While we discuss how to best create the buildings for the race track, I did some more work on the Riviera.
Here are a few progress renders:
There’s still a lot to do before I begin to add the weapons and armor. I want to make sure I have the best possible base mesh to work with before I move on to the fun stuff…
I have been working on the warehouse. I created these tileable assets to create the exterior walls;
They don’t look like much on they’re own, but when I tile them and throw in a few detail meshes it begins to take shape…
More to come…
The team here at Digital-Mercs laid out our asset list recently, and chose which assets we wanted to work on. It was decided that we will create the tileable assets first so that large areas of the track can be built asap.
I opted to create a two-story warehouse that will appear on the inside of the track’s first turn.
The above image was taken from a screen cap pulled from the blue-ray version of Death Race.
I will be re-creating the building by breaking it up into it’s major parts, and then creating specific assets to add detail.
In the following image, I have highlighted the major areas of the building…
The building is similar to a cake, it is made up of three layers. I will also be creating the smaller blue building. It’s will be used in multiple areas of the track, but with different colors.
The nature of our project lends itself well to lots of tiling assets. The trick to making tiling assets believable, it to make them look like unique versions of the same thing. In the same way that no two manholes on a New York City street would collect exactly the same wear, We don’t want any two tiled assets in our game to look like exact copies.
To this end I’ve been building some simple tests in Unreal to get the most mileage out of our props.
To give you some background on the layout of this test scene, it’s just a bunch of simple BSP cubes. The floor and back wall have a neutral grey material with no specularity applied to them. You’ll see the color of the floor and back wall change though. This is because the level is lit with a single light with Lightmass (Global Illumination) set to 6 bounces. Since the only real color in the scene is red, everything else gets chroma-shifted in that direction.
First off, the scene with a 128×128 Brick texture applied to everything:
Next, the same material with a grunge mask, locked to the world position.
You can see that the grunge mask adds a bit of nice detail to the otherwise plain surface, but still it’s fairly obvious that it is just an overlaid texture.
Finally, the same material with a grunge mask locked to the world position, and a detail mask of a larger tiling scale locket to the world position. This detail mask is designed to add detail near the ground to make it look as if dirt and grime have collected there.
In the course of putting together this project, I made another personal discovery, Global illumination looks a little silly when the entire scene is dominated by one color (In this case, Red.) In actual application this shouldn’t be an issue.
Finally, here’s the material network I created for this demo. The only thing not shown in this picture are the scale values in the TexCoord nodes. I played with the values to make the grunge appear more subtle, and to make the detail layer fit the block height.
I must begin this post with a tip of the hat to Bradd. I was having trouble getting the holes in the Rivie’s wheels just right, and he swooped in with some suggestions that were spot on. My thanks go out to you good sir.
Here are two renders of where I am currently at on the wheels for the Riviera.
The light setup used in these renders is not perfect, but I think it get’s the point across.
Jon and I have been working on a simple proof of concept for PDR. The idea is to create a simple track in UDK and add a vehicle.
For the Proof of Concept I am creating a few simple assets. These models will most likely not be used in the final project.
Asset Name: Steel Trellis
I created the Steel Trellis with the mindset of building assets that can be used in multiple configurations, and would be easily multiplied to create different structures.
Examples of multiple configurations.
Asset Name: Finish Line Lights
These lights will be used in unison with the Steel Trellis asset to create a starting/finish line for the Proof of Concept.
An example of how the assets can be used together.
Here is a quick progress render for the Riviera. I would like to be further along, but Turkey Day cut into my project time. I placed black planes into the window areas of the car so the render would look better until a true interior exists.
The team is looking into how to setup destroyable assets in UDK, so for the time being I am keeping the various sections of the car separate.
The Death Race to GDC has begun.
Race is the key word in “Project Death Race.” So it’s not at all surprising that a vehicle or two will be created for this project.
After discussing who will be making what, I decided to take on the task of creating the 1966 Buick Riviera. Known from here on as the 666′ or the “Rivie.”
1966' Buick Riviera as seen in "Death Race"
To get this asset started I searched the internet for some decent pictures of the car to use as reference. Hoping to at the very least find a nice profile shot.
I found what in my opinion was the holy grail of reference images:
1969' Riviera reference image
I shrunk the above image down in Photoshop before posting it here.
As with anything that seems too good to be true, there is an issue with the image I found. The car in the movie was a 1966, and the car in the image is a 1969… But after close inspection of the cars I noticed that the only major difference is that the 69′ Riviera has a larger bumper than the 66′ and that area of the car is going to be covered in steel plates. The shape of the car is the same so I’m not too worried.
I doubt fans of Death Race or Buick Riviera’s will come after me for not being 100% true to the source material…