And here are the Results in UDK

I did my tessellation video, I'm very happy with the results! Problems still appear though:

Fixing seams seems imperative at this point.

After talking with my tutor Josh... do we need lighting information in the Diffuse now that the engine is handling all of that? Do we need such a detailed normal map?

In any case, here is the video documenting my progress:

Normal maps... depthmaps! EVERY MAP!!

Now that I have finished my sculpting process, I have extracted a number of maps based on the information I put into my sculpt. Here are the maps I generated:

Normal Map:

Used for Current Gen set ups, to aid with the comparison I'm making.

DepthMap:

Used to generate tessellation based on our Depthmap.

And then I created my Diffuse and Specular Maps:

 

More Updates

 Here is some of my progress! I just finished creating a sculpt of my rocks for the rock wall. As you can probably see, I tried to exaggerate the shapes and crevices of the rocks quite a lot. The idea behind this is to see how well my depth map will portray my sculpt and see if it can really be used to have fully artist controlled assets using tessellation. 

 

 

After that, I created a base or “mud” layer on which the bircks would rest. In this case, I tried to make the details subtle… this will test if the depthmap can translate the subtle information into good tessellation.

 

 

The final result is this:

 

So now, I just have to put it into UDK and hopefully make it work!

 

 

 

Small Update

This post is just to give you a small update on what I will be working on. As mentioned earlier, I will be exploring the possibilities on Tessellation using sculpts and depth maps based on those sculpts. For this test, I will be creating a stone wall. The reason behind making a stone wall is that it will give me a very clear representation on how the tessellation is working, and it will make it easy to create a depthmap based on my sculpt.

As with my older test, I will be creating a comparison between a normal, “current Gen” setup and the tessellation. Stay tuned!

More Tessellation

As expected, I continue doing my work on tessellation using UDK as my engine of choice. Talking with my tutor Josh, we discussed the areas we could go into with tessellation. After a long discussion we decided tackle tessellation in a way that the artist would have full control of how the tessellation works on each asset and how it would look.

After doing some research I concluded that using depthmaps based on sculpts created by the artist would allow for clear, concise, precise and fully art controlled tessellation.  This is the path I will follow from now on and what I will be working on in the next few weeks.

On another note, Josh has decided to put me in touch with a tessellation expert at Nvidia, so I will begin to make some work in order to show him and see if he can point me in the right direction.

Tessellation it is!

After me and Josh had debated on the route I should take in terms of next gen processes, wwe decided to go with tessellation. 

I have been working hard on getting good results and I am now ready to show what I have been able to set up. This is a Work in Progress video but I believe it gets the point of tessellation across. Hopefully I will be able to develop this further and fix some issues that come with it. (UV seams are a bit of a problem right now!!)

Here it is!

So... Next gen?

My journey begins... and it really couldn't start any more exciting for me as having the possibility of looking at next gen processes. I Don't know what I might get out of this (given the limited access that I have to Next Gen engines and tools), however my focus will lie upon emulating what I think will be good next gen workflows and techniques for artists using the engines available to us today.

My first meeting with Josh had me shooting for what I thought what would be possible to do in the near future (with the dawning of the release of the next gen engines just around the corner), and where I thought the next gen might be going. Together we started brainstorming and with a little research I had done prior to the meeting, we decided to look at tessellation techniques and set-ups that could help us prepare us to generate "Future Proof assets". 

What do we mean by that?

With "Future Proof Assets",  we aim to develop assets that could be easily transferred to a next gen engine and have it work with all the elements of said engine, without extending production time for a studio , and thus, without generating more cost for that studio. to achieve this we must create this asset on an engine that is available to us now. A good example of why this would be very useful would be any game that would release close to whenever the next gen arrives. To maximize profit and efficiency, naturally, a studio would want to release his game on all possible hardware. However, the production cost and time implications of re-generating all game assets so that they work on the new engines and justify the game being on a next gen engine would typically be very large.

We aim to cut the cost and time of production, using assets that we can create on a "present engine" (such as UDK). These assets must work on both present, and next gen engines. However the next gen engine version must take advantage of the technological advancements of  the new engine.

  

 (Excuse the crudity of my drawings! :s)

To do this I will be looking at dynamic tessellation on in-game objects. I believe this is what the industry is moving towards. Understanding how to set this up and how to keep it cheap on the performance side can be hard... but I guess it wouldn't be worth doing if it wasn't a challenge!

 

So stick around, hopefully I will have some sort of approach to this sometime soon, and hopefully I will receive feedback from anyone who might read this.

Hello World!

Here we go!

Well, to put it simply, this will be my "Hello World" post. My name is James Burton, and I'm a video game artist. In my short experience I have mainly specialised in Environment art, however, I have always had a very technical approach to it since this is where my interest has mainly lied in the past few years.

I feel extremely proud to be able to say that I am working as an Environment/Tech Artist at White Paper Games on our debut title Ether. So far it has been an amazing experience. In fact I feel privileged to be able to work around the talents of Ben, Pete, Oj and NJ. I will be working on this game as I go through my MA and can only hope that the copious amounts I'm learning just by working on this game with the people around me will aid and add to the quality of my MA course as much as possible (however related or unrelated this MA might be!).

I really don't know what I hope to make out of this MA apart from expanding my knowledge in general game art, as well as developing my skills as a technical artist with the help of my tutor: Josh Taylor. But I guess not knowing where this MA will take me is a good thing; having an open minded approach to any new project has always been something I have held in high regard and for something as important to me as this, it certainly makes me wonder what I can achieve and will be able to achieve once I go through this journey. The uncertainty is scary, but it's damn exciting!

So I will leave it here for now, I've never been good with introductions, but I guess that there is not much introduction to be made when my career has only just started! I will update this blog as often as possible and hopefully review my progress in an honest way... my only hope is that whoever is reading this finds it as interesting and exciting as I know I will!