More Bits and bobs and a look into the future

This section will serve as an explanation of some of the other things I’ve been working on for ether that didn’t really need a whole section made for them, as well as a look into what I’ll be working on next.

First I could mention Lens Flares. Lens flares were made through textures in Photoshop. In order to save memory, 3 different lens flares were comprised in one image. To do this I simply painted monochromatic lens flares into each one of the image’s channels (R,G,B) allowing me to have 3 different lens flares in one image. Lens flares were also used to simulate Bloom due to the glitch UDK currently has on DX9, where a yellow Bar appears on the right of the screen if bloom is activated.

 The buoys in the sea were made using the same techniques, only applying a Sine wave for movement in the material.   

The next big thing would be the Skydome. With the same idea in my head of keeping everything reusable and versatile, I created a skydome that could be used for night time scenes as well as day time, dawn, dusk, etc. To do this I made a material network that would allow to change the colour of the sky, clouds (and clouds amount) and stars. This material also allows to edit the amount of stars in the night sky as well as their complete deactivation.

As for the future, for Ether 2 I will be creating a lot of Snow systems, as well as making the season changes more interactive and better. I will continue to try and create the most efficient workflows possible so that our small studio doesn’t have to spend too many resources.

Here is a video detailing a few other things and with better explanations:

I hope you have enjoyed my work so far! Until next time!

Particle Systems!

Particle systems in Ether posed pretty much the same problems as everything else so far. How to make them fit the Ether style? How can we make them quickly? Bellow you will find some of the particle systems I created for Ether and how the process was.

One of the main issues with VFX work is that it can be very time consuming. The other issue is, when making Ether in a hand painted style, you almost want to stray away from using technology too much and avoid normal maps or anything too “techy”. When making particles this was to be the same, however, since we didn’t have much time to meet our deadlines, We allowed technology to do most of the work for us. I figured, as long as the textures look like they belong in Ether, that’ll do!

The first particle system is the Flies that hover around the port’s lamp posts. This was simply made by creating a soft edged 16x16 texture of a yellowish dot. After that, I just applied an orbit module to the particles and adjusted their velocity and spawn areas. A very simple yet efficient particle system.

The second particle system is the chimney smoke. To make this I used a flipbook technique, in which I divided an image in 16 parts (4x4) to create the different steps of the animation of smoke from its birth to its expansion and eventual disappearance. This allowed me to make the smoke look hand painted and fit the ether style, while not having to worry about actual animation for the smoke. When importing, it’s important to check the “Flipbook” option. After that, I edited the material and applied it to the particle system, and after a few tweaks I got the effect I wanted.

For the wind particle systems, we decided to go with something more painterly, as if an invisible brush was drawing the strokes of wind within the world. To do this, a simple, soft edge 16x16 texture was used and a Ribbon Particle system was created. This allowed us to animate the particle system and move it around the level as it leaves a trail of paint on the world. The results are surprisingly nice for such a simple particle system!

The last particle system I wanted to look at is a prime example of how to create workflows that are efficient and fast for small teams. In the case level, the team had the idea of having birds flying around the level. Since creating 3d models of these and rigging them and then animate them would have taken up too many resources, I decided to tackle the problem with a particle system. I applied the same Flipbook principle I used for the chimney smoke and made a texture with the different stages of wing span of a bird’s flight. This allowed me to create hand painted textures of the birds, and after that, I was able to use an orbit module in the particle system to recreate the flying of the birds. The results were convincing and far cheaper than making a 3D version with animation.

You can find a video breakdown of the particle Systems of Ether here:

 

The trees of Ether

When setting out to create the trees for Ether, the team had the idea of being able to change the seasons on the fly, so for example, one minute it would look like a summer day, the next it would turn to autumn. From the get go, I had this in mind and I was able to create a system that allowed for us to do that, by slightly tweaking the grass shader I made earlier on in the development process.

Apart from that, making trees that would hold up to the Ether style in a fast and efficient manner would prove to be quite hard. Modelling trees in an singular fashion, creating enough variation and making sure Uv mapping them in the traditional manner would have taken an extremely long amount of time, and since we’re a team of 2 artists, I had to figure out a system that would allow me to create trees in a fast manner, UV map them with ease, and for them to allow for an almost modular approach in their creation workflow.

The following explains how I go about making the trees for Ether and how I managed to create an efficient workflow for a small team.

The first thing I did was create a spline that would define the shape of the tree. Each branch would become a separate spline. After this is done, I made a cylinder and edited it to make it resemble a tree trunk or branch.  Once this was done I UV mapped this piece. The idea behind this method is that we will now duplicate our cylinder and create an INSTANCE of the original. This will ensure that every time we need to edit our branches, we can just edit the original and not have to worry about akward rotations or positions that our branch will take.

Once we have our instanced cylinder, we apply the “Path deform” modifier and stretch the cylinder to follow the shape of the branch. After making a few of these branches, we will have the skeleton of our Tree.  Now we can paint the texture for the bark. In this case, for the Oak, I made the following texture:

Now it’s time to make the textures for the leaves. One thing I must note is that when texturing the leaves, I didn’t want to create extreme colour variations. The reason behind it is that to ensure the transition between summer and Autumn doesn’t end up having unrealistic coulours like blue leaves!

Once this is done, we can create a plane that is Vertex painted (in order to work with the wind expression) and apply our leaves texture. With these planes, we can now create a clump of leaves that we can place as branches and create the canopy of our tree.

The final result in udk is:

And to show the season changes:

Here is also a Forested area created with the trees and foliage:

Here you can find a video explaining the tree making process: