Here is another couple of screenshots of my environment, that I have developed over time. Recently, the lighting has become rather bright with the over use of Omnis, a problem on my part due to the attempt to create some realistic volumetric lighting and neglecting to remove. To rectify this problem I removed most of the lights in the scenary and re-did most of the lighting. The responsive effect was inherently noticeable...
As you can see the shadows are not more prominent amongst the objects, and stands out clearly wth deeper shades for closed objects with a more intense lighting pattern and you can really see the bump mapping detail on the frontal colum and the depth of field in the back shadowing of other elements in the scene, such as the church.
Here is another screenshot I took and this allows me to actually discuss some of the choices I made during the creation of environment.
One thing I realised pretty quickly when starting to work on my environment was that it was a very small piece of a much larger system. Take a look at the map below to get a fundamental idea of what I am on about.
The environment is what I call a neverending environment, meaning closing the environment off is a difficult task to achieve, due to the large nature, it would have to be modelled pretty extensively. I knew I didn't have the time on my hands to add more buildingds an elements to the scene (I may after the show case to improve my grade) but understanding I focused on the main element of the scene, the Salts Building, this allows me to develop a scene for the showcase trailer rather than spending a whole lot of time focusing on the out areas, it also means that I can work on developing a more robust and phot-realistic buiilding as a opposed to less detailed buildings in order to be able to render in a set time.
With this I used a technique that is used in the industry, which simulates a much larger surrouding. Mostly older system to decrease polygon size. Its adding terrain ( or in mine mountains) in the background with some very simple modelling, the effect is the feeling of a larger environment as the seams are hidden the effect gives it distance and volume. This effect has been used in games like Dragon Age, to make the environment seem like it doesn't just die.
In todays session, we decided to start defining our trailer for use in determining the outcome of our environment. Unfortnatly, Micheal Prior was not present in this particular session, meaning was not able to produce his outcome of what will happen in his particular piece, but it will be added when he returns. We have worked out around 2:51 seconds without priors scene so we are well over the minium required 180 seconds.
In this post, I will be covering the following points;
- Recording my responsibilities (Environments, Sound and Marketing).
- Who is before in the trailer timeline.
- Who is after me in the trailer timeline.
My responsbilities for this, is developing the my environment, which is the first environment, I am also designing the montage of screen shot images, that will be used to transist into the final splash screen. My sound is being used throughout the entire trailer, which is the song my brother recorded with me, to play entire. For my marketting, I was the one responsible for the web banner which will not be taking place in the trailer, instead, curts splash screen will play its part.
Throughout the build of the environment I took various sample shots that detailed different effects and processes that I undertook during the intial development stage. While some of these shots are not in the final production, intially due to time constraints and increases on rendering composition, most of the actual effect seen here have been implemented in one way or another. Please see my lighting samples post, as this one details more about the actual environment rather than lighting techniques I used to create atmospheric effect.
This was to show the use of lighting, reflections in the window, and shadowing that I applied to my scene. You can clearly see the effects of a lit environment in the far back column enclosure, the use of bump mapping really brings of the tectures.
Bump mapping works by applying a normal map layer that exposes the normals over a normal texture, normals are a direction in which the vectors describing a surface are facing, a normal exposes vectors on a texture by texture basis. This helps to increase detail in environments. Bump mapping can also be called "Dot3 Bump Mapping" for more information regarding bump mapping see:
or any book on 3D Computer Graphics. When the light shines upon these surfaces however, we get the simulated effects of dents and bumps. This works well for added realism and a very low cost, this also means that we can make something look more detailed without the need to increase polygon count, with effects like Tesselation.
This video is one of the sample videos I took, a few seconds preview of the development build of my environment for the web shot. Unfortnatly this didn't get placed on the actual showcase advertisement for unknown reasons. This is textured, with atmosheric lighting and effects a new sky has been placed in. Unfortnatly the skylight used in this scene is removed in the final cut, skylights add a huge amount of time onto a frames render, once removed, we shaved off around 10 minutes of render time, a huge increase. This is one of the unfortnate comprimises that have to be made to meet the 10th May Deadline.
One thing I do wish to note, even though I mentioned I didn't want to describe lighting effects, is the volumetric lighting from the main windows. This is a great effect that was easy to achieve. Instead of using omni lighting, would fire light in all directions, I required a more direct light, I used a directional lighting effect, applying volumetrics and increased the general intensity, this worked really well for my scene.
Comparing the effect and the darkness I am trying to apply to the inspritation game of my choice, the video here for Amnesia, a few seconds in, depicts a darkend environment where the only lighting is the volumetric light coming from the windows.
I think my lighting effect with directional volumetrics looks in anything very much the same as the one used here, minus lining up and some of the dust particle effects, which I would't have minded adding myself if not for the actual limit I have on time.
It's probably safe to say that I lied about the above comment on not mentioning lighting, lighting is key to the ambience of my particular environment, and you probably noticed the lighting that was applied over the face of the building, like a search light, that is one of my shameless self promotions, pause the video, the light actual displays the Cybertronix logo, the logo of our team. I got the idea from the Batman series and of course, the use of a search light works absolutely well to depict a unusual way of displaying our team logo in the scene.
The bat logo did this well, originally I was going to have it in the sky with some dynamic clouding. However, due to that lack of a true skybox, because of how akward it worked with lighting, the use of an actually sky logo wouldn't have worked, with no collision for the lighting to shine on, so I decided to use it like a search light instead, which proved to be more beneficial.
In my sound production I developed the music that will work as a backing track for our trailer. The song was played by my brother, due to his skills with the guitar, and using Cubase I was able to clear up any peaks and create some VSTs, in order to hel provide a deeper ambience to the final production piece.
I have numerous inspritions from this particular piece that I developed, one of them was the Diablo theme, which inspired a rather dark feel and followed the path I was looking for. It potrayed that mysterious and anxious feeling that I wanted the individual to feel while they were watching my trailer.
A sample of this can be found here at this location.
I also had inspritation from Mark Collies, In Time, which insprired a true sense of blues, encapsulating a timbre that gave a solemn rythm and potrayed that moment in the right feed that I think worked well, it worked well in the film punisher, and I think if played along the right mood, which fits our trailer, it could help to give us the correct finish that we need. This is one of the reasons I based my ideal on this particular concept.
I had to interpret, my ideal and my thoughts to my brother, in which he did pretty well, coverying a slow and peaceful tone, against the words I used to describe them, Such as dark, soft, grumpy, and when I wanted him to speed up, using works like Anxious, Edgy, Running.
During my continuation with lighting techniques and appliances, my tutor showed me a unique way of rendering a photorealistic scene with a skylight, using a multiplier and setting an ambience/diffuse to create a sombre effect over the lighting and shadowing of the environment. The effect of which is to soften the overall scene, reduce the sharpness of the edges and textures. For the following screenshot render, I had dropped the multiplier for the skylight to 0.72 applying a yellow back ambience and using an omni close to the right column in order to generate a soft scene, alothough the lighting was not quite dark enough and the rendering took far too long, animation wise this would not be sufficient.
Lighting Sample #2
Using omni's and applying an ambient blue to represent the cold environment more. Omni's made a great effect with ustilising shadows and the normals form the texture maps where bumped with their presence which also confirmed my suspicions that a bump map cannot operate withoout a lighting source other than a skylight, which makes sense, through my understanding a normal map needs to be defined by a normalised vector calculation of direction therefore the normal could not be multiplied by the vector matrix in order to create the bump mapping impression. Also, the blue effect was too heavy creating a rather blue overlay that didn't fit the scene, the yellow warm ambience I believe didn't break the setting of a dark environment and also complemented the yorkshire stone colour.
Lighting Sample #3
The ambience coloured yellow for the sandstone appearance.
Today we began on selection on voting on the t-shirt design. We moved around each member noting each point we liked and disliked about the trailer. The team especially seemed unfond of black, due to the game graphic being of a black background it seemed ineffecient in order to generate a black image on a black background that needed a general order. However, might was quite cheap to create, compared to the others, on a budget that would have been a defining factor.
In the end we selected pretty much between Curtis and Joey. Curtis has gone for a plain white t-shirt, however the emphasis on text and not in the base image was a massive turn off for me personally, and it seemed for several others in the team. We selected Joey's design, who has gone all out in my opinion he choose a unique color (well unique, I consider dev t-shirts to be black but i'm old fashioned). We may add our own names to this shirt, taking Curts idea, however, depends on the overall costs and budget we are bound too. I am concerned about the general cost of the actual t-shirt but it is nicely designed, and expresses alot of what we do as developers, besides, it may be possible to get a discount.
Yesterday, I began the production side of developing my 3D envrionment, I decided to use a box modelling technique, which I believe works very well for building environments, and especially to create the concept for the Salts Building.
It was important that I referenced the images I had taken previously during our planning stage of the environment. Below is a couple of images that I used as a reference and a couple of images from yesterdays development progress.
These images were good enough to be able to view the detail and reference for a detailed replica of the model itself. Monday's work. I continued development in the next five hours I had the next day, unfortnatly with a laggy network and some oustanding pieces I had to catch up on I wasn't able to fully develop it to a standard that I would have liked to. Overall the general finished design finalised as this for this weeks production.
Today we also worked on our sound planning which has to be in next week, this was simple, describing the music for my area. We decided as team we would do the music for our own environments during the animation. This was a good idea and we tried to make sure to develop a consistency between the sections.
Today we also worked a movie production piece, developing a small section of editing, it was a good excercise, and helped to get our minds working on the editing/consistency which I need to assure works on my team.
