Keep in mind this art test was spec'ed for the older i phones like I phone Gen 1g, 2g
If this art test was speced for 4g you could've done WAY bigger Textures and double the Tris.
But its always good practice to work with a tight budget.
not sure the texture sheet could be much bigger actually, 1 2048x2048 seems to be the max people like to use on iphone 4 / ipad as a rule of thumb. Id like to see this same level without the fancy shaders and tons of rain for a true representation of mobile gaming but that just me cause I make iphone games at work.
its not a problem on the unity or udk side, opengl es 2.0 performance on most devices is still pretty crapy, so the majority is still doing stuff with fixed function pipelines...
you cheated a bit with the tricount as the rain particles look pretty dense
shaders are really nice, but i guess of marginal production value for said reason.
but hey who cares, it looks nice and that counts
thats interesting, I thought opengl es2.0 worked really well on iphone 4, admittedly es1 definitely runs better on 3gs and other old devices.
Wow, thank you very much guys, I'm blown away:)
First and foremost a little something I'm sorry I didn't make clear earlier. The scene is "supposed" to be for mobile platforms but it's not actually running on UDK mobile. With some minor simplifications I think I could make it run on Mobile but with the price of extra triangles and those were really the bottleneck here.
Concerning the shaders - it was more of an example since I'm not sure gameloft uses Unreal for all of their games. If not made in the shader editor I still could write an HLSL version on my own, that could potentially be implemented somewhere, Not sure about the specifics, though. But this is something I'm still going to give a try just as an HLSL exercise and to see if I can make it work at least in 3ds Max.
dpaynter26, thank you, man!
Hey, Johnathan, thank you very much! love your stuff
Huge thanks, Chris. I'm glad you dig the video:)
Thanks, Joshflighter, I'm happy some people actually do find it funny.)
Thanks,haiddasalami!
Thank you megalmn2000, you even wrote my name in bold font!) bugo, it totally is aaaaand thank you
Hey, Vailias, thank you once again, man!
Thanks, Sparkwire. Agreed, it could be faster.
Cheers, chrisradsby, you're totally right. The rain planes actually end with the pier. My bad:) and thank you! Anuxinamoon, thank you very much
Yo, rasmus, thanks, man! So when's Trico coming?)
Thanks,Spacey. Yeah, "silly" is my middle name.)
Valid point,odium. But on the other hand it would be unfair on the crazy creative scientists behind those technical innovations to be out of jobs, just because some artists are lazy.
Thank you,StefanH. I hope so)
Thanks, seth., I appreciate. Mask_Salesman, oh noes! You just game the MGS2 itch. Must not play, have to work, must not play...:D
Thanks, Talon Lazerus Reborn, thanks man! The more I work, though, the more it seems that it's not the amount of resources that makes stuff look good.
Thank you, dang87
You're very welcome, eyo sanketpro3d, huge thanks, man
Thanks, r_fletch_r Jenn0_Bing, thanks, I appreciate the kind words.
Thanks, zortech. I'm not really sure how to check it up in UDK but If I was to suppose I think it'd be around 15.
Thank you, nalwayv
You're totally right here, DLoud, I'm sorry I didn't mention it earlier.
Thanks, Jackablade. And, yeah, I've seen the thread. And this is something I will definitely have to hear explanations for if I get to the interview phase.
Thank you, Ged. Yeah, soon hopefully:)
Good luck, Gannon
Thanks, disanski I'm glad you like it
Hey, kio, thanks, man. I didn't mean to cheat here - the rain is not actually particles but just 9 planes with panning materials placed around the scene. You can actually see them intersect with the ground since depth biased alpha seems to not function with transparent objects(which kinda makes sense). But yes I've left the particles out of the tri count, cause they were sort of an additional thing in the test guidelines. The only particles in the scene are the lightning(2 tris) and the ground splashes(around 100 tris) that ideally should be attached to the camera, but me being lazy I just put a whole bunch of them there.:D
Thank You, Minotaur0, and you're most welcome!
Thanks,Andreas. I'm sorry, I'm not really strong with fonts.
Thanks, Szark sergeimoroz, yeah it's an art test for Gameloft made with UDK.
Thank you, Madison! I'm sorry I haven't gotten to the PM yet, but I will very soon.
Thanks, shrew81! metalliandy, thank you, man
Thank you, chrisavigni
I'm glad you dig the video, fmnoor. I've put a lot of work into it.)
Thankus, Clintus Maximus
Thank you, Lucra. Yeah, sorry about that. Mohamed Rotab, thank you. Yeah, half a tank I used to make at my last studio job.:D DeeKei, right you are! hobodactyl, thank you very much man! We'll have to see how things will work out, but would be totally cool to meet you in person!:)
Huge thanks, jeffro!) AndyLittleton,it is a good practice man.) And yeah those phones are catching up with the consoles stunningly fast. Thank you! Lachtan, thank you very much. I appreciate the kind words
And a very special thanks to Vig, for putting this on the news! This was, like, the best thing ever:D Thank you, man
awesome work man, the guys at Gameloft should drop their jaws as I think it is the best test ever made...
I'll check out your shader stuff in more detail this weekend - so far it looks very intriguing and I got curious
Good luck with that!
P.S. : love the sinking ship... it just lacking giant full metal killer shark eating it
not sure the texture sheet could be much bigger actually, 1 2048x2048 seems to be the max people like to use on iphone 4 / ipad as a rule of thumb. Id like to see this same level without the fancy shaders and tons of rain for a true representation of mobile gaming but that just me cause I make iphone games at work.
thats interesting, I thought opengl es2.0 worked really well on iphone 4, admittedly es1 definitely runs better on 3gs and other old devices.
I don't mean to bust your bubbles but I used to work for gameloft and made published games for I phone. So i dont' mind his use of fancy shaders as these are quite common in 3g+4g phone since its opengl es 2.0. But ya thats just me cuz I too used to make i phone games at work. LOL
Its not uncommon for us to use 10+ 512x512 textures per environment for the 3g+4g phones . The art test was just for 1 single 512x512 for the whole environment. The 3g+4g i phone does have a lot of v ram 30-60 megs worth. You can stuff quite a lot into it.
D1ver! Awesome stuff again man. If for some crazy reason you don't get the job, seriously find a programmer and make ur own i phone game. Your that good!
I don't mean to bust your bubbles but I used to work for gameloft and made published games for I phone. So i dont' mind his use of fancy shaders as these are quite common in 3g+4g phone since its opengl es 2.0. But ya thats just me cuz I too used to make i phone games at work. LOL
Its not uncommon for us to use 10+ 512x512 textures per environment for the 3g+4g phones . The art test was just for 1 single 512x512 for the whole environment. The 3g+4g i phone does have a lot of v ram 30-60 megs worth. You can stuff quite a lot into it.
D1ver! Awesome stuff again man. If for some crazy reason you don't get the job, seriously find a programmer and make ur own i phone game. Your that good!
Agreed, did that too, there is a lot of ram, just enought for 10-15 textures some of which we had even at 1024 res... And that was even with 3g-3gs.
Well, on the other hand simple vertex color blend/multiply etc is not a heavy shader. Simple alpha (masked 1 bit alpha) is heavier than simple vertex color blend nowadays.
So imo that stuff would fit even with shaders;)
Just wanted to drop a little thank you to everyone else that's commented, just because I appreciate it so much.
Ciaralli, thank you, man.
Hey, Vlad, thank You, buddy, if it wasn't for you I probably wouldn't have gotten to it. An yeah I've been also getting a request for an alien spaceship to blast it in the end so the list keeps expanding.))) maybe next time Rhoutermans, your welcome, man. I hope it comes useful.
And huge thanks to you, Andy, I appreciate your kind words very much.
...Id like to see this same level without the fancy shaders and tons of rain for a true representation of mobile gaming but that just me cause I make iphone games at work.
Hey, man, I don't really think that the shaders have anything to do with the "look" of the level since they are obviously more of a memory preservation kind and rain could be done even with current versions of UDK. But nevertheless here's the rainless version:
I don't know if that will be useful to anybody but I'll try to explain why, in my opinion, the scene "works":
- Atmosphere of a rainy-rainy full moon night was chosen early on and was something most of the further decisions were based off.
- Color palette chosen from the start to reinforce the mood.
- Lighting, fog, sky and rain fx(planes with panning materials) made first(in accordance with color palette) to set the mood.
- Color contrast - the brightest spot on the picture is generally the yellow city in the background. Blue and yellow are you textbook combination of moody colors.
- Background city - it's always good to have a background in an open environment to sell the "vastness" of the space.
- Wide spec, Fog, Emissive + Bloom to sell the humidity of the environment and once again reinforce the initial atmosphere. Plus everyone loves Bloom no matter how cliche.
- Rain - a lot of small noisy details add the complexity that the scene really lacks due to the hardware limitations.
- Reflection - the thing that gives the environment the next gen feel is the distorted reflection. Which is actually nothing more than a transparent floor with reflection geometry underneath and a transparent distortion plane. Yes UDK mobile doesn't support distortion atm but they had it in games as old as GTA:SA so I'm confident it could be done on handhelds now. As far as I can see it's "take the last frame from the frame buffer->move the pixel around according to incoming distortion map values", so I'd even try to write it on my own if needed.
You can also notice that there's some rain flowing down the surfaces that is done in the shader but that doesn't mean you can't make a transparent panning mat and place it wherever you want, or you can live perfectly well without it.
So, anyway, I hope this was useful and thank you everyone once again.
Damn, awesome environment man, congrats on making the front page! Thanks a lot for the technical insight! Also, I haven't read all the pages but I read somewhere you were trying to get a gig with this piece so if it's true, I really hope you get it, you sure deserve it.
This might be a stupid/redundant question: How do you create a 512 light map for the entire scene?
All I could think of was doing a batch bake on each object, but that would bake the lighting to it's uv space and would prohibit you from using any repeatable textures, and each object would need to have its own space for the lighting to work.
Hey Jonathon,
Not at all. The point is, that UDK combines lightmaps into least sheets possible, to effectively render it in a single pass. So by 512 I mean that every object's light map was done in a usual way but the combination of all their resolutions didn't exceed 512 square.
Hope it helped.
Cheers.
Good luck using any one of those shaders on opengls2, reflecting your scene is basically doubling the triangle count. Get this running on UDK mobile then we'll talk
Hey Hawken-san, fofna is pretty much correct. The reflections are mesh that is seen through transparent floor and it is accounted for in the overall tri count. There's a distortion plane on the ground that makes the reflection look, well...distorted! And I particularly asked the gameloft guys if they had the distortion shader in their engine and they do. So pretty much everything that is in the scene is very doable on ES2.
I kinda regret already not doing it straight on UDK mobile, but I really wanted to fiddle around with some shader ideas and UDK mobile is greatly restrictive on that one.
That does help a bit, but where i'm lost is slightly different. When you layout an object to use a repeatable texture you could do it a couple of ways. Keep the object's uv's within the 0-1 space and then have the texture be repeated in the shader node. Or you have the uv's extand past the 0-1 space to achieve the desired amounts of repeats -- usually I see it done this way. However if I were to have uv's outside the 0-1 space for texture repetition and then go and batch bake a light map, the light map will only be able to bake to what was in the 0-1 space.
So:
How are you laying out your UV's to use repeatable textures?
How are you creating the light maps?
Thanks, Snader. You're totally right and it's something I'll have to pay more attention too in future.
It's a shame though, that it seems no one was actually interested enough to find out what callipygian means and I spent so much time looking for a prefect word.:D
Replies
not sure the texture sheet could be much bigger actually, 1 2048x2048 seems to be the max people like to use on iphone 4 / ipad as a rule of thumb. Id like to see this same level without the fancy shaders and tons of rain for a true representation of mobile gaming but that just me cause I make iphone games at work.
thats interesting, I thought opengl es2.0 worked really well on iphone 4, admittedly es1 definitely runs better on 3gs and other old devices.
First and foremost a little something I'm sorry I didn't make clear earlier. The scene is "supposed" to be for mobile platforms but it's not actually running on UDK mobile. With some minor simplifications I think I could make it run on Mobile but with the price of extra triangles and those were really the bottleneck here.
Concerning the shaders - it was more of an example since I'm not sure gameloft uses Unreal for all of their games. If not made in the shader editor I still could write an HLSL version on my own, that could potentially be implemented somewhere, Not sure about the specifics, though. But this is something I'm still going to give a try just as an HLSL exercise and to see if I can make it work at least in 3ds Max.
dpaynter26, thank you, man!
Hey, Johnathan, thank you very much! love your stuff
Huge thanks, Chris. I'm glad you dig the video:)
Thanks, Joshflighter, I'm happy some people actually do find it funny.)
Thanks,haiddasalami!
Thank you megalmn2000, you even wrote my name in bold font!)
bugo, it totally is aaaaand thank you
Hey, Vailias, thank you once again, man!
Thanks, Sparkwire. Agreed, it could be faster.
Cheers, chrisradsby, you're totally right. The rain planes actually end with the pier. My bad:) and thank you!
Anuxinamoon, thank you very much
Yo, rasmus, thanks, man! So when's Trico coming?)
Thanks,Spacey. Yeah, "silly" is my middle name.)
Valid point,odium. But on the other hand it would be unfair on the crazy creative scientists behind those technical innovations to be out of jobs, just because some artists are lazy.
Thank you,StefanH. I hope so)
Thanks, seth., I appreciate.
Mask_Salesman, oh noes! You just game the MGS2 itch. Must not play, have to work, must not play...:D
Thanks, Talon
Lazerus Reborn, thanks man! The more I work, though, the more it seems that it's not the amount of resources that makes stuff look good.
Thank you, dang87
You're very welcome, eyo
sanketpro3d, huge thanks, man
Thanks, r_fletch_r
Jenn0_Bing, thanks, I appreciate the kind words.
Thanks, zortech. I'm not really sure how to check it up in UDK but If I was to suppose I think it'd be around 15.
Thank you, nalwayv
You're totally right here, DLoud, I'm sorry I didn't mention it earlier.
Thanks, Jackablade. And, yeah, I've seen the thread. And this is something I will definitely have to hear explanations for if I get to the interview phase.
Thank you, Ged. Yeah, soon hopefully:)
Good luck, Gannon
Thanks, disanski I'm glad you like it
Hey, kio, thanks, man. I didn't mean to cheat here - the rain is not actually particles but just 9 planes with panning materials placed around the scene. You can actually see them intersect with the ground since depth biased alpha seems to not function with transparent objects(which kinda makes sense). But yes I've left the particles out of the tri count, cause they were sort of an additional thing in the test guidelines. The only particles in the scene are the lightning(2 tris) and the ground splashes(around 100 tris) that ideally should be attached to the camera, but me being lazy I just put a whole bunch of them there.:D
Thank You, Minotaur0, and you're most welcome!
Thanks,Andreas. I'm sorry, I'm not really strong with fonts.
Thanks, Szark
sergeimoroz, yeah it's an art test for Gameloft made with UDK.
Thank you, Madison! I'm sorry I haven't gotten to the PM yet, but I will very soon.
Thanks, shrew81!
metalliandy, thank you, man
Thank you, chrisavigni
I'm glad you dig the video, fmnoor. I've put a lot of work into it.)
Thankus, Clintus Maximus
Thank you, Lucra. Yeah, sorry about that.
Mohamed Rotab, thank you. Yeah, half a tank I used to make at my last studio job.:D
DeeKei, right you are!
hobodactyl, thank you very much man! We'll have to see how things will work out, but would be totally cool to meet you in person!:)
Huge thanks, jeffro!)
AndyLittleton,it is a good practice man.) And yeah those phones are catching up with the consoles stunningly fast. Thank you!
Lachtan, thank you very much. I appreciate the kind words
And a very special thanks to Vig, for putting this on the news! This was, like, the best thing ever:D Thank you, man
I'll check out your shader stuff in more detail this weekend - so far it looks very intriguing and I got curious
Good luck with that!
P.S. : love the sinking ship... it just lacking giant full metal killer shark eating it
I don't mean to bust your bubbles but I used to work for gameloft and made published games for I phone. So i dont' mind his use of fancy shaders as these are quite common in 3g+4g phone since its opengl es 2.0. But ya thats just me cuz I too used to make i phone games at work. LOL
Its not uncommon for us to use 10+ 512x512 textures per environment for the 3g+4g phones . The art test was just for 1 single 512x512 for the whole environment. The 3g+4g i phone does have a lot of v ram 30-60 megs worth. You can stuff quite a lot into it.
D1ver! Awesome stuff again man. If for some crazy reason you don't get the job, seriously find a programmer and make ur own i phone game. Your that good!
Agreed, did that too, there is a lot of ram, just enought for 10-15 textures some of which we had even at 1024 res... And that was even with 3g-3gs.
Well, on the other hand simple vertex color blend/multiply etc is not a heavy shader. Simple alpha (masked 1 bit alpha) is heavier than simple vertex color blend nowadays.
So imo that stuff would fit even with shaders;)
Ciaralli, thank you, man.
Hey, Vlad, thank You, buddy, if it wasn't for you I probably wouldn't have gotten to it. An yeah I've been also getting a request for an alien spaceship to blast it in the end so the list keeps expanding.))) maybe next time
Rhoutermans, your welcome, man. I hope it comes useful.
And huge thanks to you, Andy, I appreciate your kind words very much.
Hey, man, I don't really think that the shaders have anything to do with the "look" of the level since they are obviously more of a memory preservation kind and rain could be done even with current versions of UDK. But nevertheless here's the rainless version:
I don't know if that will be useful to anybody but I'll try to explain why, in my opinion, the scene "works":
- Atmosphere of a rainy-rainy full moon night was chosen early on and was something most of the further decisions were based off.
- Color palette chosen from the start to reinforce the mood.
- Lighting, fog, sky and rain fx(planes with panning materials) made first(in accordance with color palette) to set the mood.
- Color contrast - the brightest spot on the picture is generally the yellow city in the background. Blue and yellow are you textbook combination of moody colors.
- Background city - it's always good to have a background in an open environment to sell the "vastness" of the space.
- Wide spec, Fog, Emissive + Bloom to sell the humidity of the environment and once again reinforce the initial atmosphere. Plus everyone loves Bloom no matter how cliche.
- Rain - a lot of small noisy details add the complexity that the scene really lacks due to the hardware limitations.
- Reflection - the thing that gives the environment the next gen feel is the distorted reflection. Which is actually nothing more than a transparent floor with reflection geometry underneath and a transparent distortion plane. Yes UDK mobile doesn't support distortion atm but they had it in games as old as GTA:SA so I'm confident it could be done on handhelds now. As far as I can see it's "take the last frame from the frame buffer->move the pixel around according to incoming distortion map values", so I'd even try to write it on my own if needed.
You can also notice that there's some rain flowing down the surfaces that is done in the shader but that doesn't mean you can't make a transparent panning mat and place it wherever you want, or you can live perfectly well without it.
So, anyway, I hope this was useful and thank you everyone once again.
cheers.
Hey,EmAr, thanks man. I hope it's been useful.
This might be a stupid/redundant question: How do you create a 512 light map for the entire scene?
All I could think of was doing a batch bake on each object, but that would bake the lighting to it's uv space and would prohibit you from using any repeatable textures, and each object would need to have its own space for the lighting to work.
Thank you
Not at all. The point is, that UDK combines lightmaps into least sheets possible, to effectively render it in a single pass. So by 512 I mean that every object's light map was done in a usual way but the combination of all their resolutions didn't exceed 512 square.
Hope it helped.
Cheers.
Good luck using any one of those shaders on opengls2, reflecting your scene is basically doubling the triangle count. Get this running on UDK mobile then we'll talk
I kinda regret already not doing it straight on UDK mobile, but I really wanted to fiddle around with some shader ideas and UDK mobile is greatly restrictive on that one.
Thanks for your comment anyway, mate.
That does help a bit, but where i'm lost is slightly different. When you layout an object to use a repeatable texture you could do it a couple of ways. Keep the object's uv's within the 0-1 space and then have the texture be repeated in the shader node. Or you have the uv's extand past the 0-1 space to achieve the desired amounts of repeats -- usually I see it done this way. However if I were to have uv's outside the 0-1 space for texture repetition and then go and batch bake a light map, the light map will only be able to bake to what was in the 0-1 space.
So:
How are you laying out your UV's to use repeatable textures?
How are you creating the light maps?
thank you!
these might help:
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LightMapUnwrapping.html
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LightingReference.html#Lightmaps
Unreal engine bakes lightmaps when calculating lighting and you use a separate UV coordinate index for unique lightmap unwrapping.
http://www.dafont.com/tosca-zero.font?text=Callipygian
http://www.dafont.com/28-days-later.font?text=Callipygian
http://www.dafont.com/promises-broken-dream.font?text=Callipygian
http://www.dafont.com/smash-punkers.font?text=Callipygian
Obviously these are a bit too distressed but it gives an idea of what I mean.
It's a shame though, that it seems no one was actually interested enough to find out what callipygian means and I spent so much time looking for a prefect word.:D
The M.V. D4T-A55
Thank you very much, SCB! I'm glad you like