Authoring of procedural rocks in The Blacksmith realtime short
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This talk provides an overview of common approaches to authoring procedural environments in games. It then describes the pipeline used to author rock formations for the short film "The Blacksmith" in 3 sentences or less: A) Unique objects were created using procedural generation tools, exported, cleaned up, and had textures projected to create normal maps and albedos, then detailed in Substance Painter. B) For backdrop objects, height maps from Terragen were made tileable and used to displace basic shapes in 3DS Max, which were optimized and given procedurally mixed textures for variation. The method aimed to create natural-looking detailed objects efficiently without extensive modeling and allowed reuse across different environment types for different
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Authoring of procedural rocks in The Blacksmith realtime short
- 2. Authoring of procedural environments in The Blacksmith real time short Veselin Efremov Unity Technologies
- 3. About... ● Veselin Efremov ● “The Blacksmith” real time short
- 5. This talk... ● Overview ○ common approaches for environment authoring in games ○ available tools ● Objective ● The method we used: pipeline description ○ A: High quality unique objects ○ B: Quick variation for backdrop objects ● Applications and opportunities
- 6. Overview Common approaches in current games Can we go procedural?
- 7. Overview Common approaches in current games ● current state (summer 2014) ● previous generation games
- 8. Overview Common approaches in current games ● manually sculpted ● photogrammetry
- 12. Overview Common approaches in current games ● manually sculpted ● photogrammetry
- 13. Overview Common approaches in current games ● photogrammetry ○ hard to do properly, especially bigger cliffs ○ limited man power in production team - 1 artist ○ needs scouting for suitable real-world objects ○ often soft edges on big objects
- 15. Overview State of procedural environment assets We looked at: ● Terragen ● Vue
- 16. Overview State of procedural environment assets We looked at some Terragen and Vue user galleries
- 23. Objective To author rock formations which are: ● natural looking ● as detailed as our budget allows (2048; 4096 textures) ● not time consuming to make. Not a modeler!
- 24. Pipeline Use-case: A: High quality unique objects B: Variation in backdrop objects
- 26. Pipeline Unique objects ● A procedural generation tool to create the hi-poly object ● Mesh exported and cleaned up ● Automatically optimised and auto-unwrapped
- 27. Pipeline Unique objects ● Projection of Normal map, AO map ● Low poly mesh, normal map and AO map to dDo → a base set of textures ● Substance Painter – particle brushes for adding specific features in the texture (e.g. leaks)
- 28. Pipeline Unique objects ● A terrain generation software to author the object ● Mesh exported and cleaned up ● Automatically optimised and auto-unwrapped
- 31. Pipeline Unique objects ● A procedural generation tool to create the hi-poly object ● Mesh exported and cleaned up in MeshLab (free tool) ● Automatically optimised and auto-unwrapped
- 35. Pipeline Unique objects ● A procedural generation tool to create the hi-poly object ● Mesh exported and cleaned up ● Automatically optimised and auto-unwrapped in ZBrush Intermediate optimization step in MeshLab if the polycount is too great
- 38. Pipeline Unique objects ● Projection of Normal map, AO map in xNormal ● Low poly mesh, normal map and AO map to dDo → a base set of textures ● Substance Painter – particle brushes for adding specific features in the texture (e.g. leaks)
- 41. Pipeline Problem Can’t export a texture from terragen
- 42. Pipeline Problem Can’t export a texture from terragen We have a very dense mesh -> maybe vertex colors will do?
- 43. Pipeline Unique objects ● Projection of Normal map, AO map in xNormal ● Low poly mesh, normal map and AO map to dDo → albedo texture ● Substance Painter – particle brushes for adding specific features in the texture (e.g. leaks)
- 46. Pipeline Unique objects ● Projection of Normal map, AO map in xNormal ● Low poly mesh, normal map and AO map to dDo → a base set of textures ● Substance Painter – particle brushes for adding specific features in the texture (e.g. leaks)
- 48. Pipeline First test one continuous canyon segment tons of problems still has potential
- 52. Pipeline After some experiments... one rock wall very promising
- 53. Add image
- 55. Pipeline After some experiments... single object instanced, scaled, rotated, squashed
- 57. Pipeline After some experiments... rock slate for the shore
- 60. Nuisances
- 61. OBJ takes forever to save and load Terragen -> PLY MeshLab -> OBJ 3DS Max -> FBX
- 62. Pipeline Quick and easy custom backdrop objects
- 63. Pipeline Use-case B: We create a generic, reusable set of textures (albedo, specular, smoothness, normal and occlusion maps), and apply it to a large variety of in-game assets.
- 66. Pipeline 1. Several 16bit height maps are exported from Terragen and made tileable (Photoshop) 2. A basic shape is created in 3DS Max and is tessellated. 3. The height map is used to displace it. Simple planar mapping is applied. 4. Automatic optimization is used to create the final low poly mesh.
- 67. Pipeline 5. The normals from the original (smooth) mesh are copied. 6. A shader for procedurally mixing a second set of tileable textures is applied to add variety (snow, moss, sand, dust, etc.) 7. Vertex alpha and colors are used for manual per instance control for additional color variation.
- 71. Problem: Since it’s displaced from a height map, there are stretches
- 75. Problem: Wasn’t really a problem in our case Maybe it’s worth exploring using vector displacement instead of height in the future
- 77. Problem: All the shapes shading info comes from the normal map The normal map is projected from a plane How do we make it work for any geometry?
- 79. Solution: Project the normals from the original mesh, before it was displaced Used Noors Normal Thief http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/noors-normal-thief
- 82. To recap:
- 90. Application ● various environments ○ canyons ○ rocky deserts ○ caves ○ icebergs ○ … ● teams of any size ○ cost-efficient, fast, and high quality
- 91. Ideas to explore If we only had more time ● Adding details like cliffs on top of heightmap-based terrains ● Clouds - render elements
- 95. Ideas to explore ● Adding details like cliffs on top of heightmap-based terrains ● Clouds - render elements
- 96. Overview Procedural clouds Terragen and Vue user galleries
- 101. Overview Procedural clouds We can export a lot of elements
- 104. Thank you