GHOSTBUSTERS: Multiplayer art dump
polycounter lvl 19
Hello!
My last full project @ Threewave was as an artist for the Ghostbusters multiplayer team. Below are screenshots of the maps I was directly involved with, and handled either the majority or at the very least, 50% of the art tasks for.
The majority of the meshwork is original in these shots. Textures were either used from single-player or created by myself or the other artist involved. Lighting was done by another fellow at the company.
All the work was made in 3DS Max and imported, amazingly easily I should add, in to the Infernal Engine. Shaders, meshes, and all that magic could be easily imported straight out of Max and in to the game without a lot of overhead to deal with. Great engine for artists, to say the least.
My last full project @ Threewave was as an artist for the Ghostbusters multiplayer team. Below are screenshots of the maps I was directly involved with, and handled either the majority or at the very least, 50% of the art tasks for.
The majority of the meshwork is original in these shots. Textures were either used from single-player or created by myself or the other artist involved. Lighting was done by another fellow at the company.
All the work was made in 3DS Max and imported, amazingly easily I should add, in to the Infernal Engine. Shaders, meshes, and all that magic could be easily imported straight out of Max and in to the game without a lot of overhead to deal with. Great engine for artists, to say the least.
Replies
So when using the infernal engine, you model the level first then import it as a whole mesh? I'm interested in how everything translates from Max to the engine. If you allowed to talk about it.
Thanks for the break down shots!
I really have to check out Infernal.
objects. From that, Infernal was used for lighting and for scripting. Ryan Monday (Mangled Poly) can
elaborate on this, though.
Fun note of interest #1: If a flat surface, like a wall, seems unesseccarily cut up with extra edges it was
a requirement of GB's tech. The scars left on walls from the Proton beam, at the time anyway, wouldn't
show up on large triangles so they had to be cut down.
Fun note of interest #2: No second UV's needed for lightmaps! So awesome! All we had to do was select
the meshes we'd like lightmapped and flag it as such! Literally! So fucking fast compared to other... engines.
Fun note of interest #3: Basic materials (such as diff, spec, bump, etc) didn't need ANY setup inside of
Infernal engine. So long as it was setup within a standard Max shader, it would export AND WORK. Only
complex shaders needed to be setup inside of Infernal... which is a node-based material editor.
Haha, we hate them! Actually, thats a lie. In the end we loved them. BUT!!! You can shoot ALL OF THEM. With the proton pack, every single one of those bricks can be shot and flung out in to space or over top of the gameplay area. It was a pain in the ass to solve (re: HAAAATE) but once we nailed it, damn were we satisified.
pretty much that easy. for larger levels you may cut it into multiple legos and attach them within the engine, but most of the building of the level is done in max.
anyways. awesome job adam. when we first got to checkout what you guys were doing with the multiplayer it was a total moral boost to how cool the game was going to be. twisted stacks design is kick ass. gj.
wanted to pick it up, but apparently atari got some kind of weird ass deal with sony and the game will be delayed on 360 in europe
oh and congrats on first shipped title man
Their are actually many different methods for building your levels from art assets. The first of course being the method Adam used which is importing a whole area done in max right into the engine. However you can also do tile sets where you have many parts in one file that you can hide on and off to piece together a level. I usually recommended a hybrid of building the shells in max and exporting the small props and using the engine to propagate. This allows for faster iterations of building, plus the engine has better placing tools.
Like Adam covered we will auto convert your max standard materials for you so you do not have to rebuild them on import. we support max and maya's standard material for this. However, we also have many custom direct-x materials like multi-texture blending that will automatically import for you as well. On cases you want to make a really advanced material you can in the engines material editor then link it back to max and maya. Also you can do things like collision mesh flagging and geometry type flagging right in the 3d package, so once you import into the engine it is all setup for you.
There are many cool features Adam has mentioned plus many... many more
cool work, thanks for sharing.
I wanted to get a "light" version up and running for unearthly.. but since we announced we are licensing we have been so crazy busy that it may not happen this year... Kind of a bittersweet thing for me cause you know how much I loves my unearthly!
Grr.
the tree wireframe mesh is missing on your wireframe shot in the church entrance scene. :0
Also as you said everything was imported into engine from max. you created the terrain in max as well, which I dont see normally. does infernal have a terrain editor? isnt bsp easier on loading rather than a huge object that has to entirely load everytime. ... thats from my limited knowledge off hourences site.. but was it just easier and faster to do it this way, or could you explain a little more about the terrain creation and why its from max?
This is more of a question for Mangled Poly, but here are my 2 cents: Terrains as easy to make in Max as anywhere else. The levels were blocked out using BSP which we then used as guidelines for doing the artwork for the map but the engine is designed around mesh work being used.
Hourences is talking about Unreal. It doesn't negate his fact, but I wanted to be clear. The mutliplayer maps are essentially arenas which can be seen in their entirety from any point in the map, more or less. Only a FEW had 'rooms' which would require some view portal magic to happen, and even then the engine took care of that.
The tree is missing because it was placed as a prop within the editor, not within the Max scenes.
Also like the sheets of paper motif, I always loved how far 2000AD took this sort of thing in the Megacity lower depths, really pushed that hard boiled feeling of cultural saturation.
Is that roof top a cannibalised version of your skateboard map you made a while back?
Haha, my skatepark was brought up a couple times during development
Awesome work dude. :thumbup: :thumbup:
you know this qualifies as "dream job" don't you?
Please keep in mind that the mesh work isn't exactly the most efficient, when speaking generally for games. For Infernal, it was great and needed to be as it is. There is a lot of (what looks to be) inefficient lines cut all over the place, or alternatively often times HUGE 'ngons'. At the time the engine was finicky about render mesh triangle sizes AND their proximity to the collision mesh and this is the result.
So, I wouldn't say they'd make good reference for 100% efficient environment modelling, but If anyone has specific questions/comments about the mesh work I'd love to hear it!
And yeah this Infernal engine sounds really sweet. I hate setting up a second uv channel for lightmaps!!