3D Environment Reflection

Environment Overview

And finally, I discuss about the environment I developed. This post is a general reflection on that environment and should work to give a detailed insight into the development progress of the Salts Building.

This was the main theme of the project we set out to develop, and my environment was at the forefront of this creation. Initially I decided that I would create a photorealistic replica of the Salts Building Exterior, however, in realising time constraints, the volatile nature of 3DS Max, and also the skills I possessed, I felt it would best if I developed a more simplistic but appreciative concept style. I took inspirtation from the image of the Salts Building I took previously in the year, and also on the dynamic nature of the environment, trying to picture a more worn down, and lucid Salts Building, I realised images from fantasy games like Dragon Age, and Witcher 2 helped me to generate a good idea of the concept I was intially planning on.

Witcher 2  - Catle Ruins
http://www.el33tonline.com/images/cache/18334.jpg

Dragon Age - Ruins of Ostagar
http://greywardens.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Ostagar.jpg

I knew, during the concept phase of the environment I had to use all my resources to generate a feasible solution, I knew the software I had to use, Photshop coupled with 3DS Max for the environment development, but simply getting an idea of what I wanted was key to the successful development of this environment.

I started by producing sketches and concept designs, collecting images and collating them together to get a good theme and standing for the end product I wanted to develop. Below are some concept designs I created for the 3D Environment itself.

The question, how did I  do this,  is a viable question to ask, I generated the foundation of the environment through box modelling techniques, to create the base theme and setting, this allowed me to construct around it and add on the extra detail with minimal effort. I chose box modelling techniques over other conventional methods simply because I believe through experience that for constructing buildings, box modelling serves a better purpose in the long run. Plus it is simple, quick, efficient and easy to get started.

Lets also take a look at the Salts Building Image, coupled with some development images from the production to get a good on the technnique used and how it compared to the final product.

Above is the actual Salts Building, below is my rendered environment, looks alike right ? Okay maybe not, but  you get the picture.

How did we manage our time ?

During the development process we created a production plan, which detailed the amount of time, and the hours during the week we could realistically spend on the environment itself. In the project plan I detailed various times when I'd work on texturing in photoshop to apply to the environment, this came in handy on Thursdays, which we didn't have intial access to the production suite with 3DS Max installed.

The main advantage to this is it allowed us to manage our time effectively, we knew when we needed to generate textures and allowed us to allocate specific hours, and gave us an absolute insight into what was going on and what I specifically, needed to drop in order to assure we met the end deadline.

I do believe personally, that more could have been done for the environment, if I had managed my time, and my teams time more effectively, this could have been done by outlaying what had to be done by week, and also keep a to-do-list or changelog that helped define what was done, changed and needed to be done still, with this, I could have accurately spread out the development and still managed to develop a more robust environment.

What problems did you face ? 


We faced a wide range of issues, ranging from time constraints to general crashes of the software. One big issue that affected everyone was the volatile state of 3DS Max. Luckily the software came with a backup system, to ensure that we did not lose too much work, which helped to eliviate some of the stress from production.

Another problem we faced was man hours approachable on the environment, we had roughly 3 Hours on and Monday and 5 hours on a Tuesday to work on our environment, thats 8 hours a week, for a 6 week period, overall thats 48 Hours in total, about 2 days worth of work to get this done. Not a lot of time if you consider, give and take the hours we actually did at home, mind you.

Another problem was my texturing skills. Texturing was one of those small detail aspects that was difficult to work with, and required alot of work to create a repeatable background for the intial design.

What did you find easy?

I found that lighting and modifying the intensity, volumetrics and placing on bump maps that reflect the normals, was a very easy part for me. I also found that using the lighting to create a design and compliment the environment effects and ambience was great addition to the overall look and feel of the final production piece.

 Did you learn anything new while working on this project ?

To say I learnt nothing would be a lie. I have learnt not only skills in 3D Modelling software, but an appreciation for the work that goes into it as well. I have learnt about lighting techniques that I have been able to apply over to my programming realm, learnt more about 3D Geometry, Normals, Vertices and Polygons, all couple with the basis of bringing together a dyanmic environment, and the knowlegde attained is something I can take with me through life in my future careers.

How does your finished product compare to a professional example?

If we compare my final product to one of a professional concept, we can clearly depict the differences.

Sound Reflection

During the audio production I developed and produced a production piece for my trailer, for this I used the talents from my brother's guitar playing, due to my lack of musical ability.

I created the audio and edited it in Cubase to improve the effectiveness and sharpness, the music was directed from me to my brother, and played through into the actual sound card. This allowed me to directly record the sound into Cubase and model to my whim.

The final audio production did meet my expectations, my brother relayed the information from my descriptions and played it exactly as I imagined it. However there were points where the spikes hit in the guitar playing, which caused stuttering or rather caused it to generate a distortion, which I was unable to rub out and cut down using the editor, however, during the final production piece I was able to work with the sound in premier along with Joey to help smooth out the peaks of distortion.

I used every session in the sound room to work on my sound piece up until the showcase, I wanted to get it looking ship shape and although I lack the nessary skills with music production (and i'll be honest if I never touch a sound card again, it'll be too soon) I did like the final production, and it was used as the backing trailer for the trailer. I could have managed my time more effectively by installing cubase at home and perhaps doing more editing work there, this would have helped to bump my production grade from a pass to a merit, if i'd have given it that much more attention.

To be fair, I didn't find much of it easy, sound isn't my thing, and not something I will explore, however, I did find the intial concept of planning the song the easiest thing to produce, because of this, I was easily able to get the effect I required to generate this piece.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> O <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Other people enjoyed the effect of the audio and the level of tension it built, however, it was too quiet to be actually heard fully, and this  played with the rest of the audio, wasn't syncronised well. However, overall, the audio alone was liked, and compared to the likes of Diablo, which was the theme that inspired my own.

My general music production capabilites, I never took to Cubase, or operating the sound card, and perhaps if I had spent a little time aside I could have found a new fondness for music. However, overall, the general skills with the producton piece.

I would try to play the guitar myself next time, and take a couple of weeks to learn some simple chords and strings, to help improve my understanding. Coupled with this, learning a new skill would be invaluable in the future.

Overall the journey has been eventful, while I feel I can do much more, I felt I achieved a level of success, and have a song that was developed by me, that I can calll my own.

Human Interface Components - UI Design - Planning

Welcome to another Blogpost, and this one is all about my planning for the current work on our 3D game, the User Interface. This in an exciting moment for me, not primarily because I get to code, but down to the basis that it allows me to make the game work the way I please. This blog is going to detail my planning and concepts, and then the actual art I developed in Photoshop that will be used in the final product piece, primarily as place holders for the code base. I will be using, Flex AS3 to program the UI with the IDE FlashDevelop, rather than the Flash IDE as its not suitable, for the kind of dynamic UI development that comes with a package like FlashDevelop.

So lets, start. We have three weeks to complete this project, and today marks week two, and end of the intial planning stage, and moving into the more production stage, so what better time than to discuss what has kept me busy.

First off, I decided to sketch out my idea and take inspiration from a couple of UI uses. I noted two games, especially that I rather liked the look of, however, my design changed dramatically from theres, but the concept remained the same.

I really liked the look of the Diablo 2 user interface, and was even allowed to explore it's properties during class, whcih made for an exciting turn of events.. I do believe that more shouting to heal and stop ninja looting was focus of attention rather the UI, but still, it was nice to be able to explore its working. Diablo 2 has a health record, the left red ball and a mana record, the right most ball. One thing that stands out most about this UI, is how detailed the main interface is.. but also, how clumped.

I wanted to take a detailed approach to mine, rather like this, but also try to maximise the use of space and provide more screen for the user, rather than have it blocked out by user interfaces. The best thing about the UI for this, is everything is easy to get to, just one button or hotkey and its open, I decided that the use of hotkeys to manage a menu, as opposed to clicking the sections, was much better to allow for quick open and close.

This menu is only prompted when the user presses start, something I think is great, we all know large games like Skyrim are likely to require a large field of information, as can be seen in this screenshot. It gave me an intial idea of my own, why not have my own subsystems popup when the users presses a key or a image, rather than clutter the screen with maps, and quests and all sorts of nonsense.

Another key feature is how clean the UI is. Unlike Diablo 2 which has various detail and has everything in one place this seems to be more spread out. I dislike the location of the health bar mostly, its never seen in game, and knowing how close you are to death is a difficult task at best, something I think i'll incorporate in mine, is too always have the bars viewable at all times.

I decided that for added speed, response and direct control, I will use C++ to program this, I have decided on use the SDL library, as opposed to raw DirectX or OpenGL, simply because it provides a simply and direct interface to graphics and input management, that will save me time and stress in the long run, due to the complex nature of DX9 or OpenGL, which would increase development time, tenfold. Furthermore, SDL is a cross-platform library, meaning, the end product should work on other machines, such as a Mac and Linux, if compiled with a compiler targetted towards those platforms, i.e. MinGW.

I decided that it would be best to begin drawing out various ideas for the platform, because the original idea, was to release our product on PC and XBOX 360, I decided to plan for those two interfaces, due to the nature of how the interfaces may play out, I may have to differ the theme a little to correspond with the platform specifics. For example, a directional wheel that that allows the user to select from various different options, to allow us to use the ergonmic design of the XBOX controller, on the pc however, hotkeys, will suffice, such as I for "Inventory", J for "Journal", M for "Map". This quick approach is also familar, as it is used alot of various games, usually those of an RPG nature.

Below is a view of my photoshop mockup, which should closely resemble the actual finished product.

From this mockup, you can clearly see that I have chosen a very stylised look, going for graphics, similar to the approach taken by RPG games, for example, Diablo II above. The choice of grapics also allowed me to experiemtn with my creative side, and create a very unique and clever  looking UI that fit in more with the design we had planned for the game.

One of the closer UI schemes that I could find that related very much to the Witcher 2 which had a very similar scheme to the one I wanted to employ, minimal it its on right but allows for a very complex system for navigating most of the system UI.

I expect to face several chanllenges, that mostly fall into the programming zone, because of the intial

requirement to blit an array of pixel into a select zone, requires a lot of general work, transferring the data to a surface buffer in memory, and then transferring to the front buffer.

Otherwise, the intial build should be pretty simple. I aim to work at a Windows platform, and use the Visual C++ compiler in order to develop for that specific platform.

Final Trailer Production

Hello, and apologies for a belated blogpost. I figured now was as good a time as any to reflect on the trailer, that that me and my team developed the digital showcase. The good things, the bad things. I'll try not to keep to much of your time, afterall, not everyone has the luxury of it, I realised this more than ever during the development stage of our environment.

Firstly, allow me to say a massive thank you to the team, Cybertronix. This trailer was amazing, not because I worked on it, but the sheer effort and work put into everyones piece, even from a less optimistic members, and for the smallest team out of the three, I think we pull it off really well, and with that I want to thank each member individual.

Micheal Prior,
Joey Brown,
Stuart Wade
and Curtis Stoyles.

And above all, a thank you to Mel Brown and Chris Dewey, for whom without there nagging, tutoring and constant help and advice, not to mention pulling the showcase off as well, the end product probably wouldn't be here, or, nearly as fantastic as it end up, and that goes for all teams, when I say that, the end products where amazing.

This was our final product, compiled by Joey. One thing our trailer was complimented most on, was our use of lighting. I will say now that some of us, where not that strong in modelling, or had rather simple areas to replicate. With that, we knew we had to bring our scene alive more, and give it that "UMPH" we needed to get it looking 100%.

I used various lighting techniques in my environment, including direction, volumetric and even a couple of omni lights, applied with shadow mapping. One thing I will note, here that was key, was render time. Render was important in order to get our particular scene ready for the deadline, because we drove ourselves right up to the frontlines with our intial design, we ended up with very little time left to render our environments out. One problem with mine was, it was taking very long to render each frame. (About 10 minutes per frame, multiply that with 800 and your looking at 8000 minutes to render the entire thing..) It was also not very possible to leave machines rendering over an alloted time, because we are in a college, our machines are likely to be required for teaching purposes, and we have no render farm, so its not very practical to render over night, instead we used a different technique, but first, I want to go other a problem that I solved to cut down my render time.

SKYLIGHTS! Thats right, there a bane! Well, they apply ray tracing to creating ambience light around the entire scene, unfortunatly this kind of effect generates a lot of overhead, and takes time to render each frame, it wasn't until I removed the skylight to help relight the entire scene (it had gotten far too bright) that I realised the overhead that Skylights cause. So remember, Skylights = Bad. Least when your limited in development time :)

So now I have expressed my dislike of skylights and there treachery, I would like to specify how we overcame some of the rendering issues. Now, recall how games and movies, use frames. Each frame depicts a moment in scene, and games/movies move around 25 - 30 Frames a second, roughly. Well, thats how we did it. We didn't render it out as a full AVI movie, that would be tedious for the sake that AVI is actually larger in file size, but also, if our rendering machine crashed (Which they did.... alot) then we lost the entire file and had to restart... ugh.

So we rendered each frame out in bitmaps. That meant any crashes, problems, we could just start from the last bitmap it got to. Perfect, no more rendering from the start, which meant we kept a linear progress level.

Overall however, we managed to get it pulled through, Joey himself had to re-render his environment, due to a lack of frames given, it resulted a rather ugly and jumpy framerate that didn't remain consistent. Which brings me to the reviews. One thing i've alway said from the beginning was that I wanted to keep a trailer that was consistent through out. I specified it so much so, my team practically made sure each environment led off from one another.

Looking at previous teams, and also this years, I was able to see how they combatted consistency issues. Because my team was relatively small, and we were pretty much in the same idealism, we was able to generate a very consistent idea, that help with generating the trailer. Thanks mostly to the back story, that Joey typed up, we have a very linear path we could follow.. "From Joeys Environment, it follow down the stairwell, and into Priors".

While, it wasn't 100% consistent, give or take, we still used the same texture gallery (Photo's we took from around Saltaire) and we still managed to keep a similar pace in framerate consistency, which I loved alot.

So, one trailer I immediatly realised how they combatted differences in environments, was last years work called T.R.A.I.N.

The use of a train to explore each environment was a great idea, and also, the storyline chosen, allowed them to  work with any nature of environmets, this created a sense of consistency, and an idea that I believe Wolfpack used, the idea of time and portal to other lands, which generated a level of consistency and exploration.

One thing to note, moving from the topic of consistency to comparison of quality, is that Wolfpacks trailer had a lot of good 3D work, one thing we did notice, however, was how easy it was to create a detailed interior rather than an exterior. None of the exterior environments where as highly detailed as the interior ones, from like Joseph Lee and Joshua Williams, we believe it to be down to how much detail can you really put in an expanded environment.

While I admit, if I was to do an interior it was unlikely to be as good as those in Wolfpack, I still stand by that producing an interesting exterior is much harder, with so much space, everything feels... empty. Suppose, the use of everything is too compact in an interior environment could be used against me there. :D

Back to my trailer, each environment was created in correlation with a level. The exterior was the introduction, the plaza level would be in gameplay, for searching and findin the entrance, hence the torchlight, the tomb would be simiulated with traps, and made to feel rather like the level on Amnesia, stuarts was going to be a way for the player to be introduced, rather like a tutorial level, and of course, the final level, the wine, would likely occur a boss fight.

Intially, we was going to add in various elements, a stone samurai was actually in development by me, however time scale, and my lack of ability in modelling, forced that idea to be scrapped pretty quickly.

But so you can laugh, where is some development shots I took of the stone samurai, armour breast plate I was working on developing.

As you can see, it wasn't coming along too bad, now I look at it, it seems to be better than I intially realised. Usually, I like to compare my models against professional examples, but thats obvious to what would be considered better and what I would want to aim for, I mean, I know I wanted this to look like a Samurai, instead, I am going to compare this humanoid model, to a humanoid model developed by one of the first year students, who happens to be pretty talented with 3DS Max, and compare my experience with the software, to his.

For all purposes the model above is actually under the intellectual property of Zero Matrix Interactive, and use of the model without permission will breach copyright. I'm serious.. :P
Credit for the model, goes to "Tom Pearson". 

However, you can clearly see the amount detail in this. One key factor to realise here is that the armour plate I developed has around 1400 Polygons. Including smoothing, in some areas. This model, has grabbed around 2800 polygons, and its finished. So, my unfinished samurai would have likely had four times the amount of polygons that this model did.

One other key fact is well.. its finished. But, its arms, and hands are incredibly well detailed. I remember staring at awe in Ivo's attempt at creating hands last year, but now I look at Tom's work, no offense, but it blows that out of the water, and not just the hands, but the entire body posture. I do have some development images of the model, and i'll display a few for visual comparison to my development images, but I cannot display any updates, other work or textures used on the model, for sakes of IP.

Well, I was sort of going in the right direction... sort of. The face is my favourite one here, it has NURB SubDivision applied, to increase the smoothness and depth of the model, however, we have removed that because of the increase in polygon count it creates. However, the head is something I struggled with when developing the stone samurai. 

My previous posts, depict my development of my own environment, but there hasn't been a direct link between the two. So here I will show and explain what I did in certain areas.

This time, i'm comparing to the real thing, because, when I was developing the actual building, I wasn't aiming for any particular style, I wanted to create a photorealistic environment.

Immediatly you can see the massive difference in the two images, if you can't, then your just being nice, and deserve a cookie.. I decided pretty early on that I wasn't going to replicate the frontal area exactly.

One reason for this was development time, of, what we lacked of it. We didn't have long to work on developing the environment, and as I said previously, exteriors are much harder to develop, due to the large size and open spaces. Intially, I had benches and bins about, but they looked unsightly, and decided it would have been best just to remove them them.

Knowing I had a huge grass field, and knowing that I had to do something, I decided to play on the renovation scenario we had planned, and its easily seen in Joey's environment, by making pillars and collasped environment present. This was great it allowed me to keep the look of the building, but present a essence of my own design into, and above all, cut out development time. I also applied some fog and volumetrics for that added depth, and the church and hills in the background were added for increase effect and to simulate a larger environment than it actually was.

I am asked alot, when I show people the actually environments, why I didn't develop the surrounding areas of Saltaire, well this was simple. Firstly, I wanted the Salts building to feel rather empty and alone, in comparison with the rest of the town, I achieved this with a large open grass field, and fog, which made it feel spookier than it actually was.

Another reason is I only wanted the Salts Building, why waste time building Saltaire, when i'll only show a small part of it. This was vital for both production time (I keep drilling that in don't I) and also render time.

I've discussed alot about trailer asthetics but I haven't talked much about management. I'll leave that for another post, as for now, i'll end this one. Hope you found this interesting, and keep a look out for productions posts, where i'll detail areas of my environment and steps I had to overcome, you may even learn something. I know I did.