The tech presented in Redwood Falls

Skamberin

Prototype:
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-eB-oCWsq4[/ame]

Game was canceled long ago and the tech demo is pretty old, but it's always impressed me how awesome it was, it was also an Unreal Engine 3 game, I believe 4 people or so put it together in 4 months. I have yet to see a Unreal Engine 3 game with effects like this, heck, something as common as bullet wounds is absent.

Now with the release of vertex colors on characters and all that, anyone have any idea if achieving something like this on UDK is feasible? At the very least just have bullet wounds or whatnot appear on a character actor?

EDIT:
Found a more in-depth look at the game and it's ideas on the site of one of its devs: Cumron Ashtiani: Redwood Falls - Art Direction

Impressive stuff:

haiddasalami

I think Crysis had bullet wounds and ability to shoot off limbs but then Crytek had problems with the German government. Its all feasible (Source has bullet wounds in L4d2) but most companies play it safe to stay away from M ratings as T rating caters to a wider audience and brings in more cash.

cholden

A little while back here someone made a real technical player model for UT3 that had a normal person model, a musculature model and a skeleton model. And the shader on the character would randomly fade their visibility for a similar effect (of course not as a response to being shot, but this could be setup). So yea, this is all quite feasible, but I wouldn't know where to tell you to start short of the art itself.

Ark

Im no unreal expert, but it looks like material transitions. Eat3D has a dvd on the matter.

cholden wrote: »

A little while back here someone made a real technical player model for UT3 that had a normal person model, a musculature model and a skeleton model. And the shader on the character would randomly fade their visibility for a similar effect (of course not as a response to being shot, but this could be setup). So yea, this is all quite feasible, but I wouldn't know where to tell you to start short of the art itself.

I believe is was Davision3D that made that: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=60289

Acumen

don't know if that's the same quality of wounds you want to achieve in udk but valve release an interesting presentation on wounds in left 4 dead a while ago:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/publications/2010/gdc2010_vlachos_l4d2wounds.pdf

maybe that can give some insight or is comparable to what you want to achieve in the first place ?

Skamberin

Thanks for the answers guys. While they're all probably used in some fashion in the tech demo, the part I'm the most interested in figuring out how they did was to have dymanic damage location on the character. As in, wounds appear where the player shoots. The material effect for the regeneration is similar to what Davision3D did with his Egyptian Warlord it seems, but I have no idea how they got damage location to determine what part of the texture should be replaced with the wounds and such. If someone knew, they could in theory get some advanced bullet wound and hole decals working, like they have in Source games and in Crysis (if you enable it)

Thanks for the links though, they're all great

Lamont

Skamberin wrote: »

I have yet to see a Unreal Engine 3 game with effects like this, heck, something as common as bullet wounds is absent.

Now with the release of vertex colors on characters and all that, anyone have any idea if achieving something like this on UDK is feasible? At the very least just have bullet wounds or whatnot appear on a character actor?

X-Men Origins Wolverine.

Skamberin

Good example Lamont but that's still not what I'm looking for. In Xmen they seem to have a seperate texture with pre-placed wounds appear when a certain amount or type of damage is received (which gets progressively worse until you can see innards etc)

Notice in the tech demo that when the player shoots the head, it shows wounds there,, when its the leg, you see the leg, when its the abdomen it's there etc.
It's fully dynamic and up to the player down to the centimeter, just like in source games.

Like here:
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7RPQVzPnt0[/ame]

Lamont

In the Wolverinie game, he has guts (you can see some organs systems), muscle, bones and blood. It is a way for the player to see how much damage has been done. As Wolverine heals, the wounds go away, you see the skin thread itself back together, see holes through the body, clothes do not come back. It's not just textures it's geometry.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Lamont

But I guess to do this...

You'd need all those models, not sure how they load them as needed. for what part that's taken damage. Shooting the character and causing a hole via texture based on the weapon/proximity I can understand, but having innards, I've never worked with anyone who's done that.

Skamberin

Probably the most impressive graphical feat is the regeneration system. This essentially lets the player shoot chunks of flesh out of the creature. The technology works by having a double skinned enemy model, the outer skin and also a skin inside that is textured with muscles and bones etc When you shoot the creature it projects the impact based on a spherical cage and then applies an alpha decal with normal map to cut a hole in the outer skin revealing the insides.

Well, seems thats the gist of how they did it. I have no idea where to even start with recreating something like it though. Real real shame the game was canceled by the higher ups in Kuju

Seems they had some awesome things in mind:

The demo shows this at stage 1, two skin levels and no limb loss. The plan for stage 2 was three skin levels (outer, muscle, organs) and limb loss. Animation would also change when a limb was lost. The creature would move in a different way until it had chance to regenerate.

MattLichy

Yeah that sounds familiar to how valve did it for l4D. It can get very complicated it seems and if u don't do it right, expensive quickly.

BlackulaDZ

pandora: the box or whatever it was called had an effect similar to redwood falls, you could shoot the skin off of werewolves to reveal the muscles