Home Digital Sketchbooks

Sketchbook: Rick16bit - Tower22

Hey there,

We thought, let's start showing some stuff from our game, Tower22, here on Polycount. The shots will vary from 3D WIP, concept drawings, finished images or well, whatever may look interesting.

Tower22 is a horror game that takes place in an isolated skyscraper, like you would see in former Soviet cities. Though the building content isn't restricted to this style, as the game actually has not much to do with Russia or communism. You start your new job as a caretaker in this gigantic building, but very soon you will find out this not an ordinary place. For one thing, where are all the other inhabitants? And... where is the exit?


As for the technology behind these renders, Tower22 uses its own engine, programmed in-house. So, one of the challenges is to keep up with modern technologies such as realtime G.I., volumetric effects, correct reflections, or SSS. Though in the end, the real difference between a good or bad athmosphere is the result of the design and the artist talents of course ;)

Well, for a start, I just picked some random (older) shots. We hope you enjoy them!

Web:
Website / pics / movies
development blog

Target platform: PC
Genre: Horror survival
Project started: January 2010
Engine: Engine22 (using OpenGL, Cg, Newton physics, FMOD sound)
Software used: Delphi7 (programming), Maya, Max, Lightwave, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Blender, & more


2010 meathook corridor (in game)
x2q8ls.jpg
Concept clay model
21npkyx.jpg
2011 Barracks (in game)
16az1hu.jpg
2011 Stairs (in game)
2j5hwmu.jpg

Replies

  • Rick16bit
    The monster being used in the 2011 movie. To fill the empty space, which was initially just made as a technical showcase, we added a monster in the final phase. It started with a simple sketch (warning, programmer art):

    2hi8chu.jpg


    And here, Robert made a first Maya version of it. And the lower poly LOD's (the engine toggles to lower poly model versions as the camera distance increases).
    34j3f36.jpg
    zsjfp.jpg


    Just a stationary blob. obviously, there was some work to do to spice up this scene. The first version still looked like a rubber potato, so we had to play a bit with the textures, and mainly the specular sharpness to get a dirty wet look.
    ff0oqf.jpg

    aongoj.jpg


    The model doesn’t use very special shaders or anything, just Lambert(diffuse) + Blinn(specular), and a bit of rim lighting.
  • Rick16bit
    “Radar Blob” monster part #2.
    Asides from the monster, also the environment had to transform from a boring concrete monster to something more... alive. The idea was to connect the monster with the environment somehow.

    5b1n5.jpg

    Again, sorry for the programmer MS Paint drawings hehe. Anyway, since the surrounding area was covered with ice (the whole demo takes place in a frozen radar station), the idea was to freeze the monster partially, and put nitro-tanks with a leaking hose next to the monster.

    2lu3v9d.jpg

    It still doesn't make that much sense, but hey, it was just a tech-demo. As a nice side effect, the hose would blow gas into the scene for a cold-blue atmosphere (using volumetric particles and sprites refracting the background for a “cold wave” effect). In Gameland we have the luxury to bend logic, just as long the overall picture keeps believable more or less :)


    v7zgb5.jpg


    Nice all those effects, but without some kind of animation (and audio), the scene still remains dead boring. The time was limited though, so we had to pick easy techniques. Like this gauge arrow going mad, and the nitro hoses blowing cold gas in the scene. Further, the monster itself had to “wake up” when the camera approaches.

    We made a simple morph animation to make the blob breath, sort of. A vertex shader would morph the vertices with the help of textures containing the offset positions. The shader would also interpolate each vertex between its animated position, and its idle pose. As the time elapses, the animation effect and speed would increase for the “awakening” effect. Simple, but effective.
    Another little last minute effect were the hydraulic hoses at the top leaking oil. No particles or anything, just an extra texture and shader that would fade the oil in/out based on time and a vertical position to make it “stream”.


    14cy4y9.jpg


    Well, it took some effort, ice chunks, texture adjustments, resizing the whole room (made the ceiling higher), animations with simple tricks, and a lot of screwing around with lights and foggy particles. As often, the development process showed how an ugly, unpromising room can still transform into something nice when turning the right dials.

    Ciao!

    2lux45f.jpg
    Movie link: http://www.tower22game.com/media.php
  • alecchalmers
    Offline / Send Message
    alecchalmers polycounter lvl 10
    Wow, this game and what you are doing looks really exciting. I love the art style you guys have chosen. How many people are working on this right now?
  • Rick16bit
    Ha, good question. As a "hobby-project", it doesn't have a big team spending many hours on it, unfortunately. On paper, we have about 5 3D modelers, 1 animator, 2 audio guys, 2 drawers, 1 guy that does the website and helps with other stuff, and 1 programmer/lead (me).

    But it often happens that somebody joins or leaves again, plus the available time is very limited for most. The movie explained above was made with a much smaller team btw. All in all, finding dedicated people with talent AND enough free time, turns out to be harder than programming the damn thing hehe!
  • alecchalmers
    Offline / Send Message
    alecchalmers polycounter lvl 10
    Can me and my partner have a go at doing some drawing and concept for you then? We've recently done a concept art course, and would like to test our skills. We'd like to hear some more about what you have planned with the design, and see if we could help.
  • Rick16bit
    Well, you can always contact me via
    "rick AT tower22game DOT com"

    As for drawing & design, currently the needs are:
    - UI (fonts, menu's, inventory, symbols, cursors, ...)
    - Environment concepts, from conceptual ideas to realistic final versions
    - Level design (floorplans, ideas, collecting references, ...)

    There is not much drawing work on monsters or the likes. Not that we don't need any, but we won't be able to produce them as long there isn't much environment.

    Greets
  • Rick16bit
    Hey again,

    this time some progress on (one of the many) an apartment. As usual, it starts with a floorplan, and then a “lovely” 3D mesh. This basic mesh is used to test whether the dimensions fit with the gameplay (apartments stuffed with junk quickly become impossible to navigate within a game). It’s also worth testing the perspectives. Even when basing your doors and furniture on real-life proportions, it doesn’t always work out in games (usually I have to scale up a bit).

    wlslf5.jpg

    The same mesh also helps to give the drawers initial input of course. Time to spice up your life:

    1ttpw4.jpg

    That’s more like it. Since the general guideline for these apartments (at least in this section of the game) is “Soviet” with 80ies or older technology, the contents had to look somewhat cheap, but functional. So we had a look at some Russian furniture and equipment from that era. Not exactly copying, but just using them as a reference.

    23it47s.jpg

    Besides “Soviet”, the atmosphere on this particular section is supposed to be “dreamy” and “gloomy”. Like a sleeping but dangerous entity that could suddenly change. This drawing (by Borja Cuellar) tries to show a warm room that could be cozy, but isn’t. The apartment has some unusual, half hidden elements…

    1radl2.jpg

    To some in-game renders then. The textures and props for this room aren’t finished, neither does the above screenshot resembles the warm lighting. But I liked to show it anyway :) So far nothing really special has been applied on this room graphically wise, except that most surfaces are more or less reflective (using either cubemaps or Realtime Local Reflections) and use an early version of the realtime G.I. system. Oh, yes, and the couch + carpet are furry if you look from close, but I’ll save that for another post.

    121sspk.jpg

    To finish this room, we need some doors, lamps, another wallpaper, decals, lightflares, more junk, and ehm... did I forgot something?

    Ciao!
  • Rick16bit
    Hey again
    Here a radiator object Diego did recently. It will be mainly used to place in corridors. But instead of a common metal heating element, we used a cover for a change.
    2111il1.jpg

    2mdnixd.jpg

    The model was made in Maya btw. Below are some shots rendered in our own engine.

    ftpilk.jpg

    33xufqr.jpg

    Not much special going on other than that, though a little detail is the transparent raster. The foreground has transparent holes, and behind that layer is a simple quad placed with a (darkened) heater photo on it. You can see it a little bit in this shot:
    znsn5j.jpg
  • Rick16bit
    *Bullet time on*

    Now T22 is not going to be an action game. In fact... maybe there won't be any guns at all. If there will be, they only play a very limited role.

    Nevertheless, having a gun during development to shoot stuff is always fun. So, Diego made a machinegun based on the Russian PPS 43.

    kajlz6.jpg

    I didn't model the gun so I can't say too much about specific techniques being used, other than the standard flow of making a highpoly model first, and extracting details out of that such as the normal- and AO map.

    23icrio.jpg

    Well, time to import it into the game. No special techniques were used, other than some glossy realtime reflections and a secundary "detail NormalMap" for making the small bumps on the metal surface.

    5pmuxl.jpg

    Hmmm. Not quite right yet. One of the shitty things about a First-Person-View, is that you only see a small part of the gun. Being right-handed, the cooler right part with the moving handle, isn't visible. Neither the muzzle or trigger. What remains is the left side, and mainly the top & rear. And those were kinda boring right now. Time for some programmer-feedback:

    2dlp74j.jpg

    Diego added some details on the mesh and in the normalMap, and we had to do something about the "overcrispy" noisy metal look. The secundary detailNormalMap was reduced on several spots. Finally, also Federico pimped the texture, giving it a colder blueish look:

    2yoa6o2.jpg

    The engine doesn't give that cold look directly, but that probably has to with the warm athmosphere of the room. And probably I should experiment with some suble RIM lighting.

    34xmkra.jpg

    xf13n.jpg

    Besides just having a gun, this weapon also gave me a nice case to program the support for FBX animations, throwing out bulletcases, bullet hole decals, and of course VFX. But that's for another time folks!

    *bullet time off*
  • NenadGojkovicPF
    Offline / Send Message
    NenadGojkovicPF polycounter lvl 7
    Looks nice and interesting so far, love horror games. Wish you luck and hope you'll make it!
  • Rick16bit
    Thank you!
    I hope we make it too. Far from easy with a small team, nowadays you need whole Polycount armies to create all the assets. But who knows. At least we're having a good time the past few years hehe.
  • The_Blenderer
    you really have the horror atmosphere nailed down.
    I love how in some of dark parts it is not completely clear so it keeps the true nature of fear:the unknown, alive despite visual representation.
    Also the resident evilness of it
    looks very promising, keep it up
  • Rick16bit
    Lighting is indeed the key. For any (3D) scene, but especially hor horror scenes that rely extra much on what you see & hear (or don't see & hear).

    T22 is not going to be a very dark game though. Of course we'll use clich
  • Rick16bit
    "Monstrous delicious"
    A Plant. Recently Diego finished a vase + plant object for the game. Not very special maybe, yet it was the first "fresh green" object in the middle of all those dusty, brownish, rotten, stinky textures. My first concerns were that this green object would generate a weird contrast with the surrounding scene.

    i5stnm.jpg

    Well, it didn't turn out that bad. Of course, the surrounding scene itself isn't finished yet, and normally a plant being placed in a dark corridor without windows will turn brown within a week anyway. And then there is also a few engine bugs that make sort of a cartoonish and blurry edge around the leaves. Plants should appear very sharp(=fresh), so I got some work to do there. But nevertheless:

    2urmbt1.jpg


    One new feature that had to be added to the engine, was (cheap) backlighting. As you can see in the first picture, the leaves would normally appear very dark at the unlitten sides. But as you know, light travels through the leaves. So I added some features for simplistic SSS. A "thickness" map was used to control the amount of light traveling through. This makes the thicker (nerve) parts visible, as they block light more.

    As said, very cheap SSS, but probably sufficient enough for plants. In case you would have to render a whole jungle, you can't go wild with more realistic SSS models anyway. Not yet at least :)

    9pnwoh.jpg
  • Rick16bit
    Not a big fan of SSAO, but it's one of those necessary evils as long as there isn't a better realtime method that can accurately calculate occlusions on a detailed level.

    * Left sides of the pics are Gauss-blurred, right sides = raw SSAO unput

    zn7xg0.jpg

    For those who don't know what SSAO(screen-space-ambient-occlusion) is; it's a post processing technique to a roughly approximate Ambient Occlusion for each pixel on the screen. This produces a value that darkens the pixel eventually, in case it was surrounded by other foreground pixels (occluding it). The whitish images you'll see here, are multiplied with the other (colored) results, and thus basically darken spots such as corners or the floor below an object.

    2lkcvaf.jpg

    It only works at a small scale, and it sure isn't physically correct. Then again, it works pretty fast nowadays and it can handle fully dynamic situations, nothing was pre-baked. So, for the time-being, SSAO is an accepted method even though it's notorious for creating dark or bright aura's around objects, or just looking like an ordinary cartoonish edge-detection filter in some (bad) implementations.

    25ro0f5.jpg

    There are many ways to implement. Some good, some bad. Some fast and simple, some a bit more accurate. Some barely noticable, some too much present. Some having aura problems, some having another type of bug. Well, none of them is perfect really, neither this one.

    I chose for a slightly more accurate model (using very crude raycasting) to prevent some of the typical bugs, as well as to make sure occlusion works in most situations. And also, the texture-normalMaps have some influence on it as they bend the rays a bit. The price is lower performance than the average SSAO shader though, and I still didn't kill all bad-mojo aura's. Oh well, it's better than having nothing at all!

    24obtk1.jpg
  • Rick16bit
    Add lens-flares this week and tinkled the bloom a bit.

    2ik9vuh.jpg

    The lensflare is based on this nice article:
    http://john-chapman-graphics.blogspot.nl/2013/02/pseudo-lens-flare.html
    In short, this is a post-process image based technique:
    1- Apply a brightpass on the screen so only the very bright spots remain.
    This is usually already done if you're using bloom
    2- Mirror the (brightpassed) 1D image
    3- For each pixel, make a ray towards the center. Sample X times along that ray so it *may* sample bright spots. This will create "ghost" spots. Multiply the samples with a rainbow like gradient texture.
    4- Add a circular halo by doing the same trick but with a single fixed radius sample
    5- Upscale and gaussblur the results so far to a full-screen image
    6- Add the fullscreen image on top of your scene, or on the spaghetti

    2cyl2yf.jpg

    The nice thing about this technique is that its pretty cheap. But besides that, it works for any bright spot, thus also for specular highlights.

    2n9j7fa.jpg

    Of course, as with all blurs, blooms and other additional shit on your screen, you'll need to do it subtle. Apply it once for a "wow". Apply it dozens of times for a "sigh". But all in all, it's a nice cheap little feature.

    See you later!
  • Rick16bit
    One of the nice aspects of having corridors, is that we'll have to make tons of art to decorate the otherwise empty & boring environments. Paintings, statues, sculpts, ornaments, et cetera.

    Diego & Federico made some painting frames and empty canvasses to start with. Now whenever someone feels like doing a doodle, can try and make a canvas to put in the game. So, I began with "Bloody Buffet" and "Angry Windmill":

    23kerg7.jpg

    It was mainly to practice a bit with the Wacom. Since I'm not really a drawer and neither use that thing on a regular basis, the hand-screen coordination will probably keep sucking, but painting like a toddler was fun nevertheless :) Oh, ignore the weird frames on the left. I forgot to toggle off debug screens for (realtime) GI-processing.

    33omwzp.jpg


    By the way, if anyone here ever feels like making a scary drawing for Tower22, you can always contact me!

    See you!
  • Rick16bit
    Here another painting (in game). Though I didn't draw it this time. Pablo Moralez made the "Lady Plastic" canvas, Diego made the woodframe, and I just programmed the bits to poop it out on the screen :)

    5bxwts.jpg
Sign In or Register to comment.