Lovely as always! How many of you are working on it now, and what's the plan? Enemy soldier in goggles is my favourite I think, really nice clean shapes... Waiting for more. And Neox, you mean you code this stuff as well as churn out top-notch models? And yeah, the crossed-out "o" in the title reads a bit odd without a propeller to us Scandinavians especially...
well the idea for the propeller o came in denmark when we drank some øl :P
it was just BANG that is a propeller, we should try it for the logo!!!111 :P
and no i don't code stuff, i'm ready through papers, try to fiugure out what they do and plug nodes together, i'm a loser in maths and coding, thanks to unreal i have nodes to play around with
qjohnny: nope unreal mods have to be free by definition, once its getting commercial it stops beeing a mod and you have to license the engine, well with enough luck and time we might win it, but well i guess we should have a lot of luck and even more time to do that
Neox that's frigging awesome stuff... can I trouble you to post a texture sheet for the hero if it's allowed, I'd like to see how much effects unreal is adding in realtime
it might not look so but we are doing quite some stuff to the shading inside the engine, we did more before but well most stuff we tested didn't work out in motion, thats why the hatching is now baked into the diffuse as opposed to be drawn dynamicly based on the lighting, it worked for stills but was awful in motion
its not pino as i don't have the source files with me here but it shows the process.
We have quite a lot of shading information inside the diffuse but it's all on layers so if it has negative sideeffects we can tweak it down.
I made the texturing process do be very straight forward and very fast, the texture of the soldier was done in only a few hours, my bakes take a lot of the texturing load for airborn, it may not be as dynamically as it could be but it looks good and if there are some downsides and it looks odd i can just easily change it, ut in my opinion good diffuse > dynamic shadig
what we have is a ramped shading not unfamiliar to the one of TF2 that manipulates the shading from bright to dark to get more saturated and a little edgy (not like cel shading, but also not as smooth as a normal phong/blinn) the basis of this shader is the same as in my TF2 Shading Tutorial for UT3 but we changed some parameters and maps to get a more unique look that works together with the outline
there are still things i want to tweak in the shading but right now there are more important tasks to be done.
I like the visual breakdown of what your shaders are doing, fantastic stuff.
How much was experimentation, and how much did you already know you "needed" to do to get the desired effect for the Airborn shader? Do you notice any performance hit at all if you have a fair amount of characters / props on screen at once?
Does the enviroment get the same treatment (using same shader? "Lite" version of the shader?)
Hopefully this in-depth look at Airborn continues, cause man, I am loving it.
airborn was a lot of experimentation...
we tried nearly everything. From realistic to hatching, to watercolor, to what we have now.
We didn't know what is possible in a mod, so we couldn't plan that much forward..
@jason: the environment cannot have the same shader as the dynamic objects as they will be prelit so we definitely have to use a different shader that can handle the 3 lightmaps. However the specularterm will be the same and i might be able to ramp the shading there too but we will have to experiment more on that, once we have the final version with bakes in side unreal... manuel?
wow I keep forgetting how much the normal map does for things... that's what I get for being stuck working with low res diffuse only 3d stuff for work guess I'll have to get back into more in depth stuff soon
I'm normally not a big fan of highly stylized characters but you have some really great stuff in here. Love your line work too, makes for some beautiful sketches
I've gotta say the environments progressed a lot and I love it since i've been watching on ModDB for the last few months. Any plans on getting it published yet?
@rdmlegend: well we have to to joing MSUC so we will publish _something_ in the next few days, the first testern are taking a look at the current build, we have some stuff to add but it's definitely more gonna be like a basic techdemo then a game, there is not much to play, but once we have it done we can concentrate on the next steps which will definitely ha a more gameplay based focus
very nice art style Neox...the steampunkish feel reminds me slightly of Last Exile, especially the soldiers. Great stuff, looking forward to more updates.
very nice art style Neox...the steampunkish feel reminds me slightly of Last Exile, especially the soldiers. Great stuff, looking forward to more updates.
seeing this originally made me want to learn shader work and I spent a year learning unreal shaders on and off, though im still not fully knowledgeable in the subject it has pushed my learning curve way high for this and even helped me to create that street fighter 4 shader I made a while back
I hope you guys get this project going somewhere big soon! (I hope to see gameplay or something soon!)
yeah same, it was the original airborn stuff I seen that made me want to do shaders, very inspiring.
Whats performance like with externally baked lightmaps? I'm thinking it might be a boon. Would you consider swapping over to the next UE3 features if a game was released with that editor? I know that's got Beast pretty much integrated (but I don't think it's actually Beast, if you know what I mean.)
Else, I suppose it'd be a load of work to port things to the Mirrors Edge build, right? I am not sure if that came with Beast integrated with it, but I know some people cracked open the editor for it...
But all that for something you've already found a solution for... sounds a bit useless!
The main problem of our workflow is, that we can't instance lightmapped objects.
That's not optimal performancewise. Therefore objects that don't really need a lightmap (railings for example) won't use one, so that we can instance them.
awesome work, love everything ive seen from this game
ImSlightlyBored: I was wondering about the beast thing with mirrors edge, or turtle their uniqe version of it, so i cracked open the edtor and the buttons are there for it, the jut have no icon and wont launch it when you click as im guessing those files were not needed for gameplay since all the lighting had been built. haha i had my hoped up but it makes sense its not there.
still waiting for manuel to add his env, damn work faster, harder, stronger!!!!!!!!!!! na i know how it looks in maya and everthing is shaoping up well but i'd love to have it in unreal too ^^
erm that one tree in the second image is from crysis i just wanted to test if it will work with the outline, gonna create new ones beside those mattpainting trees in the background with that technique... because i cant get unreal to render shadows for their speedtrees
Replies
... With the propellor I for some reason pronounce in "airburn" in my head. Which is amusing, so it's cool.
it was just BANG that is a propeller, we should try it for the logo!!!111 :P
and no i don't code stuff, i'm ready through papers, try to fiugure out what they do and plug nodes together, i'm a loser in maths and coding, thanks to unreal i have nodes to play around with
qjohnny: nope unreal mods have to be free by definition, once its getting commercial it stops beeing a mod and you have to license the engine, well with enough luck and time we might win it, but well i guess we should have a lot of luck and even more time to do that
I wouldn't tell it's Unreal by the screenshots. I'm not into full realism in games, I love stylized look of your project.
its not pino as i don't have the source files with me here but it shows the process.
We have quite a lot of shading information inside the diffuse but it's all on layers so if it has negative sideeffects we can tweak it down.
I made the texturing process do be very straight forward and very fast, the texture of the soldier was done in only a few hours, my bakes take a lot of the texturing load for airborn, it may not be as dynamically as it could be but it looks good and if there are some downsides and it looks odd i can just easily change it, ut in my opinion good diffuse > dynamic shadig
what we have is a ramped shading not unfamiliar to the one of TF2 that manipulates the shading from bright to dark to get more saturated and a little edgy (not like cel shading, but also not as smooth as a normal phong/blinn) the basis of this shader is the same as in my TF2 Shading Tutorial for UT3 but we changed some parameters and maps to get a more unique look that works together with the outline
there are still things i want to tweak in the shading but right now there are more important tasks to be done.
Amazing stuff, top notch guys!
I like the visual breakdown of what your shaders are doing, fantastic stuff.
How much was experimentation, and how much did you already know you "needed" to do to get the desired effect for the Airborn shader? Do you notice any performance hit at all if you have a fair amount of characters / props on screen at once?
Does the enviroment get the same treatment (using same shader? "Lite" version of the shader?)
Hopefully this in-depth look at Airborn continues, cause man, I am loving it.
we tried nearly everything. From realistic to hatching, to watercolor, to what we have now.
We didn't know what is possible in a mod, so we couldn't plan that much forward..
i can't say anything more.
http://www.ixbt.com/divideo/ae-plugins/zbuffer.png
duplicate the image into a new layer
blur it
turn it to difference
thats the outline, well the basic idea behind it
@rdmlegend: well we have to to joing MSUC so we will publish _something_ in the next few days, the first testern are taking a look at the current build, we have some stuff to add but it's definitely more gonna be like a basic techdemo then a game, there is not much to play, but once we have it done we can concentrate on the next steps which will definitely ha a more gameplay based focus
I would not be able to put this game down if his pompass face kept laughing at my amateur flying skills...
he needs more thin lip mustache tho
Thanks!
Is it post process effect? Or shader on characters only?
Sorry for so many questions, but I'm curious
You're not the first to say that ^^
I didn;t read all the posts...just marvelled at the pretty pictures. ^_^b
I hope you guys get this project going somewhere big soon! (I hope to see gameplay or something soon!)
Whats performance like with externally baked lightmaps? I'm thinking it might be a boon. Would you consider swapping over to the next UE3 features if a game was released with that editor? I know that's got Beast pretty much integrated (but I don't think it's actually Beast, if you know what I mean.)
Else, I suppose it'd be a load of work to port things to the Mirrors Edge build, right? I am not sure if that came with Beast integrated with it, but I know some people cracked open the editor for it...
But all that for something you've already found a solution for... sounds a bit useless!
That's not optimal performancewise. Therefore objects that don't really need a lightmap (railings for example) won't use one, so that we can instance them.
awesome job man
strong concepts and modelings
good luck
ImSlightlyBored: I was wondering about the beast thing with mirrors edge, or turtle their uniqe version of it, so i cracked open the edtor and the buttons are there for it, the jut have no icon and wont launch it when you click as im guessing those files were not needed for gameplay since all the lighting had been built. haha i had my hoped up but it makes sense its not there.
well done keep it going!!!
just joined the thread !
Greets,
David - Animator
erm that one tree in the second image is from crysis i just wanted to test if it will work with the outline, gonna create new ones beside those mattpainting trees in the background with that technique... because i cant get unreal to render shadows for their speedtrees
just kidding, thanks!
our coder nearly finished a maya scrip that will help me to bake the lightmap and get all the stuff ingame! wohooo
keep up the great work
I can't even see any of your stuff in there! haha
- nice models
- nice textures
- nice style
thats a four time win