Sins of a Solar Empire (intro and art dump)
polycounter lvl 14
Hello all! I'm a long time lurker here at PC so after all this time It's great to be able to show what I've been upto! Stardock officially released the intro for sins of a solar empire so now I can share it with you all. We outsourced the intro to freespacefilms. Who has done an amazing job of putting together the shots.
I was responsible for modeling and texturing the largest ships(6 titans) in the video as well as coordinating the assets for freespace.
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og0aMApQCfU"]Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion Trailer - YouTube[/ame]
Here's some zbrush BPRs and maya whatnots.. I'll post some more high rez and in game screen shots soon. Hope you all enjoy!
High Rez model for the Advent Rebel Titan:
and a few stills from the intro:
I was responsible for modeling and texturing the largest ships(6 titans) in the video as well as coordinating the assets for freespace.
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og0aMApQCfU"]Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion Trailer - YouTube[/ame]Here's some zbrush BPRs and maya whatnots.. I'll post some more high rez and in game screen shots soon. Hope you all enjoy!
High Rez model for the Advent Rebel Titan:
and a few stills from the intro:
Replies
Samcole: Thanks! We made some minor tweaks to the textures but I think the biggest improvement to the game is the shader changes. (I'm not a technical artist yet, but I'm working on it
EDIT: Here's an example of what the old shaders/lighting looked like:
Here's a pre rendered shot of one of the titans I did for the game (Getting the shaders setup for a marketing image).
We didn't have time to create separate assets so everything in the intro video is using the in-game models/textures.
Sure! I textured some of the ships in MARI so if anyone is interested in that workflow I'll for sure go into more detail on it.
Here's the wireframe for the game rez tech loyalist titan. I modeled the high rez and baked the normal map/amb occ using Xnormal and textured it in Photoshop.
The textures themselves are 2048x4096 ingame and we have 1 for diffuse with an alpha for team color, a "data map" where the red channel is the specular map, the green channel is self illumination and blue is a reflection map. The alpha of this image is used to control the bloom post process effect. And finally a 2 channel normal map(DXT5NM format.)
I was really happy I was able to use such large textures because it meant being able to put the small details in that make these ships feel really large.
I was using photoshop for the first few assets and it was taking way too long to finish these ships(the schedule laid out for me was very tight). Mostly because of the large texture size and the scale of the ships. We needed a lot of small details to sell the idea that these ships are huge. I was curios about mari and at the time hadn't heard much about 3d coat.
So I downloaded the free trial of mari. I went from texturing taking a full work week or more to wrapping up an entire titan (4k x 2k textures) in 3 days (while learning the software on the first day) the brush engine is very similiar to photoshop and its easy to learn. I love the fact that I can be editing each new projection as if it were a layer in photoshop.
The only downside is that mari does not support overlapping uvs in any way. However this is easily overcome with a similiar workflow to baking normal maps on symmetrical overlapping uvs. Just offset your reversed uvs 1 unit in U or V. This will cause mari to treat it as 2 seperate images that you are baking to. I made a suggestion to the foundry to allow the same image on two seperate uv tiles. They added the feature as of v1.4v3 which is really exciting. So now it will update properly if you source 1 image for 2 uv tiles.
Mari is super user friendly and I really enjoy the projection workflow. It gives you so much flexibility. I can paint a dirt texture and bake it down several times across the model to get a weathered look very quickly. The masking tools in MARI are great as well.
It's one of those programs that just lets you do what you need to do and doesn't get in your way very often.
While the benefit of mari is most certainly geared towards high resolution assets, I'm about to test it out to see how well it does with a painterly style on a low polygon model.
I'll post some images of the assets in mari soon.
Heres a few new images. First up is the Vasari Loyalist Titan in mari.
Shaded(with specular):
Pure Diffuse:
Close up Shaded(with specular):
You can also paint on the flats at any point. I love having instant access to the flats in my 3d painting app. Sometimes things can be hard to get to in 3D and you can swap right into 2D at any time. I use this primarily for selection of uv islands(for masking purposes).
Next up is the Vasari Rebel Titan.
This was the first model I textured in Mari. I had a lot of fun with this one so here's a closeup:
So Mari hates any kind of overlapping UVs. It literally will not project anything at all if you try to paint onto overlapping uvs. At first I just made sure to only import the faces/objects that didn't have any overlapping UVs. Later I made adjustments to my workflow. To get around this issue I selected all the mirrored uvs and offset them by 1 unit in U.
I added the glowing lights later in photoshop for this model. Later I figured out a shader setup in MARI that lets me paint masks for lights so I can see it all on the model. Here's a couple shots of the final textures in maya.
Here's the tech rebel titan.
At this point MARI still didn't have the link selected patches feature so it was easier to just bring in a 4th of the model.
Here's a mental ray render I did as I setup the shaders for marketing material and such. Everything was almost plug and play with the mia material X shader. Which I loved. It's also super easy to paint a gloss map because of the WYSIWYG workflow.
Sorry for dumping all the huge images. Hopefully you guys will find it somewhat interesting. :P
Thank you for sharing your Mari approach.
To the wiki you go:)
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryReferenceGameArt#Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire_.282012.29
I am honored! So many talented artists on that page. I feel so small among the giants of our industry
Oh, I was going to post these yesterday but forgot to upload the images.
This one is my favorite titan out of all of them. It was really fun making a mech-like spaceship.
and last but not least, here's the Advent Rebel Titan. I loved modeling the high rez for this guy, there were so many interesting shapes to play with. Also, if you look on the left of the image you can see the list of mask types available. These are extremely useful and allow you to get in and get out very quickly when dropping down a base texture.
Since mari has all the sweet blend modes of photoshop, you can create seperate image files (called channels) and layer them together just like you would in photoshop. So I was able to paint some extra panel lines for use with nDo.