In-GamePort Zone Test for GameLoft

franman

I'm doing one of Gameloft's tests as practice. Before showing some of my works, I thought I may share you GameLoft's rules so that you won't critique beyond their boundaries.

Here are the rules:

Based on the above design, you must model a “port zone” scene, respecting a maximum of 3500 triangles.

Your scene must be designed in a realistic style and include at least two “cranes”, a cargo ship (or part of a cargo ship visible to the player), containers, a warehouse, and props of your choosing.

You must respect the ambiance defined for the design: rainy night with a full moon. You do not need to model the player’s weapon nor the player’s arm.

Texturing constraints: Maximum texture size is 512 * 512. You can use multiple 512x512 textures but try to fit a maximum number of objects in the same texture (texture sharing). Only diffuse + vertex color + Lightmap.

Lighting: 1) Vertex colour only + additional patch for light cone.
2) Lightmap only (512x512) + additional patch for light cone

Skybox: Cloudy night sky with a full moon.

Animation (optional): Put in some animated objects in your scene (props etc). This is optionial.

Ground reflection: Partially transparent ground allows you to duplicate some objects in order to fake some reflections (up to you to decide the essential elements).

Integration of rain and water-drop FX is a plus.

So without further delay here's some of my work; so far the total number of tris is around 3150.

Matroskin

ohh, could u edit your post so that images don't get aligned in a row cauz it makes the page sooo long and it hard to look through your images

I am pretty sure there will be some gameloft artists around here to give some sugegstions
Well, me as ex-gameloft artist i guess i could give u feedbacks as well, but if u could only arrange your images in a readable/viewable way ;P

fmnoor

That doesn't look like 3500 triangles. Since it's a night/rain scene, you'd also want to go under for the reflection effect

Baddcog

The tex requirements seem a bit odd to me. I can see a 512 size limit, but the fact that there is no max number of tex is weird.

With that in mind I really think what you are missing is color. Tons of concrete, need some brick walls, metal warehouses, something else imo.

wires would be good too, it's hard to tell where you used them. Are the cables modeled 3d, or are they alpha planes (if 3d a huge waste of polys there that could go towards more important and larger details).

Also any railings should be alpha, just too low of a count to waste on them imo.

I think a few car models would go a long way to, they'd add some various shapes and colors around the scene.

Ged

yeah I dont know how many 512s you are using but I dont think the iphone would even get away with 8 512x512 textures, maybe 6 at a push

Matroskin

oh, now the images r better to see... Dunno if its because u changed their alignment or if it was a browser error :P

Well, nevertheless.

@Ged - actually those limitations are even lower that what could be done. That is dated from the times of iphone 1 i guess. The iPhone memory is large. Even on past gen (iphone 2 and 3) it was higher than the PSP and using like 15 different texture sheets ONLY for level (excluding characters, vehicles, weapons, lightmaps and SFX)was ok. Not to mention half or more of them were 1024s
So what is possible on iphone4 should be even higher than that i assume.

What IS a limitation is quantity of IDs. That is why it is better not to go over 10-15 IDs per level.

Now concerning the actual stuff posted.
Definitely I agree what ppl said about posting wires cauz it is hard to say what is what. For now cranes look too hi-res.

What I think will help u a lot when submitting that is to show how u can create interesting surfaces with lower res.
Your concrete stuff looks just plain boring. Buildings need more stuff to break down the huge flat planes. Use trims, separator and edge supports on your architecture.
Windows and more roll-up doors would help as well. Maybe even use a wall texture that takes all the height and tiles only horizontally. This way u could have some nice vertical detail going on.

You also have huge quality contrast in your textures. Concrete walls are photosourced and have actually some details in them while pillars are plain noise which does not even fit with concrete walls.

The ground texture does not need all those lines. U r wasting texture on them, and moreover the ground res is too low. It should not only match the rest but be even slightly higher.

Ship is plain blue color. That needs to have actual details like rust, leaking dirt, seams etc. Of course u don't have to create unique unwrap for the that cauz it will result is uselessly huge texture, but u could unwrap one section of a ship and re-use it.

Also when working with low-poly and texturing it will go better if u use fullbright view for the meshes cauz that defaul viewport lighting makes things look bad in this case and don't let u evaluate the texture as needed.

franman

Baddcog wrote: »

wires would be good too, it's hard to tell where you used them. Are the cables modeled 3d, or are they alpha planes (if 3d a huge waste of polys there that could go towards more important and larger details).

The cables on the crane are alpha planes.

Baddcog wrote: »

Also any railings should be alpha, just too low of a count to waste on them imo.

They are in alpha; all of them are.

Baddcog wrote: »

I think a few car models would go a long way to, they'd add some various shapes and colors around the scene.

I'll keep that in mind thanx.

Matroskin wrote: »

oh, now the images r better to see... Dunno if its because u changed their alignment or if it was a browser error :P

I think it's ur browser lol.

Matroskin wrote: »

What IS a limitation is quantity of IDs. That is why it is better not to go over 10-15 IDs per level.

This sounds interesting because I'm always using Multi-sub objects in 3Ds Max. I have assign a Number ID to a polygon side so I can apply a certain texture to it.

Alright thank you guyz for critiquing this rookie 3D modeller; I'll keep this thread updated and seek further for advice.

pior

It looks as if you started to model the scene under the poly budjet, without thinking of UVs ... then tried to texture that with the texture budget you were given.

I think you need to plan further, identify possible tiling elements, and design your meshing accordingly. So far it looks like you are simply tiling textures on big surfaces. Try to define your scene with a grid and blocks ; and make sure your geometry as modular as you possibly can. That way, you will be able to reuse geometry everywhere (instead of doing big unique objects)

Michael Knubben

I know there's no constraint on the texturing, but it feels strange to have such highres textures on so lowpoly a scene. Given the client and limits, I'd go for bolder, less noisy textures, as they will likely be seen on a small screen. Where you can, paint in trims (dirty edge to a wall...) and some lighting/shadow to make things seem more 3d. As it stands your flat, overly subtle photosrouced textures aren't doing much to compliment the low detail in geometry.

Snader

Can you give a wireframe and some texture sheets? Also some numbers: current polycount for the ship/crane/etcetera and how many textures you're using.

Right now it looks very empty with no vehicles, no containers, and using a lot of grey boxes gets boring pretty quick. Add some interesting shapes and some colour. And like MightyPea said, paint in lighting effects and trim and such. If you plan ahead carefully, you can get very far with very little - check out old games such as Unreal Tournament and HalfLife 1, or low end games like WoW.

red = actual geometry
blue = faked shapes with texturing

franman

Snader wrote: »

Can you give a wireframe and some texture sheets? Also some numbers: current polycount for the ship/crane/etcetera and how many textures you're using.

Sure, I'll start off with the crane.

Polys: 362
Tris: 804
Texture number: 32(way too much)

Rendered Shots



Textures
Unfortunately this site only supports up to 16 images so I have to give you a link to check them out instead.
http://s52.photobucket.com/albums/g12/franman007/Crane/Textures/
Be sure to check out page 2 as well.

Ged

I work on iphone games, not for gameloft but we have our own engine and I have to say if you want to be realistic you need to have a maximum of about 8 512x512 textures in any one scene. This is a rule of thumb but Id say its pretty close to what most games would use unless they are streaming in textures on the fly or using intense compression.

also if you want to mimic how this will look on the device use bilinear mip mapping and a screen res of 480x320. You may find that some of your textures turn into unidentifiable mess on the device even though they look clean and crisp when you look at them on your pc.

another rule of thumb if you want to support older devices eg 3G iphone then you may have to limit tris(not polys) to about 5000 per scene or less.

brandoom

Great info Ged,

can you give any insight on how to go about setting up " bilinear mip mapping and a screen res of 480x320" within 3dmax?

Would be much appreciated

xvampire

i found a good image to explain this.

basically , start with something like lego, or module.
and start with big but basic object first like wall, and floor.

unlike UDK for PS3/pc/360, T junction in Iphone is OK, because your polygon budget is limited.
(t junction)
however something like you will see frontal, like buildings. big pilars landmark,
you should make it as unique as possible.
if you see that module/lego pieces in first example you can see it has unique shape/color even without
high frequentcy detail ( bump or etc)
if the pixel allow you can add more small frequents details later on

try to work without ambient and shading, or try using white vertex color. good texture should be look good and stand out. even in flat shading.

this is a good example, http://www.armchairempire.com/images/previews/ps2/radiata-stories/radiata-stories-3.jpg
you dont have to do hand painted texture like this but, Im just want to mention that even in flat shading we can see the distinct overall details.

this modular technique has been used in industry in many generations

deepelements

fmnoor wrote: »

That doesn't look like 3500 triangles. Since it's a night/rain scene, you'd also want to go under for the reflection effect

what did you mean by go under for the reflections. Thats the only part of the test i don't get. Make the ground transparent? do you have and example of this or can you explain. I've always used materials for reflections.

thx in advance

LMP

oh hell, this thread is old...