So is this game for UDK or Unity? I love the soft clouds.
It will most likely not be produced with UDK - though this decision is not final, we are not even in real preproduction yet.
UDK has the best base when it comes to artist friendly tools, a great built in materialeditor makes it easy to create stunning results in no time. But the whole dated coding/scripting progress makes it a pain in the ass to use, for us as artists (don't know code for shit) and also programmers. So to us, UDK never was the right choice when to comes to actually coding this game, it never felt right.
Unity on the other hand is very nice to work with for prototyping and such, overall the coding tasks are much nicer to be handled inside unity - but we have yet to port one final artset from udk to unity to see how it performs on a larger scale.
In the end from an artists point of view i don't care which engine is going to be used in the production.
Looking at it from the past few years we worked on it here and there, tested around with different solutions it is not an easy decision. But it will really come down to the budget.
We will most likely not be able to produce it with an Unreal Build (Unreal because then modifications to a lot of things would be possible, as opposed to UDK). I wouldn't mind using Unreal 4 or Cryengine either, but both will need quite a budget just for the license - and in case of the cryengine also quite a bunch of specialized coders.
Which leads us back to unity, as beeing right now the most likely tool to work with.
But as said this is a decision that we can make once we know the budget we can spend. At the moment our budgetting plan is based on unity. And i have no doubt we can port all assets from UDK (Art for the groundgameplay build, the stuff Manuel has been showing lately) over to unity or any other engine. In the End its just 3d models and shaders. But as Unity lacks great shaders to begin with, this stuff will need to be rebuilt from ground up, which is out of our possibilities right now. It would just eat way too much time. Also we don't need super duper art for the gamedesign prototypes and we do not need perfect gameplay for the artbuilds right now. So the presentation we do for kickstarter including a couple of gameplaydemos will be a mix and match of both, good art from UDK and gameplay prototyping of the past months from Unity which will also not look like shit, but will not be as polished as the ground part.
If Epic reads this and they are thinking "dude we want this on Unreal 4" i would be the last to not evaluate the engine :P
@Chris: with a lot of luck and support of you guys, you will. Without and if we fail the pitch t will most likely end in something way simpler, or nowhere to be seen again.
Hm. Yeah, UDK still might be a good option. But I can understand your issues with programming and whatnot.
From that screenshot, it looks like Unity still might look good. But I'd hate to have visuals suffer too much because of the lack of features.
But, at the same time, I'd rather see the game get made/released and working and look good, but maybe not AS good as UDK.
i really do not fear that unity is not capable of doing so, it's directX11 and supports the same stuff, its just a matter of porting/rewriting stuff, however i do fear that unity is not as potent when it comes down to the pure masses of artassets that unreal can push - thats a thing to evaluate. But as said we lack the time and budget to do so at the moment, so thats why we run on 2 engines right now.
So i finally can start sculpting, hell what a beast to make it work in game and as a 3d print.
The back needs to be removable as the biggest piece of the printer we most likely are going to use can handle 15cm in any dimension.
For the 3d printed version the hood is removable and 2 AAA batteries fit in, doing wiring canals and such nasty things is what took the most time :X
Not every part you see moving here will be moving in the real version, my engineering skills are far too low to make the wheels work for real. So those will be extra pieces you can plug in, but the cover will be cloaseable, the back wheel part will be rotatable as well. The saddle can be opened for whatever use as well, so if you want to stuff anything tiny in, this will work
The airbrakes will not work in the real version, but we needed those for ingame purposes.
oh well, lets add some rivets and welding seams and whatnot.
Ah yeah those small light blue thingies here and there are actual real size LEDs i hope the whole wiring will work out, i added space for 3 miniature motors to drive the propellers as well - yay
Dude that is awesome! I can't wait to see the process for printing and wiring this beast. What size are you going for with the print? Will we see a matching Pino action figure to go along with it? Keep it up dude.
Wow well this is going to be awesome, as it already was.
Can't wait for the printed version!
I also wonder how big the printed version will be, but I guess if you think about the size of a AAA battery you can grasp an idea of the print size, a nice enough size, looking forward to the sculpting detail version.
The whole plane is 22cm long, which i can't change if i want the AAA batteries to go under the hood. The printer we are most likely going to be using does "only" 15x15x15cm so i needed to split the plane in 2 segments - its nothing that is going to happen ingame but something i needed to add forthe print version - same goes for the wiring canals in the core of the plane, they will not be used for the lowpoly version.
yeah i know, some of the parts will be beefed up a bit once the game ready version in sculpted.
about the code, oh well i know how to hack a little which already helped a lot with doing some minor gameplay prototypes, but i just don't have the time to produce art AND code this one - and i'm just not talented enough to be a good coder, oh well and i don't want to put as much time into becoming one as well.
@urgaffel: i will show it once we have some of the bugs fixed, its not really that complicated. At the moment we have a few culling issues per cloud and some overdraw issues when you get very close, we will have to work on that before i would consider this tech game ready. But it runs at 50fps minimum on all machines we tested it on, so its not THAAAAAt bad, just a little ^^
Cool, looking forward to more info since I love volumetrics and the like
Likewise, the cloud tech looks really nice and I'd be interested in seeing how it's implemented .
Plus the whole thread is just filled with some really impressive work and designs. It's got me wanting to work on my limited C# and 3D modelling skills and have a bash at doing something in Unity.
Just out of curiosity, do you think you'll be going with Unity for the final version? I haven't had much experience with it as I usually use Marmoset for previews, but I wanted to find out if its got as much power in terms of visuals as UDK, since there seems to have been a lot of updates in the new version.
I'm late to this thread, but thanks to the recap, I'm gonna go through all 28 pages soon and catch up. Love the most recent environment shots! The lighting looks great. I love the foliage and the rocks, great contrast. :thumbup:
Today I finished a new conceptual Illustration piece for the ice setting. Some time ago I had the idea to do a family portrait to show what clothes the people there are wearing. I did not want to do warriors and cool guys and brutes and what so ever. I wanted to do some normal guys. A smith, his wife and his son.
So here you go:
We hope to have some more news soon. We'll keep you updated.
finally some new 3d work, i have a couple of more NPCs prepared, mostly variations for existing ones to get a few people in the world... however here is a small modulesystem for one of the enemy soldiers, the brute
he can function as an officer, who is kinda like a better gunner, with a bit more health, as some sort of simple mechanic/engineer for the enemy troops and of course as his primary intention a heavy armored meleed type of fighter, with a weakspot in his back.
and a couple of variation ideas for the head. i think we will do a few more faces but also more variety with different haircuts and beards and such. the usual mass grunt will have his face covered though.
well yes and no.
So we started doing dota things thats right, and i will use all the money i makde from it to support airborn, everyone of the team is giving a percentage to support us with this, I give all of it (minus taxes ). Some artists from the dotaworkshop also join us with this, which is really great.
We didn't raise a huge budget but a small one to do some things with, i will most likely use this money to fix the bottlenecks we definitely have, right now this is animation mostly. So i'll hire someone at one point to create some animations to play with.
Last year was really interesting to us as a team and studio, we moved to a new and bigger place (which is still not over yet) are finishing our so far biggest production which took most of my time away (managing 16 character artists, to do 140+ characters, yay fun times). So right now i try to shrink down the team, create smaller taskforces for smaller volumes of work for different clients, do more indie stuff, i really try to chill down a bit to have more time for airborn. Which also means less work for artists from here, sadly i'll try to figure this out maybe we can still run some outsource operations and i still have more time - but right now I really need to work less and have more time for our own baby.
Thats said, last year didn't go on without work, we are evaluating engines, the biggest chances are Unity or Unreal4, it's not decided yet.
We test different solutions for the sky, particle based, volume based - before we entered the UE4 beta, we tested with UDK as well. I could show a couple of things, nothing is really groundbreaking, mostly trying to solve one of the biggest challenges artwise, the sky.
besides that we try to focus on the GDD at the moment, getting our base shit together, not doing much art, but we need a foundation. workflow is also a big issue on my side, we don#t have unlimited ressources, so how do we get this done with the art we want to have and the budget we can spend (time and money, most people spend budget in form of time). It's really tough to get ANYTHING to work without a budget, thats definitely an issue, was always and will stay one. But I don't feel confident enough to pitch it to anybody yet.
Be it Kickstarter or publisher, investors whatnot, IF we do this, it needs to be solid. If we can get to this stage, i don't know. I hope so and push as hard as I can do this, sadly this is still a project to work on, on the side. There is only so much i can do, i could take myself out of production and work on it myself use the budget I have, but the bottlenecks would still remain. So right now i try find ways to break away some of the bottlenecks we had, by spending money I made.
Dota is a great chance, we love working on assets for that game it is running good, not super overly great to a point we could stop and just do what we want. But it gives us some freedom, freedom i couldn't even think of last year.
There are only 4 of us working on our game Routine, surviving mainly on a bit of savings we have left from our jobs, we do all share a flat to keep the costs down and use the front room as our work space. We are running out of money and its stressful times indeed, I think its great that you are being cautious about it and honestly If I was to start this all over again, I would downscale the project and make sure I have more savings before going on this crazy adventure. I think the whole DOTA items is a bloody great way of helping with that.
We have also freelanced 2 other people that have shaved off a month or two worth of work, and honestly its a god send.
Best of luck with Airborn and as you can tell there are a bunch of us foaming at the mouth to play the damn thing :P Thank you for the explanation and I am sorry for my long winded reply !
@why_pack: thanks a lot, yeah Ori was a crazy cool project, tough for many of us, but still a great project. But we do not work on airborn and might not anytime soon. We just slipped out of the Halo production and still work on Overwatch. I for one do not have the energy to work further on anything bigger than just sketches. I'd love to one day take a break and just work on Airborn, but keeping a team of artists afloat is a bigger task for me right now and I enjoy it a lot. Airborn the game is super scary, we are good at making nice images, we have zero experience with actually creating a game and at this visual fidelity it will be a lot of work on the artside as well. I have now idea when or IF we will work on it seriously again. It started as some sort of portfolio project and only barely moved out of that, not sure if we can move it past the point of just being a looker.
but i would still love to, i still enjoy the universe we have created here
How would one UV map something like this in the shape of this ellipsoid to not get distortion on the texture?
If you look closely you can see seams. My guess... this is a cube with 4x4 faces on each side, Sphereify modifier to create roundness, then non-uniform scaled and soft-select edited into an ellipsoid shape. If you look where the original cube edges would be, you can see UV discontinuities.
Replies
It will most likely not be produced with UDK - though this decision is not final, we are not even in real preproduction yet.
UDK has the best base when it comes to artist friendly tools, a great built in materialeditor makes it easy to create stunning results in no time. But the whole dated coding/scripting progress makes it a pain in the ass to use, for us as artists (don't know code for shit) and also programmers. So to us, UDK never was the right choice when to comes to actually coding this game, it never felt right.
Unity on the other hand is very nice to work with for prototyping and such, overall the coding tasks are much nicer to be handled inside unity - but we have yet to port one final artset from udk to unity to see how it performs on a larger scale.
In the end from an artists point of view i don't care which engine is going to be used in the production.
Looking at it from the past few years we worked on it here and there, tested around with different solutions it is not an easy decision. But it will really come down to the budget.
We will most likely not be able to produce it with an Unreal Build (Unreal because then modifications to a lot of things would be possible, as opposed to UDK). I wouldn't mind using Unreal 4 or Cryengine either, but both will need quite a budget just for the license - and in case of the cryengine also quite a bunch of specialized coders.
Which leads us back to unity, as beeing right now the most likely tool to work with.
But as said this is a decision that we can make once we know the budget we can spend. At the moment our budgetting plan is based on unity. And i have no doubt we can port all assets from UDK (Art for the groundgameplay build, the stuff Manuel has been showing lately) over to unity or any other engine. In the End its just 3d models and shaders. But as Unity lacks great shaders to begin with, this stuff will need to be rebuilt from ground up, which is out of our possibilities right now. It would just eat way too much time. Also we don't need super duper art for the gamedesign prototypes and we do not need perfect gameplay for the artbuilds right now. So the presentation we do for kickstarter including a couple of gameplaydemos will be a mix and match of both, good art from UDK and gameplay prototyping of the past months from Unity which will also not look like shit, but will not be as polished as the ground part.
If Epic reads this and they are thinking "dude we want this on Unreal 4" i would be the last to not evaluate the engine :P
@Chris: with a lot of luck and support of you guys, you will. Without and if we fail the pitch t will most likely end in something way simpler, or nowhere to be seen again.
Unity seems like a good choice at least for the prototype as you get the easiest code access.
From that screenshot, it looks like Unity still might look good. But I'd hate to have visuals suffer too much because of the lack of features.
But, at the same time, I'd rather see the game get made/released and working and look good, but maybe not AS good as UDK.
So i finally can start sculpting, hell what a beast to make it work in game and as a 3d print.
The back needs to be removable as the biggest piece of the printer we most likely are going to use can handle 15cm in any dimension.
For the 3d printed version the hood is removable and 2 AAA batteries fit in, doing wiring canals and such nasty things is what took the most time :X
Not every part you see moving here will be moving in the real version, my engineering skills are far too low to make the wheels work for real. So those will be extra pieces you can plug in, but the cover will be cloaseable, the back wheel part will be rotatable as well. The saddle can be opened for whatever use as well, so if you want to stuff anything tiny in, this will work
The airbrakes will not work in the real version, but we needed those for ingame purposes.
oh well, lets add some rivets and welding seams and whatnot.
Ah yeah those small light blue thingies here and there are actual real size LEDs i hope the whole wiring will work out, i added space for 3 miniature motors to drive the propellers as well - yay
Can't wait for the printed version!
I also wonder how big the printed version will be, but I guess if you think about the size of a AAA battery you can grasp an idea of the print size, a nice enough size, looking forward to the sculpting detail version.
the whole thing is 22cm long
@spencer: yeah Pi
Me likes the toy but there are parts which are really .. fragile
about the code, oh well i know how to hack a little which already helped a lot with doing some minor gameplay prototypes, but i just don't have the time to produce art AND code this one - and i'm just not talented enough to be a good coder, oh well and i don't want to put as much time into becoming one as well.
@urgaffel: i will show it once we have some of the bugs fixed, its not really that complicated. At the moment we have a few culling issues per cloud and some overdraw issues when you get very close, we will have to work on that before i would consider this tech game ready. But it runs at 50fps minimum on all machines we tested it on, so its not THAAAAAt bad, just a little ^^
Likewise, the cloud tech looks really nice and I'd be interested in seeing how it's implemented
Plus the whole thread is just filled with some really impressive work and designs. It's got me wanting to work on my limited C# and 3D modelling skills and have a bash at doing something in Unity.
So here you go:
We hope to have some more news soon. We'll keep you updated.
:thumbup:
he can function as an officer, who is kinda like a better gunner, with a bit more health, as some sort of simple mechanic/engineer for the enemy troops and of course as his primary intention a heavy armored meleed type of fighter, with a weakspot in his back.
and a couple of variation ideas for the head. i think we will do a few more faces but also more variety with different haircuts and beards and such. the usual mass grunt will have his face covered though.
http://www.facebook.com/airborngame
i'm drooling at those cliffs btw!
well yes and no.
So we started doing dota things thats right, and i will use all the money i makde from it to support airborn, everyone of the team is giving a percentage to support us with this, I give all of it (minus taxes
We didn't raise a huge budget but a small one to do some things with, i will most likely use this money to fix the bottlenecks we definitely have, right now this is animation mostly. So i'll hire someone at one point to create some animations to play with.
Last year was really interesting to us as a team and studio, we moved to a new and bigger place (which is still not over yet) are finishing our so far biggest production which took most of my time away (managing 16 character artists, to do 140+ characters, yay fun times). So right now i try to shrink down the team, create smaller taskforces for smaller volumes of work for different clients, do more indie stuff, i really try to chill down a bit to have more time for airborn. Which also means less work for artists from here, sadly i'll try to figure this out maybe we can still run some outsource operations and i still have more time - but right now I really need to work less and have more time for our own baby.
Thats said, last year didn't go on without work, we are evaluating engines, the biggest chances are Unity or Unreal4, it's not decided yet.
We test different solutions for the sky, particle based, volume based - before we entered the UE4 beta, we tested with UDK as well. I could show a couple of things, nothing is really groundbreaking, mostly trying to solve one of the biggest challenges artwise, the sky.
besides that we try to focus on the GDD at the moment, getting our base shit together, not doing much art, but we need a foundation. workflow is also a big issue on my side, we don#t have unlimited ressources, so how do we get this done with the art we want to have and the budget we can spend (time and money, most people spend budget in form of time). It's really tough to get ANYTHING to work without a budget, thats definitely an issue, was always and will stay one. But I don't feel confident enough to pitch it to anybody yet.
Be it Kickstarter or publisher, investors whatnot, IF we do this, it needs to be solid. If we can get to this stage, i don't know. I hope so and push as hard as I can do this, sadly this is still a project to work on, on the side. There is only so much i can do, i could take myself out of production and work on it myself use the budget I have, but the bottlenecks would still remain. So right now i try find ways to break away some of the bottlenecks we had, by spending money I made.
Dota is a great chance, we love working on assets for that game it is running good, not super overly great to a point we could stop and just do what we want. But it gives us some freedom, freedom i couldn't even think of last year.
We have also freelanced 2 other people that have shaved off a month or two worth of work, and honestly its a god send.
Best of luck with Airborn and as you can tell there are a bunch of us foaming at the mouth to play the damn thing :P Thank you for the explanation and I am sorry for my long winded reply
first of all, thanks again for the love
@Razorb: good luck with your project!
@errorx: nope, and i am not sure there will be
@why_pack: thanks a lot, yeah Ori was a crazy cool project, tough for many of us, but still a great project. But we do not work on airborn and might not anytime soon. We just slipped out of the Halo production and still work on Overwatch. I for one do not have the energy to work further on anything bigger than just sketches. I'd love to one day take a break and just work on Airborn, but keeping a team of artists afloat is a bigger task for me right now and I enjoy it a lot. Airborn the game is super scary, we are good at making nice images, we have zero experience with actually creating a game and at this visual fidelity it will be a lot of work on the artside as well. I have now idea when or IF we will work on it seriously again. It started as some sort of portfolio project and only barely moved out of that, not sure if we can move it past the point of just being a looker.
but i would still love to, i still enjoy the universe we have created here
Pretty legit question and answers tho ^^