How would you? - The Wall!

searlee

Hi guys,

I'm currently in the process of creating Castle Black from HBO's Game of Thrones, I'm wondering how you'd go about creating the wall? I've tried so many different things so far and at the moment it's a technical nightmare for me. I've tried creating one large object (which failed miserably). Creating a smaller object and repeating it just ended up sapping away at my FPS even when I LOD'd it. Any help would be much appreciated. for those that don't know what the wall is, I've enclosed both a picture of my early castle black (zoomed right out) and a picture from the Television Series. (mine looks nothing like it from this distance, pictures are just to give you an idea of the scale)





Thanks in advance,

Paul

ambershee

Rotated landscape? I don't see why you couldn't use modular meshes to handle it, so long as they have suitably aggressive LODs.

Oniram

haha cool. i just started gathering references a couple days ago to make this.

here's how im gonna be going about it. i have a general "front" ref of the wall that i can use as a base to sculpt the ice/stone (whatever it is.. link at the bottom). making a tileable texture from that sculpt, ill then build off of it in a similar way mentioned here

http://philipk.net/tutorials/modular_rocks/modular_rocks.html

just building off the major shapes from the normal map, ill get pretty detailed where the "player" can get up close. essentially right in front of the training area/elevator.

now because the texture is tileable, the mesh should be too. so using this method..

http://wiki.polycount.com/TilingRockWallBeyer

you can build the wall out of a tileable mesh. now here's the part that changes everything. you said building modularly sapped at FPS, well you can still do that, but, lets say tiling left and right.. every so many meshes.. you reduce the number of tris.. until eventually you have a flat plane out in the distance. here's a diagram of what i mean.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13680846/TheWall.jpg

so now this could all be assembled together in max (or preffered software), and if your FPS still suffers, then make an LOD for it (you could just do a procedural one) and see how that works.


this method btw comes from Dreamworks, on their first go at one of the scenes in Kung Fu Panda. while it is different that one is realtime and one is rendered, the concept is still the same.


here is the image im using as a reference for the wall. its from the behind the scenes of the show.

sprunghunt

I would use the massive LOD system for this

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MassiveLOD.html

and have some really big meshes that get replaced by multiple smaller meshes as you get closer.

unless it's always going to be in the background. In which case a huge mesh alone would be fine.

searlee

Oh my,

thank you very much, just from the ideas in this thread I've already got some good things that I can do. The rotated landscape might work best because I can stick that into world-machine and get some realistic looking erosion on it too.

That rock tutorial is really useful Oniram thanks, I'll be using that for sure.

That massive LOD system seems like it will work a lot better than what I have in there at the moment anyway.

Either way, Thanks again

That was really helpful!

Paul