NBA Street DLC
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Finally this has been released on xbox live, it's free if anyone owns the game and wants a new court to play on. I built it quite a while ago but I can finally show it. This court is the cursed court and was passed around between like 5 different artists until it was finally passed to me and I ended up finishing it with some help from 2 other guys. Direct link to the gallery below.
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I noticed that the shadows seems to be arealight-generated, I assume you achieved this with a specific baking process. However, how do the shadows interact with the players, inside the game ? Are the shadows baked into a dedicated lightmap, or did you baked everything into the same color map ?
Nicely done dude.
How is it cursed?
I'm always inspired to go make a basketball court with all the details you manage to squeeze in.. although I never actually do.
you could be a genious. check that.
cool stuff, malcolm.
Poop, I'm glad you like the shadows this was our big next gen feature and is ultimately what made our game look different than everything else that had shipped before us. Skate is using the same lighting tech so you will see some nice stuff there too, it will be at a lower res due to the open world but it still looks quite nice with all the ao and soft shadows.
Johny, I actually don't have any of this work on my home pc I neglected to take it home with me, we stored the models in a proprietary format too so I doubt I could even open a court and save it as .ma any more. The props are just standard shit, nothing special, pretty low poly.
IronHawk, I didn't make the bike actually but Alan will be happy to know you like it.
Astrofra, yes all the lighting is baked, Ryan actually wrote a raytracer/baker from the ground up for this game. Things to note about the light baker are directional lights with area light shadows, ambient occlusion cast and recieved from everything, including through alpha channels. We unwrapped the whole world into a second uv set so we could still tile the textures without breaking the lighting. Going to next gen was interesting we lost some really simple features and gained some complex ones. One of the features we lost from last year was baked shadows affecting the players, no one seemed to notice though.
AdamBrome, there's no depth maps, it's all raytraced. Only the characters cast real time depth maps.
pliang, the colour correction and lighting are stylized but everything else was meant to be photo real. The theme of the game was supposed to be a nostalgic memory of the court from the NBA players who grew up on them. Faded 70's photography was used heavily when the art director was designing the look of the stylization. The court is cursed because it kept falling behide schedule and artist kept failing to complete it so it got passed around, the same thing happened last year too with the exact same court. Basically I had to rebuild almost the whole thing from scratch when it landed on me due to all the errors and high polycount it was in when I got it.
John_Warner, that was random seeing you today downtown, I'm glad you like the colour correction we got slammed by some reviewers, they didn't get it and wanted to turn it off.
SouL, yep I did all the lighting for this one. The outdoor courts are pretty straight forward, it takes one day to light one of these after it's unwrapped. The lighting turned out to be the easiest part of the process it was building all the content and unwrapping it all for light mapping that took forever.
Regarding the shadows / players, I'm not that suprised it doesn't interact.
However, I think it could be possible to cast dedicated shadows on the players only, with a set of very simple projection map. I think the XBox can handle it easily, and you wouldn't have to use precise projection map, as people won't even notice the trick.
Well, just an idea. Thanks again for sharing !!!
/end fuckup.exe!