I notice some hovering geometry (skate park 1st wire shot, lower right, 2nd wire shot base of the stairs) looks like flat planes here and there, are those texture overlays or are they there for other reasons?
The grass in the church, was that modeled in or was that added in post export?
As far as unwrapping goes, where you free to use a mix of tiles and unique unwraps? If so did you have to do anything special inside of 3ds like work within a set of custom shaders, or just work with the standard materials in the editor?
What's so special about the Infernal engine that makes it so easy to work with? From what I've been hearing, the workflow isn't shockingly easy or anything. I'd like to hear from someone who's used it extensively, so please: enlighten me!
What's so special about the Infernal engine that makes it so easy to work with? From what I've been hearing, the workflow isn't shockingly easy or anything. I'd like to hear from someone who's used it extensively, so please: enlighten me!
having to build an entire level in max doesn't sound too good to me.. that sounds like having a pretty frustrating time to me , max isn't made to be a level editor for a whole bunch of frustrating reasons i don't feel like listing right now.
but anyway, it looks cool! I think the lighting and color compositions could have used some more work though, but maybe thats just me .
What's so special about the Infernal engine that makes it so easy to work with? From what I've been hearing, the workflow isn't shockingly easy or anything. I'd like to hear from someone who's used it extensively, so please: enlighten me!
Our work flow was work in Max, setup the materials, File > Export and its pretty much ready and in the engine. Nothing hard about that! :P Mangled should post about this for you, though.
Vig: Texture overlays. I think they're stains. The grass around the Church was place in the level post-export, within IE. We're able to mix it up to our hearts content in in terms of unique or tiling textures. It was all just standard Max shaders.
really nice modeling,shame about some of those blurry textures,but thats unavoidable if the main platform is a console:)
How are the collision surfaces handled?Do you just flag the necessary pieces or create proxies?
And how about lighting,how much of that is prebaked?
this twisted architecture in void is something I've always loved...a little homage to Clive Barker's Undying maybe?:D
The collision is a separate mesh done within Max and exported with the scene. The TRI tools lets you flag said geometry as collision, and what sort of things it will collide with (player, proton beam, ghosts, etc).
Most of our lighting was prebaked, and this is done within Infernal Engine, post-export.
having to build an entire level in max doesn't sound too good to me.. that sounds like having a pretty frustrating time to me , max isn't made to be a level editor for a whole bunch of frustrating reasons i don't feel like listing right now.
but anyway, it looks cool! I think the lighting and color compositions could have used some more work though, but maybe thats just me .
Yeah, i was thinking the same thing, working in max would not be fun at all if i were to build a level.
I've work with Source, Unreal and idTech while at Threewave. Working in Max is no different from any thing else. Hell, we even blocked things out with BSP inside of Infernal. We still built with modular pieces when needed, still had organized material groups, layer groups, etc. Learn to love the snap-to-grid as you would inside of your favourite engine/tool and its fine.
If you're organized, its fine. If you're a cluster fuck inside of Max, I can understand.
I've work with Source, Unreal and idTech while at Threewave. Working in Max is no different from any thing else. Hell, we even blocked things out with BSP inside of Infernal. We still built with modular pieces when needed, still had organized material groups, layer groups, etc. Learn to love the snap-to-grid as you would inside of your favourite engine/tool and its fine.
If you're organized, its fine. If you're a cluster fuck inside of Max, I can understand.
I have worked with all those as well, and yeah i'm not saying it's impossible to do it in max. But all the hassle and organising you need to do for it wouldn't be required in a proper level editor . I have worked on entire environments in max before and found the orbiting cameras/crappy face selection/slow fps/various crashes very frustrating for this kind of work. Give me a nice clean editor where i throw put my stuff together, play with lighting, scripting etc and that shows me realtime how everything will look in the game! Is it possible to work like that in infernal?
I have worked with all those as well, and yeah i'm not saying it's impossible to do it in max. But all the hassle and organising you need to do for it wouldn't be required in a proper level editor . I have worked on entire environments in max before and found the orbiting cameras/crappy face selection/slow fps/various crashes very frustrating for this kind of work. Give me a nice clean editor where i throw put my stuff together, play with lighting, scripting etc and that shows me realtime how everything will look in the game! Is it possible to work like that in infernal?
Oh yeah, definitely is possible! We just chose it this way. I think TRI worked as you prefer.
Who uses orbital cameras when there's a first person camera in Max? :P It's my experience that setting up 1 multi-sub material and proper Layers in Max doesn't take that much time. Shouldn't take long to work in an organized fashion. I should also mention I don't prefer one approach over the other, but did find working straight in Max to be fun and refreshing.
To be fair, we had just come off another project that we had to work in Max a lot for so we used that approach for this project too.
Oh yeah, definitely is possible! We just chose it this way. I think TRI worked as you prefer.
Who uses orbital cameras when there's a first person camera in Max? :P It's my experience that setting up 1 multi-sub material and proper Layers in Max doesn't take that much time. Shouldn't take long to work in an organized fashion. I should also mention I don't prefer one approach over the other, but did find working straight in Max to be fun and refreshing.
To be fair, we had just come off another project that we had to work in Max a lot for so we used that approach for this project too.
fair enough , good to hear there's different approaches possible in the engine! But the first person camera in max is kinda sucky though
I have worked on entire environments in max before and found the orbiting cameras/crappy face selection/slow fps/various crashes very frustrating for this kind of work.
I could see the first one as deal breaker if it wasn't for Walk Through Mode. I have it bound to Shift-C or click the little foot prints in the lower right corner to toggle it on. It behaves just like the camera in Hammer.
LMB = mouse look
RMB = exit
WASD = forward, back, left, right, just like a FPS.
[ ] = increase/decrease step size (speed, adjust it while moving)
So to nav some place you can either fly there, or click a object and hit shift-z to center the viewport on it and then enter walk through and fly around.
The rest there are half a dozen different ways to improve but really with the addition of walk through mode its a big bag of win.
so i loved working on GB's multiplayer. and i was really lucky to be able to scribble down some multiplayer prop ideas when the time arose.
these are some of the sketches that showed the process of asset creation and some of the fun stuff we ran into. all i can show are the stuff that made it to the shipped title but there is a pretty good amount of that stuff
i was placed in that position for a time to get things done quick and get everyone's ideas flowing. so love em or hate em, here's some sketches!
the destruction portal:
this was the thing that puked out ghosts during the destruction game type.
an earlier shot at it with a nazi ghost buster for scale...
then a broken up look of the same idea...
busted up a few variations of the thing...
figured most of what we wanted by this guy...
and put him together for dakkon to model up easy peasy
the power up spawner:
this was the thing that was going to generate the power ups. this guy went through alot of rapid changes and development. heres a few pictures of the process.
an early attempt at canisters and placement on the players...
another quick pile of examples of canister shapes.
closer to the final canister...
the first couple ideas on how the canisters would spawn in the level. a pressure cooker style and a ammunition dispenser style idea.
thinking the first ideas were dumb we started adding stuff like coathangers and crude teleportation...
a team favorite was when we started building the thing out of a microwave...
the microwave was a cool idea but we needed to squish it so you could walk over the thing properly.
the pylon:
this guy was made up for the protection game type. something that the ghostbusters protect while it sets up.
so fisrt there was a quick slew of rough ideas...
then we started playing around with the idea of a beer keg...
a little further along:
then we jumped back to an earlier idea... (the first one of course ;P)
some ideas of deployment animation...
and another idea of scale (vs. ghost pirate)
power ups:
these were a blast to think up. a few ideas didnt make it in but heres what did along with a rough earlier sketch of them.
the proton accelerator: makes your main beam super powerful. the final result has a different top to it.
the ghost shrinker: stayed pretty much the same level through development.
the stunner: dazes all the ghosts at once, made from a tuning fork and some other things.
the shield generator: protects the player from a few attacks.
the thief object.
this is the items you need to stop the thieving ghosts from stealing. really artifacty looking. another one built by dakkon.
so i know these aint winning any beauty contests but they show some process and evolution. i had a huge blast jumping from ui integration, to asset building, to texture painting, to concept. it kept me on my toes and never bored.
i hope you dig a small slice of the multi-player concept roughs, this was my first title to be shipped as well so i am super stoked about it.
much love to my brothers at threewave and to the champs at TRI
thanks all.
Awesome concepts jouste!! I love how everything is made from repurposed junk, I bet it was tons of fun trying to come up will cool combinations of items to make all the different gadgets. The keg pylon is probably my favorite of the designs.
Great concepts jouste, I like the fact that you guys explored man different variations of the equipment. Protection is one of my favorite game types. Adam, great job with the MP maps especially twisted stacks. I'm on my way home to check out the MP right now. later -S
grats to both of you guys, adam those enviros look awesome! and infernal sounds amazing, i was looking on the site about it and it does seem very artist friendly, and im all about working as much as i can in max. and joust those concepts are absolutly fabulous! i can see why the microwaze was a team fav and adam, how was the scale, what grid size did you work with
Fun note of interest #2: No second UV's needed for lightmaps! So awesome! All we had to do was select
the meshes we'd like lightmapped and flag it as such! Literally! So fucking fast compared to other... engines.
omg. So jealous of this hahaha. I hate light maps.
This may have been asked, i didnt read all responses....
In some of the levels. specifically the first two posted. Things seem rather chunky lowpoly looking. From the looks of the wire frame, you guys did a great job of poly conservation. So why didnt you spend more tri's to round things out a bit more? Infernal engine a bit more limited on tri counts? Bad portaling?
I still think these look fantastic. We had the game at the studio this morning. Watched some folks play it at lunch. Ima buy it soon!
adam, those environments are so killer! seeing the rooftop made me want to immediately go buy this thing. the lighting in the first image is so great and all the different worlds you guys brought to life are so original and true to the ghostbusters style!
jouste, omf! those are some awesome design concepts! i've always loved your drawings... this stuff i could just stair at all day long!
stimpack, in some cases we'd spend the tri's on the corners, in some cases we wouldn't. There was never a rule for us on our end for that sort of decision. If it looked good in the game, thats what mattered.
I suppose its worth a mention, I *believe* the average triangle count for the maps is in the 200,000 region. I *think*. But, that said, I think Basement Stacks (the first one posted) is in the 90k region, I can't remember its been nearly a year.
EDIT: One more word in asterisk's for good measure. *boobs*
I watched a coworker play it yesterday, looks like a lot of fun. I liked all the little touches like, being able to talk to the painting, listening to the answering machine and wow they recorded a lot of dialog...
Hey all! I'm one of the concept artists at Threewave that worked on the multiplayer stuff with Adam. Here's some of the concepts that I did for the game.
**Note: Sandbag had mentioned that there is some single player content in these concepts. It never occured to me to necessarily mention it as being a concept artist, sometimes you take photos and mash em into your concepts to convey the quickest possible visual message and to deliver that within an efficient time range. i.e. spending 2 hours meticulously painting grass rather than spending that 2 hours being creative elsewhere. Because Ghostbusters multiplayer is based on single player, it was expected that we'd use single player assets in the multiplayer maps for several different reasons. So below unless mentioned otherwise, the concepts below are of varying combinations of painting from scratch, photos, and single player imagery. If stated, then it's a paintover that's probably about 70 to 80% single player imagery.
paintover based on single player level
paintover based on single player level
paintover based on single player level (which is the actual NYC library)
Not to take away from the effort put in to these, but maybe you should be crediting the levels and concepts that these are based on and painted over?
The work is great, no doubt, but these weren't exactly done from scratch...I have to feel a little offended for the hard work of our own concept artists and env artists.
I look forward to contributing to the thread as soon as I get the official go-ahead from 'upstairs!'
Majority of the concepts are painted over the work we did on our maps, not singleplayer. And for the MP levels, its already been mentioned in -every- image of mine that work was used from the single player game whenever necessary.
Great Work guys i really love those concepts and sets! I really look forward to playing in these levels. I'm looking forward to the go ahead to post some images as well, thanks for the eye candy doods!
Yea man, JT's always doing awesome stuff like that in his concepts. It's his little touches he does that are one of the things I miss the most about those guys.
Sandbag, I think enough credit was given all around and whenever someone asks me about them IRL, where I can easily point things out, I tell them who's responsible for what. I'm glad Stoo could clarify about the concepts, I thought they were 100% worked over top of our levels but I guess I was wrong! When're you going to post the stuff you did!? I wanna see!
I appreciate the clarification Stoo! Like I said, dont wanna sound harsh or anything, the work is great, for sure, I guess I'm just a stickler about always saying exactly what I do...it's definitely tricky when it's a big project like this and everyone had a hand on everything, but a little bit of text goes a long way you know?
I'm waiting for official confirmation that I can post stuff from "the man", though a bunch of my work is in the shots Graff posted.
Replies
I notice some hovering geometry (skate park 1st wire shot, lower right, 2nd wire shot base of the stairs) looks like flat planes here and there, are those texture overlays or are they there for other reasons?
The grass in the church, was that modeled in or was that added in post export?
As far as unwrapping goes, where you free to use a mix of tiles and unique unwraps? If so did you have to do anything special inside of 3ds like work within a set of custom shaders, or just work with the standard materials in the editor?
having to build an entire level in max doesn't sound too good to me.. that sounds like having a pretty frustrating time to me
but anyway, it looks cool! I think the lighting and color compositions could have used some more work though, but maybe thats just me
Our work flow was work in Max, setup the materials, File > Export and its pretty much ready and in the engine. Nothing hard about that! :P Mangled should post about this for you, though.
Vig: Texture overlays. I think they're stains. The grass around the Church was place in the level post-export, within IE. We're able to mix it up to our hearts content in in terms of unique or tiling textures. It was all just standard Max shaders.
How are the collision surfaces handled?Do you just flag the necessary pieces or create proxies?
And how about lighting,how much of that is prebaked?
this twisted architecture in void is something I've always loved...a little homage to Clive Barker's Undying maybe?:D
Most of our lighting was prebaked, and this is done within Infernal Engine, post-export.
Yeah, i was thinking the same thing, working in max would not be fun at all if i were to build a level.
great work on everything adam :thumbup:
If you're organized, its fine. If you're a cluster fuck inside of Max, I can understand.
Really awesome work, and congrats.
I wish we could post the concepts, orignal levels, and textures these levels were built from, not sure if we have the go-ahead yet though.
I have worked with all those as well, and yeah i'm not saying it's impossible to do it in max. But all the hassle and organising you need to do for it wouldn't be required in a proper level editor
Yes it totally is
Who uses orbital cameras when there's a first person camera in Max? :P It's my experience that setting up 1 multi-sub material and proper Layers in Max doesn't take that much time. Shouldn't take long to work in an organized fashion. I should also mention I don't prefer one approach over the other, but did find working straight in Max to be fun and refreshing.
To be fair, we had just come off another project that we had to work in Max a lot for so we used that approach for this project too.
THat would be awesome. Even I haven't seen the SP stuff in about a YEAR.
fair enough
LMB = mouse look
RMB = exit
WASD = forward, back, left, right, just like a FPS.
[ ] = increase/decrease step size (speed, adjust it while moving)
So to nav some place you can either fly there, or click a object and hit shift-z to center the viewport on it and then enter walk through and fly around.
The rest there are half a dozen different ways to improve but really with the addition of walk through mode its a big bag of win.
so i loved working on GB's multiplayer. and i was really lucky to be able to scribble down some multiplayer prop ideas when the time arose.
these are some of the sketches that showed the process of asset creation and some of the fun stuff we ran into. all i can show are the stuff that made it to the shipped title but there is a pretty good amount of that stuff
i was placed in that position for a time to get things done quick and get everyone's ideas flowing. so love em or hate em, here's some sketches!
the destruction portal:
this was the thing that puked out ghosts during the destruction game type.
an earlier shot at it with a nazi ghost buster for scale...
then a broken up look of the same idea...
busted up a few variations of the thing...
figured most of what we wanted by this guy...
and put him together for dakkon to model up easy peasy
the power up spawner:
this was the thing that was going to generate the power ups. this guy went through alot of rapid changes and development. heres a few pictures of the process.
an early attempt at canisters and placement on the players...
another quick pile of examples of canister shapes.
closer to the final canister...
the first couple ideas on how the canisters would spawn in the level. a pressure cooker style and a ammunition dispenser style idea.
thinking the first ideas were dumb we started adding stuff like coathangers and crude teleportation...
a team favorite was when we started building the thing out of a microwave...
the microwave was a cool idea but we needed to squish it so you could walk over the thing properly.
closer too the final item spawner...
this guy was made up for the protection game type. something that the ghostbusters protect while it sets up.
so fisrt there was a quick slew of rough ideas...
then we started playing around with the idea of a beer keg...
a little further along:
then we jumped back to an earlier idea... (the first one of course ;P)
some ideas of deployment animation...
and another idea of scale (vs. ghost pirate)
power ups:
these were a blast to think up. a few ideas didnt make it in but heres what did along with a rough earlier sketch of them.
the proton accelerator: makes your main beam super powerful. the final result has a different top to it.
the ghost shrinker: stayed pretty much the same level through development.
the stunner: dazes all the ghosts at once, made from a tuning fork and some other things.
the shield generator: protects the player from a few attacks.
the thief object.
this is the items you need to stop the thieving ghosts from stealing. really artifacty looking. another one built by dakkon.
so i know these aint winning any beauty contests but they show some process and evolution. i had a huge blast jumping from ui integration, to asset building, to texture painting, to concept. it kept me on my toes and never bored.
i hope you dig a small slice of the multi-player concept roughs, this was my first title to be shipped as well so i am super stoked about it.
much love to my brothers at threewave and to the champs at TRI
thanks all.
perhaps tomarrow
nice work on the levels as well Adam, great breakdowns.
Looks great man good stuff! Both of you! Grats!
In some of the levels. specifically the first two posted. Things seem rather chunky lowpoly looking. From the looks of the wire frame, you guys did a great job of poly conservation. So why didnt you spend more tri's to round things out a bit more? Infernal engine a bit more limited on tri counts? Bad portaling?
I still think these look fantastic. We had the game at the studio this morning. Watched some folks play it at lunch. Ima buy it soon!
jouste, omf! those are some awesome design concepts! i've always loved your drawings... this stuff i could just stair at all day long!
I suppose its worth a mention, I *believe* the average triangle count for the maps is in the 200,000 region. I *think*. But, that said, I think Basement Stacks (the first one posted) is in the 90k region, I can't remember its been nearly a year.
EDIT: One more word in asterisk's for good measure. *boobs*
I watched a coworker play it yesterday, looks like a lot of fun. I liked all the little touches like, being able to talk to the painting, listening to the answering machine and wow they recorded a lot of dialog...
**Note: Sandbag had mentioned that there is some single player content in these concepts. It never occured to me to necessarily mention it as being a concept artist, sometimes you take photos and mash em into your concepts to convey the quickest possible visual message and to deliver that within an efficient time range. i.e. spending 2 hours meticulously painting grass rather than spending that 2 hours being creative elsewhere. Because Ghostbusters multiplayer is based on single player, it was expected that we'd use single player assets in the multiplayer maps for several different reasons. So below unless mentioned otherwise, the concepts below are of varying combinations of painting from scratch, photos, and single player imagery. If stated, then it's a paintover that's probably about 70 to 80% single player imagery.
paintover based on single player level
paintover based on single player level
paintover based on single player level (which is the actual NYC library)
Those concepts are really fun!! great work.
The work is great, no doubt, but these weren't exactly done from scratch...I have to feel a little offended for the hard work of our own concept artists and env artists.
I look forward to contributing to the thread as soon as I get the official go-ahead from 'upstairs!'
Not just "some was by" but "I did this _____, I did not do ______" has always been my understanding of what is ethical and polite.
Yeah you're correcto. I'll edit the original concept post I did to reflect what you mentioned.
Sandbag, I think enough credit was given all around and whenever someone asks me about them IRL, where I can easily point things out, I tell them who's responsible for what. I'm glad Stoo could clarify about the concepts, I thought they were 100% worked over top of our levels but I guess I was wrong!
I'm waiting for official confirmation that I can post stuff from "the man", though a bunch of my work is in the shots Graff posted.