I am very pleased to announce the release of my second game, working in cooperation with DigitalDNA Games. It's called "Avatar Warfare", and as of tonight it's available on XBox Live Indie Game channel for just $1.00. It's a multi-player FPS game for up to 16 players, we took the formula from Avatar Laser Wars II and applied it to a conventional-weapons experience. There are several tongue-in-cheek references to COD along the way. :) For this game I created the environment & level design. We outsourced the weapons & animation (vs. me doing it all again) to save time & share more resources between games. As usual there were a number of issues to clean up with outsourced work, including me re-doing the animation idle pose (!) as well as fixing many animations. The entire environment is done with diffuse textures & light maps, no normal or specular info is present, since all the lighting was baked. I used 3ds Max + Mental Ray to bake the terrain, structures, and props into a unified model. This was a lot of fun and a better system than we had in Laser Wars, where everything was baked into the diffuse. With the game finishing up I hope to make more frequent updates to this blog (no really). It's been tough between the game & teaching the last few months to get anything else done. But I have about 5 different blog posts already planned out, including finishing the 3rd post in my F.E.A.R. 3 environment series. Here's the trailer for Avatar Warfare!
While giving a final to my DePaul students I started playing with nParticles in Maya. I love the chaos that comes from throwing hundreds of spheres into a collision field, so here's a sequence I created. This is 600 frames at 24fps, hdr/ibl lighting rig, 6 min/fr render time when particles are full in frame, i7-2670QM 2.2GHz. As it happens this type of animation is also a worst-case scenario for video compression. So apologies for the artifacts and I will try to get a true 720p version rendered out.
Egads, six months without a post on a blog I promised myself I would keep updated. Is bad, and I blame it on life.
What's gone on since September?
Production on my 2nd XBLIG game continues, recently built a brand new environment and new UI framework
Taught a graduate-level class on game art pipelines at DePaul. I had to write all the curriculum for this which was a major challenge
Taught another section of 3D Texturing & Lighting at DePaul, some great work from the students made it a lot of fun
Co-taught the senior capstone at Columbia, their project (Undertakers) is nearly GDC-ready, and it's looking really good!
My friend's iOS kickstarter fell short, but hopefully there's more to come on that
So my plan is to share a lot more visual output from these efforts, as well as post my long-overdue 3rd installment on the Fear3 visual process asap. If anybody still reads this stuff, thanks for your patience! :)
Howard Phillips was the U.S. voice of Nintendo in the 90's, and held the title of Game Master. Besides mastering the NES/SNES era of games, he appeared the in the comic strip "Howard & Nester" in Nintendo Power magazine.
I had the good fortune of working with Howard during my tenure at Microsoft. We worked on a fairly crazy project in the Incubation teams, it focused on merging games & learning on a new tablet computer for 5-7 year olds.
Anyway, I'm back working with Howard again creating the UI artwork for his new iOS venture, "Know It All". Today he launched a kickstarter which features a video of the project. Check it out if you get the chance, super cool!
I've been working on part 3 of my "Designing Environments..." series covering the environment creation process on F.E.A.R. 3. But alas, school has started and I'm teaching three classes this time, so this final update is taking longer than I expected. But check back soon it's coming! Meanwhile, my first Indie game release on XBox Live Indie Channel (XBLIG) has been holding strong in the #3 best-selling slot. But the competition is fierce! In a marketplace where 7 of the top 10 sellers are block games, I'm not sure how long our little space FPS will stay there... hoping for the best! I've also recently done the UI design for a secret upcoming iOS title, I will be talking about that once it's public. Stay tuned...
Previously, I talked about the cornerstones of game art pre-production; reference imagery and concept art. This week we move forward into 3D Design and realizing these ideas in actual game art. Early in the development of FEAR 3, the art team was up against some significant challenges. Our engine was previously designed to service large scale outdoor games like Fracture and MechAssault. So we had to essentially retool "level design" to accomodate the relatively smaller-scale worlds we had in mind for our FPS. Our first foray into 3D involved creating an "Art Test". By definition, an Art Test (sometimes also referred to as a beautiful corner) is designed to be a small snippet of a full 3d Environment. It demonstrates to the team and the publisher that that we have both the vision and the process to build the world art required to support 6-8 hours of single-player (and later co-op) campaign. Now, in a perfect world, you would start this process with a very small team of skilled artists. That way, you can prove your concept with less risk and drain on resources. In our case, we had about 7 or 8 3D environment artists in two locations, plus myself focusing on the Art Test. With that many people, you go wide and try to cover a lot of territory quickly to help offset the burn rate of a larger team in pre-production. We gave ourselves roughly a 60-day period to prototype two small Favela-style locations. And with the number of staff available, we were able to deliver playable prototypes that were fully set-dressed, at what we believed was alpha visual quality.* *Note: Many many trials and lessons later we learned what "alpha visual quality" means in the real world. Stay tuned for more on this. Level Art Beginnings To start, we ran through some initial meetings with the Design team in order to understand more about the game play goals, story elements, and what role the environments would play. This was an important step, even though we weren't building a "real" level yet. Similar meetings with Engineering would cover engine metrics, art tools, and pipeline, helping give us a better understanding of our capabilities and limitations. Then the Environment artists split into two mini-teams. Building on the great concept art and substantial reference imagery we assembled, one team focused on building the Favela Courtyard concept, and the other team started work on the Favela Alley concept. For the artists, this is probably one of the most fun times on a project, because it's a true visual exploration and discovery of potential. The Art Test isn't encumbered by all the other factors that go into making a real game level, it's a unique expression of realtime 3D artwork. Team Breakdown Although there was always crossover, artists on the team were assigned roughly as follows: Art Lead - manages the main World file and the placement of assets within, as well as integrating art created by the staff. This person is the gatekeeper of quality, consistency, and performance. Hard Surface Modelers - a majority of the team, they build all the structures, objects, and props needed for the level. Often they would create the textures and build the necessary shaders. Lighter - performs all duties required to light the world. This was usually myself in most of the early-to-mid FEAR 3 project work. The Art Test is kind of like building a film set of your ideal game presentation. However, all assets must be built at realistic game resolutions. Our goal was to load and run comfortably on the XBox 360, so that one could closely inspect and interact with the world elements. We combed through the concept & reference, producing lists of assets we wanted to make. Typically we'd categorize assets as "must-haves", "should-haves", and "nice-to-haves". This prioritization gave us a route to trim the lists without severely impacting the results (in case schedule became tight).
Results of the Art Tests So here's what we came up with. The Chicago team at Day 1 Studios (led by Murray Kraft) built the Courtyard. We decided to represent the space as a more open, dense urban Favela with a late afternoon sun and hot, dusty, polluted air. The Hunt Valley team at Day 1 Studios (led by Damien Bull) built the Alley. For that we wanted a more claustrophobic, close-quarters feeling with a mid-day sun and cooler color palette.
Here is some video captured from the Xbox 360 build:
And a few still images (wish I could have found more!):
Favela Courtyard Art Test
Favela Alley Art Test
As you can see we didn't try to build exactly 1:1 with the concept art. That sometimes can be cool, but in games it's often better to use concept art as a visual foundation. Not everything succesfully transferred from the concept art (mostly the richer, more saturated colors). But this was by design, as later we would need the characters to really pop in front of the backgrounds.
It's worth noting that none of what I am showing would have been possible without the hard work of many people on the FEAR 3 team at Day 1 Studios. It takes an incredibly dedicated team of artists, designers, programmers, and production staff to make a project like this come together.
Our first attempt at scaling up
Naturally a huge environment of complex worlds can’t be built entirely from unique assets. Re-use, modularity, and tiling are all methods that extend game content while making production feasible within narrow time frames.
Favela is a challenging subject to systemize, given the chaotic and organic layout of the spaces. So in our first run at systemizing the environment, we broke the structures into separate interiors & exteriors, and tried to craft a lego-style system to piece it all together. Separately, we experimented with shaders that would take a base set of textures and produce lots of variation for little memory cost.
Favela shacks are relatively simple architecture, a haphazard stack of boxes is a reasonably good metaphor for how these neighborhoods were constructed. We started with looking at interiors & exteriors as separate entities.
1)A single but complex material for exterior and interior surfaces
2)Variants would be created for 1st, 2nd, and subsequent stories of a structure
3)Consistent UV scale that wraps perfectly around edges
4)Collision modeled at this level
Some simple interior & exterior structural pieces that fit together
Then we created the "uber" material, one that would provide a rich surface with plenty of variation.
1)Use Vertex alpha for blending layers (rough vs. cracked/degraded)
2)Use Vertex color for edge grime
3)One material and with an atlas texture at around 24 shader instructions
Vertex alpha blends between textures, vertex color adds explicit interest
This approach gave us reasonably rich base surfaces which improved with geometric degradation applied. We could then layer on decal treatments to provide local detail. Structures would be built from a set of tiles that could mix & match exterior, interior, and multiple floors interchangeably
Early surface shader test of modular system
So far this all looked good on the drawing board! We proceeded to build our first playable space using this modular approach. Following are some screenshots:
Building on hills adds that fun complexity factor
Pretty cluttered view with weak path hinting, needs fixing!
This room would later become a meth lab
An early interior uncontaminated by props
We started integrating some high rise slum architecture
Hard lessons and Refinement
While our initial approach showed some promise, our modular construction system ended up being way more granular than we needed.
It was one of those sudden realizations that happens once all the pieces were on screen. Unfortunately, during normal game play the player moved through the environment so quickly that we had built way too much detail into the system.
It was not only too expensive to construct our worlds in terms of "per-minute of game play" cost, but the assets were too heavy in terms of performance when applied to larger level zones. This was primarily due to the mesh counts of all the pieces in the world.
Part of the solution was to find a way to slow down the player. But more importantly our system needed an overhaul. We would need to stop thinking of tiles as building sub-components or parts, and start thinking of them as entire buildings!
In addition to the above, we hadn't captured the essence of the Art Tests in this first level incarnation. Quite simply we had to get better at executing visually and systematically if we wanted any chance at building a full AAA game.
What's coming next:
Coming up in Part 3, I will detail how we modified our system approach, and scaled up again to hit both our visual and performance targets.
As an art director, I've had to work on or oversee pretty much all categories of game art. But the one area I've always loved the most is Environment Design. One could easily write a tome on the process of creating believable worlds in games. After years of working on sci-fi and fantasy franchises, the FEAR 3 project (Warner Bros. released June 2011) a.k.a. F3AR, represented the first time I had to deliver a near-future (almost present-day) world presentation. For those of you unfamiliar with the FEAR franchise, it's a survival horror game that combines paranormal elements (scary little girl, monsters) with psuedo-military futuristic combat. Accordingly the game takes place in dark, scary, moody locations often industrial or institutional in composition.
What was the goal for FEAR 3? The visual goal as desired by the producers & publisher was "AAA photo-realistic action-horror game, like FEAR 1 but bigger better bolder etc. in a post-apocalyptic setting just after the timeline in FEAR 2". For me, the term photoreal describes a neutral position, devoid of stylistic intent. It merely represents an easy way to describe "believable" or "realistic" in game graphics. But the actual Art Style would be driven primarly by lighting, color, and motion within context of the game play. FEAR 1 established a nice palette with high contrast hard-edged lighting. We decided to start there. One of the early directions for FEAR 3 was that it would take place primarily in South America, given that the protagonist in the first game had retreated there at the end. The directors liked the idea of Favelas as scary unpredictable environments, similar to those found in the slums of Rio De Jeinero or Sao Paulo in Brazil. The idea of a dark paranormal presence inhabiting a near-future (and exponentially bleaker) version of the modern world was compelling. Note: We thought we were being clever and original, not knowing that in the coming months both Modern Warfare 2 and the Hulk movie (and subsequently others) would be released featuring Favela locations.
First on the List was Visual Research Whether you are recreating a real-world location, or creating a fictional place that needs to feel real, obtaining high quality reference material is absolutely necessary to ensure a credible execution. Physically or virtually, one needs to "live in those worlds" for a while in order to gain a grasp on building them convincingly. These days, big-time game studios work more like film studios. If the goal is to feature a real-world location in the game, then location scouts investigate possible choices, returning with hundreds of photos as specified by the client. After the production team narrows down the choices, field teams are sent with photographers and videographers to "capture" the key location sites. This capture process focuses on everything that feels important; the architecture, lighting, surfaces, moods, ambient sounds, props & objects, landmarks... and most importantly the people on the team experience what it's like to be there, to feel the place in person. The team returns with a mountain of data, photos, video, and audio that become the basis of reference for the game's creative staff. If a location visit isn't possible (e.g., going to Sao Paolo didn't work out) you instead build your reference database remotely. Fortunately, major cities are typically well documented on many levels.
Looking for the Right Images In order to create a bleaker, scarier Favela environment, we started by identifying the key visual aspects which had the potential for an exciting, diverse experience. For us these aspects were: - Unique organic architecture, consisting mostly of found materials - Byzantine vertical topography that did not feel "on a grid" - Threatening vibe of haphazard slums and dark mysterious areas - Unique style of urban graffiti & visual language of Pixacao Next, we performed extensive research on Favela-style locations and media, including but not limited to: - Building a massive collection of over 1700 images of Favelas from university sites, photo blogs, and historical web archives - Study of published books including Shadow Cities, Favela, and Pixacao. - Deep scrutiny of films featuring Favelas, including City of God, City of Men, Favela Rising, Carandiru, and Bus 174 to help capture the look & feel of life within these communities. Hundreds of key frames were captured as stills for reference. After gathering all this coarse data, we proceeded to do a narrower cull of images. Specifically we chose key images in the following categories (a small sampling follows):
Topography
Favela Architecture
Street-Level Views
Degrading Civil Infrastructure
Architectural Surfaces I
Architectural Surfaces II
Transformed Building Facades
Stark Contrast between Poverty and Wealth
Favela Interiors
Unique Style of Graffiti and Pixacao Lettering
Identifying Useable Construction Elements Next, we looked for specific architectural traits and styles in the reference images that we could incorporate into our world building. This was done by marking up key reference images with call-outs and descriptions highlighting the elements we wanted to utilize.
This process was driven by our lead concept artist Eliott Lilly, an exceptionally talented artist whose concept work also is shown farther into this article.
Key Features Markup #1
Key Features Markup #2
Key Features Markup #3
Key Features Markup #4
Key Features Markup #5
An aspect of this process also worth mentioning is finding the emotional cues within the environment. These are human-imprint artifacts, things that represent the fictional culture, their ideas and beliefs. Graffiti, religious shrines, and personal props all become part of this visual language. We leverage them to help give life to an otherwise sparsely populated environment. Bring on the Concept Art The concept artists are core to the visual design process, contributing tone & mood pieces, color studies, paint-overs of in-game art to assist the 3d artists, visualization of key assets and props, as well as painting vistas and 2D background elements for the game.
When starting out on a new environment design process, typically we'd pick some cool potential spaces and just let the concept artists run with ideas within a few high-level constraints.
In attempting to look beyond the horror cliche of night settings, we liked the idea of a harsh, late afternoon sun-baked scenes with high contrast shadows where creepy things might lurk, heavy pollution, appearing deserted, with a decaying near-future South American urban atmosphere.
With all this in mind, a few key concept pieces are picked (from many) to serve as primary environment touchstones. These two pieces (Courtyard and Alley) created by Eliott Lilly gave us a solid target for our 3D Art Tests which would follow.
Favela Courtyard
Favela Alley
Color Study and Variations
Ideally, color studies are done in concert with a story so that your world presentation is in sync with the emotional beats. Nobody would ever draw a storyboard without a script right? Yet at the time our story was still in flux, so in order to prepare for anything, Eliott did a range of color studies on given spaces to explore how they would feel at different times of day or changing weather conditions. From the color studies we can ultimately extract color palettes for the artists to use when building the 3D versions.
Color Studies and Explorations on Favela Courtyard
In addition to the color & mood variations, we also explored finer iterations of lighting & surface treatments in a given space. Lighting would end up being a cornerstone of the project, and so a concept art track was dedicated to this.
Lighting Variants & Moods for Favela
There was also this idea of an alternate universe forming, something we called "world behind the walls". The idea was a parallel universe, similar to the hell from the movie Constantine, that co-existed with our normal world. Creatures from this alternate universe were breaking through into ours, and occasionally you (the player) would be able to see this world switch in & out while fighting these creatures.
Normal Street View Paint-Over
Alternate Hella-verse Street View Painting
Throughout pre-production, dozens of amazing concept images get created for a given environment (see more of these on Eliott's website). But that's just the beginning. We have to take that beautiful imagery and convert it into a systematic, modularly constructed game environment.
What's Next? In my next post I will cover moving into 3D, how we created the first in-game Art Tests for the Favela environment, and how we scaled up from there into modular construction of much larger worlds! Be sure to check out more of the Art of Eliott Lilly:
