[UDK] Normandy SR2 Retrofitting facility
polycounter lvl 5
Hi, I'm a long time lurker and first time poster on these forums.
I currently study video game art production in the Netherlands
I'm working on a small UDK level based on a location we don't get to see in the game Mass Effect 3.
Between Mass Effect 2 and 3 the Normandy SR2 has been retrofitted with new technology and repainted in Aliance Colors. I figure this has been done in a facility on earth close to where the game starts (given it takes Ashley and James about 10 minutes to reach the ship from the commity chamber)
I want to make that facility as it was just before the game starts.
I will be using Alliance and Cerberus environments as the primary inspiration for the architecture. Although some vague concept art for this facility has been released by Bioware, I am not using that as a basis for this project.
For this project I will be using.
-Maya 2012
-Photoshop
-Mudbox 2012
-UDK
What I have so far:
Quick mental ray render of the Normandy (I appologize for the simple physical sun renders)
N7 Valkyrie Assault rifle prop
First UDK test (Normandy is 216 meters/708 feet long)
This is my first serious project with the UDK so I am not as familiar with the engine as I should be for a project this size so any critique's and tips are very welcome in all regards.
I currently study video game art production in the Netherlands
I'm working on a small UDK level based on a location we don't get to see in the game Mass Effect 3.
Between Mass Effect 2 and 3 the Normandy SR2 has been retrofitted with new technology and repainted in Aliance Colors. I figure this has been done in a facility on earth close to where the game starts (given it takes Ashley and James about 10 minutes to reach the ship from the commity chamber)
I want to make that facility as it was just before the game starts.
I will be using Alliance and Cerberus environments as the primary inspiration for the architecture. Although some vague concept art for this facility has been released by Bioware, I am not using that as a basis for this project.
For this project I will be using.
-Maya 2012
-Photoshop
-Mudbox 2012
-UDK
What I have so far:
Quick mental ray render of the Normandy (I appologize for the simple physical sun renders)
N7 Valkyrie Assault rifle prop
First UDK test (Normandy is 216 meters/708 feet long)
This is my first serious project with the UDK so I am not as familiar with the engine as I should be for a project this size so any critique's and tips are very welcome in all regards.
Replies
Total polycount is 82756 with some room for optimization.
The gun is the first person model which I will trim down depending on what animation I add to it. I'll also use it for normal maps to use on the prop version.
anyway thats what i was planning so if thats not a good idea please let me know.
Compared to what?
It's 200 meters of environment art center-piece. The way it's constructed lends itself very nicely to texturing with a bunch of tiles and a trim sheet.
He really ought to build out the rest of the environment before he starts optimizing stuff further. He can remove a lot of the top of it if he's only going to be walking around on catwalks below/to the side, etc.
But just because that number sounds big doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. Every detail he's put in there seems very justifiable to me given his scope and the functionality he's looking for.
Considering your average level is pushing the upper 100-200 even 500K polies in a scene to make ends meet in todays games (most of Unreal's scenes were averaging 200K per frame) I don't see 80K as being too much.
Also, baking such a piece, without some heavy amount of tiling here and there, with some pieces being just 'solid' colors in certain areas, and just generally all around sacrifice at only looking at the ship from a distance, I don't see this piece keeping it's current nice looks without having to push between 2K and 4K textures.
It's all about what you want at this point, you can either do industry standard practices (where you only keep the silhouette of the ship mostly and tile the hell out of it to make it look acceptable in close ups) or you do what you're doing currently (pushing out large chunks, with each chunk heaving it's own material/textures, etc).
Both are perfectly valid for different reasons.
and still keep it playable at a decent frame rate.
my current machine
Intel 2600k I7 "sandy bridge"
16GB ddr3 Ram 1333hz
Nvidia GTX 570
Nvidia GTX 560 Ti
The Normandy model in the game has alot of visual trickery that holds up very poorly when you get close to it. (hence why you dont get close to it ingame)
And I'm adding alot of detail that isnt in the game model but you can still extrapolate from the textures and normal maps they used.
overall I can still shave quite a bit of polies from the ship without losing the siloutte and close up detail, and i'll probably do that in the interest of optimization but from what I can tell the most I can take out is between 5k-10k before some parts start to become noticable.
Even on today's console hardware, 80k in the environment isn't a ballbreaker. Raw triangle count is only a fraction of things that need to be optimized.
If your goal is to aim for PC specs in UDK, that's even better, since that's going to help you get a job as people are starting to ramp up for next-gen consoles right now.
this image should give you an indication of the scale of the ship
i'm going to block out the level tommorow
We have videos of the area posted on my portfolio site. They may be relevant for you with regards to how we handled certain things. Notably, we are only students with limited experiences ourselves (plus we had like 3 other projects we were working on at the time).
I do believe you can make something better than what we put together, because that Normandy is a really slick piece of work.
This project is just me by myself. not to mention I have very little experience with the UDK. so wether or not it will look better than what you made remains to be seen, although i will give it my all.
Its been a while since I worked on this, I had to deal with some life issue's wich are now fortunatly resolved.
I have started on the bay on which the cockpit rests.
I wanted people to get real close to the cockpit and walk around it.
But most of the dock designs from the games dont allow you to do that, probably to maintain the illusion that the ship is bigger than the ingame model they provided. But since this project is designed around showcasing the Normandy, that isnt an option.
all images rendered in maya with mental ray.
Critique canons take aim.
if your talking next gen...from what i know NO, expect hardware tessellation and a load of fancy shader lighting, but NOT hugely different poly budgets, i would stick to near high end current-gen poly budgets.
and next-gen AA will still be an issue...and those floors will cause poly crawling....use a normal map
And I will transfer most of this geometry to normal maps where appropriate once I start exporting it all to UDK. Right now the important thing is that i get a general design done for the level and I work faster in Maya.
The Normandy itself is already 3 seperate pieces. Because UDK cant handle Models higher than 60K but in total it's 77904 polies. and it will probably go down a little bit further soon, because I want to re-do the windows along the hull. I recently saw someone else's interpretation on the ship where those windows were sunk unto the hull instead of sticking out. I liked his solution much better than mine.
Also what exactly do you mean by poly crawling? I havent heard the term before.
Expect another update later today.
just because you can doesnt mean you should and most if not all current-gen engines can throw around 80k tris like its nothing...my point is ALOT of that is wasted, will look better and can be produced faster if textured
poly crawling is when you get less than 1 pixel thick polygon lines as the viewing angle changes and these are diagonal across the screen the engine will struggle to anti alias (FXAA especially but MSAA will struggle too) and the single pixel thick lines "crawl" along the diagonal as the viewing angle changes. the more of these you have, particularly with parallel lines and acute viewing angle like floors, the more it breaks up the image and reduces quality.
using texture maps means you get filtering.
I started to spread the walkways around the ship quite a bit. I still need something believeable to hang them from though, but I also want something like a giant celing crane. So i'll have to get creative with my solution for that one.
I've been looking at real airplane assembly plants for inspiration and saw a picture of a half built boeing with the tail completly built in with scafolding, hence the second image.
I'm now looking into a better way to transition between the 45 degree walls and the celing, the transition is a little too abrupt for this style of architecture compared to the games.
New main door based on mass effect 1 concept art.
I've been asked by several people why i havent shown many UDK pics yet.
Wel I also need to render the scene in maya for a class, so I'm trying to kill 2 birds with 1 stone.
Also several of these props will need to have their polycounts reduced and normal maps created.
Are you instancing the high poly around for class? That is just an extremely inefficient way of doing it if you were producing it for a game.
although if you have a suggestion for a more efficient working method I'm all ears, or eyes
I'm also changing the walkway floors to be more of a metal grate.
it'll save a few polygons when everything gets ported to UDK and it looks better IMO.
Placing and moving around hundreds of tiles and objects and millions of polys in the viewport can be an exhaustive and unnecessary effort. It would be best to block out your scene to get a sense of scale and composition, using assets that are not as dense as your high poly models. I would then recommend creating an object, then baking it to a low poly, then placing that low poly around. That way you won't have to do the work twice and you won't have to deal with placing tons of high poly objects around and battle frame rate / asset management issues.
Blockout. Make object, bake, place. Make object, bake, place. Etc.
Just my 2c :]
Thanks for the input though. i'll look into it.
yes, the assignment for the unreal part requires at least a partialy textured scene, and the maya render requires only the visible parts to be textured.
that said i intend to texture everything. most of it is just repeated geometry so it shouldnt be that big of a problem.
And celing struts based on mass effect 3 concept art for Mars.
so now i'm back to work and here's a new update
nearly done with the building itself, gonna start texturing either tommorow or the day after.
I've started assembling everyting in UDK.
Lighting is still preview quality, and so is the actual light placement.
No textures yet. (this part of the assignment doesnt require them yet)
I am still fairly new to UDK so any critique's you might have are more than welcome.
holy crap, subscribing to this thread. Wow.
I just need to add some lifts and other means to get up to the walkways and do something with that giant empty space underneath the Normandy,
I'm considering a fuel tank or a series of cranes or mechanical arms there. but i'm open to idea's and critique.
also the normandy in these pictures is not the final version. it still needs quite a bit more TLC.
Crits and comments are much appriciated.