Sci-Fi Corridors

Here is a little teaser of a new model pack I am working on. This is all rendered in Lightwave but I already talked with Hummel to render it with his amazing lighting plugin in Gamestudio.

i will buy it XD

really great... how long do you spend time on it?
Are these Textures be in the Sci-Fi Texture Pack what you have published some month ago?
Would this Package have only some corridors without the Models like Fence / barrel / crate / pipes etc?

cYa Sebastian

I'm amazed! Really beautiful, you've done great job

I spent a lot of time. I did not count. Probably too much compared to the price we are offering. The reason is that I built a high poly object for each model and each texture you see to render the normal, height, colour and ambient occlusion maps.

This pack comes with more than 30 decoration models (walls, door frames, doors, pipes, cables, camera, monitor, fire extinguisher and more). You can see these models in the screen shots. All textures of these decoration models are also generated from high poly geometry.

There will probably be 2 versions of this pack:

• The standard edition contains all the decoration objects but no pre-made corridors. It might be good for customers who want to make their own corridors from scratch, maybe with a world editor like WED.
• The level edition contains the decoration objects plus some pre-made corridors and crossings. It also contains some downscaled versions of some of the textures of our sci-fi 4 texture pack. This might be interesting for new customers or for people who just want to have some pre-made level for prototyping or extending.

I plan to extend this series with more content like an administration area, control rooms, hangar bay, living quarter, prison section and so on.

Some animated sci-fi weapons are also on our to-do list.

Big quality, You should work in a game company

How did you???...
Man what do you use to make those levels?

Modo, Lightwave, TheGIMP, a lot of time, many reference images and some imagination.

what is the poly count???

would love to see how lightfrog renders this

Darkinferno: You probably will see it.

Sadsack: The polycount differs from corridor to corridor. But with all these props included a corridor has something around 30 to 50 thousand triangles. This comes mainly from the cylinders used on pipes and rails. But these polies dont come as a huge mesh. They are split into separate sub meshes around 5 thousand each. So when you look at only a part of the corridor some other parts are out of camera frustum and can be culled. So the GPU often has less to render.
But when you combine many of these corridors to a big level, then you need some more scene management (not only view frustum culling). Maybe it can be done with the new regions or in combination with a basic BSP layout.

thats amazing! great work as usual!

will the UDK formats be included in the package, or will we have to import/export this from fbx/max to whatever format we want?

I am not sure about UDK format at this moment. I have to do some testing before.

By the way: Each mesh is closed and works with stencil shadows. This is of course a reason for a couple more polygons. Here is another small corridor:



And here is a corner element for turning left and right:

I am speechless - fantastic!!!

great, fantastic, amazing !!! Good work.

Somehow makes me want to play around with some lowres version on the iPhone

i will buy the extended pack if there will be one ^^

Thank you
renny

Thanks for all the kind words.

Slin: I just made a short test for you. When I remove all the cables and pipes then the following corridor has only 812 polygons. It is still a closed mesh. So when you remove the backside polygons, it would even be less (I guess something around 500):

Almost makes me want to dump my rpg and make a sci fi game lol...

and i still ask for seperate corridor pars for UDK. packing it all in a UPK would not be so hard.

This is definitely something I have in mind. I want to test these assets with different technologies and UDK is also on my todo list. There you have to make your own CSG walls but the decoration elements will help to achieve the same look as I showed here. Another interesting fact about UDK is: the new lighting system can even light the entire level from the included textures with emission channels. All my lamp textures come with emission textures. So theoretically you could light the entire level only with geometry.

Here is a first test in a real-time engine (deferred renderer with almost 100 lights in my small level and occlusion culling to render only what you see):



I get around 100 FPS in 1920x1080 screen resolution.

what pc do you have? o.0

My PC is a bit old now:
Core2 Duo E8500 @ 3.16 GHz
GeForce 9800 GTX

It is not my PC. A deferred render really can deal with this huge amount of lights, as long as they don't cast shadows. So I have only a couple shadow casters in each room. And when I add post processing like SSAO then it is noticeably slower.

any eta on when we might see an ingame preview with lightfrog ?

argh, dont stress me-.-

lol ^ ^ ur too epic to be stressed

Schleimer-.-

I made levels for 2 different engines with these models and textures:

C4 engine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFC95kLr1FU

Unity engine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVN4Sfr58c4

Now I still want to test it in UDK, while Wicht is helping to implement in T3D and Hummel wants to render it with Lightfrog in Gamestudio.

Definatly some great stuff, even though I wonder where all those polygons are on that lowpoly corridor screenshot. But on the other hand my mobile is supposed to be similar performant as the first xbox, so there should be quite a few more details possible.
If it wouldn´t be a kinda senseless investion for me, I definatly couldn´t await the release Hm, but I am still thinking about it...^^
Which is interesting, as I once discussed with you about buying and selling ressources and at that time I just could not imagine me to buy anything. But now, that I´ve got at least a bit money, thats changing

I btw prefer the C4 clip, as I don´t like that flashlight thingy And aren´t the shadows a little bit too dark? All those metallic surfaces should reflect the light pretty well and as they are quite detailed there should also be a lot of light scattered randomly which is then reflected to the viewers eye from within the shadow regions. The dearkness is probbly okay, but my first impression was, that they are too dark .

Oh and happy birthday .

Thanks Slin.

Regarding the polygons: The corridor you are mentioning has some splits at the ground for using 3 different floor textures. So it is not one big plane made by only 2 triangles, there are some more cuts for uv-mapping. And as I already mentioned there are backfaces for everything even for the columns to create closed meshes. This is needed for stencil shadows (C4 uses stencil shadows).

I also preferred the C4 scene, but now I changed the materials in the Unity scene a bit to look very similar to the C4 metal while still using more lights. I think it looks better now.

The shadows are dark. In my earlier versions I had a brighter ambient light, but it did not look good with the flash light. So I darkened it again. And I personally love high contrast between dark and bright. And ambient light washes everything out. Normals and spec are less visible and there is no mood then.
But I will also try the lightmap render functions in Unity and UDK to look how it feels with some bounced light.

I like it! And any sci-fi material is good material
gs lacks sci-fi themes way too much, so this should come handy.

good work so far, keep it up
cheers

Thanks Blattsalat.

I continued to improve this package to work perfectly in real game environments.
So I made collision geometry like the following for all corridor models and props.



I checked it with a profiler tool and I found this:



As you can see it reduces the usage of scripts for collision detection a lot, not just a tiny bit, it reduces it significantly. So there is more room for other scripts, rendering, effects, whatever.

So from what I see it is highly recommended to use extra lowpoly models only for collision detection like I did in this test environment.

are you sure that collision detection is "scripts" and not "physics"? i think unity uses physx for collision detection.

Yes, when you use a rigid body, then it is physics. But in this case it comes from the character motion controller, colliding with the geometry. It seems to be a script. I did not look into details. But what you see is exactly the same scene with the same rendering setup. The only difference is the colliding.

And as you can see, physics is merely visible in the profiler.

I also experienced the orange script peaks in exactly the moments, when I ran into walls, boxes or against pipes.

By the way, here you can see an image with only ambient occlusion and normal mapping applied.
I personally love what AO can do. It always looks like 3d on steroids, especially when there is some geometry like these columns and pipes to occlude something.

With AO like this it would even be possible to not use any shadows at all, since the AO fakes some global illumination lighting/shadowing.

I love the sterile look of that last image. I think one day I'll make a game with lots of AO and little else

Can´t wait.. when will it be ready (and what will it cost)?

Actually it is ready since last week. But I improve it to make it our best pack so far. So I created collision geometry as already mentioned. And last days I made a second UV-set for all models with non-overlapping UVs. This is useful for many projects with the need of a lightmap in the second uv-set. Now I only have to do some tests with this additional UV-set.

The set of environment models will be prized as usual. The bundle with models plus all corridors together will be slightly higher as usual. We did not decide it finally.

We also thought about offering each corridor separated as another option. This might be a very cheap option for people who only want to play around with some shaders and lighting.

I’ve been gone for a while, and I’m so glad you keep guys keep going strong!

You’ve really done an awesome job here. I can see a lot of work went into it.

A couple things:

1. I think you should look at including environmental mapping in some fashion (maybe a few surfaces or a few models). With all those metallic surfaces there should be at least some illusion of reflection. Maybe include some cubemaps.

2. In my opinion it needs more color. Even caution lines or painted numbers would make a huge difference.

Thanks Jake, you are right with your comments. And something like this is already planned for the upcoming packs. There will be some storage rooms and a loading bay section and some machinery with lots of caution lines, signs and more color.

Environment cubemaps will make it into the glass objects, when I create some windows and when I work on the medical research facility.