[WIP] Environment Demo

Nieb

This is a scene one might find in an Action/Adventure game of some sort...

I've been working on trying to get some nice lightmaps (with radiosity etc.) rendered out of 3dsmax for the past week or so without much luck. I've just started trying Vray instead of the other renders. Having more luck, but it takes a long while to render so tweaking and testing takes a alot of time. Once I've got something nice I'll update.

For now this is just using AO rendered from Faogen. (Interiors are dark from lack of lighting)

I've been running this on a Geforce6800GT, it performs smoothly.

Much thanks to Lee "Eihrul" Salzman for setting me up with a hack to make the game engine support highpoly models.

Download [approx. 16MB]: http://www.snieb.com/port/yard_world5.zip

Screenshots:

Ben Apuna

Welcome to Polycount Nieb. Yeah generating nice lightmaps can get tricky sometimes. This is a nice environment you have here, are you planning to texture stuff or leave them all with this flat shaded look you have already?

Right now your trees are looking rather flat. If you are using overlapping UVs for those leaves I suggest baking AO and lighting into their vertex colors then blending that with your current textures (if that's possible in your engine).

It looks like you've got some not very nice intersection between a tree? and the ground in the bottom left of the first picture. You might want to cover that up with some other meshes or tuck the ground back into that big root.

In addition to the AO you have here I think you need some cast shadows from your sun to tie this scene together.

I'm looking forward to seeing the radiosity added into the mix, with all the colorful objects you have in this scene I imagine it will look quite nice.

What engine is this for anyway?

Thanks for sharing

Nieb

I'm not planning to do any texturing. Not aiming to be a texture artist.

The engine doesn't support loading vertex data. It’s just loading an OBJ file. The engine really isn’t intended to have an entire scene in a single mapmodel. It has a native geometry for that, but it’s the only (free) engine I could find that could handle such a large raw polygon scene. The engine is Cube2/Sauerbraten btw. The demo includes the source code for handling high-poly models in anyone is curious.

“It looks like you've got some not very nice intersection between a tree?”
Not sure which part you mean. Could you please send a screenshot specifically showing it?

Can’t really do a direct light source outside without having the tree leaves to cast shadows. When I tried rendering with the tree leaves in the scene, all the alpha testing made my computer crawl into a corner and cry itself to sleep. I’ve only got an Athlon 3200+ single core CPU.

Ben Apuna

You say you're not aiming to be a texture artist, what is your goal? Environment artist? if so you will need to do texturing and a lot of it.

So this is one model? not broken up into modular pieces, why? And out of curiosity how many triangles are we talking about here?

If your engine can't handle a real time directional light source and if this is just one model with a unique UV unwrap why not bake the directional light along with the radiosity and AO all in one map? Another hopefully possible way to handle the tree shadows is to fake them with decals.

This is what looks like an intersection to me, might be something else or the camera angle...



If you're looking for a free non-current gen engine maybe this will work out for you. It's basically Unreal Engine 2 for non-commercial educational use:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/UnrealEngine2Runtime.html

But why not use Unreal Engine 3? It's not free but, it comes with Unreal Tournament 3 http://store.steampowered.com/app/13210/ at $19.99 that's pretty cheap. I'm pretty sure it could handle a 64k triangle mesh (even though you really shouldn't build levels that way...)

Or Crysis's Sandbox editor it's totally free, though you might need a fairly beefy computer to run it:

http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?p=939863

Hope that helps