got to play it today and got a bit dizzy.. Right now the geometry doesn't have lightmaps, collision, or smoothing groups. I'm hoping the lighting glitch has to do with either no lightmaps or no smoothing groups but I will look into this soon! Also I'm importing the mockup assets straight from Blender instead of taking them through Maya, maybe that's it.
Working with the rift has been great, you should be excited!
I did a paintover of the city so I could visualize what needs to get done.
Also I started on a really simple greybox for the cavernous area of the game.
Testing modular cave walls, the lightmap will be hard to get right as there are artifacts around where the assets meet.
Our other artists are still working on their respective scenes and assets, hopefully I can get stuff from them soon to post!
Neilson
On the ground terrain I am still getting a weird normal glitch, I'm wondering if applying a material will fix this. The current workflow I am using is to set up the smoothing groups in Maya and check the normals are right, triangulate the mesh in Maya, export with smoothing groups and import it into UDK with "explicit normals" checked, anyone else get this problem? Even my other export tests with the mesh in quads and Maya's fbx exporter triangulating it haven't fixed the problem.
Neilson