First and foremost, I was hired as a 3D artist during the development of Midnight Star for iOS. Below you can find the launch trailer with some gameplay footage:
This game took around 3 years to develop with me working the latter 2 years helping to put together everything from allied characters, enemies, weapons, environments and even dabbling into optimization for performance on mobile which was a first. This included working on reducing shader keys, simplifying materials, adjusting resolutions of textures and learning how to setup ini configurations by device.
This game was developed in UDK, and I used 3DS Max, Photoshop, xNormals, and 3DCoat. xNormals and 3DCoat were used in retopologizing the character meshes and baking out normal maps.
There are so many pictures to post but I will only be posting a few with some description of it.
Above is one of the very first shots when the game starts. Because th is was back in 2013-2015, devices weren't as powerful as the iPhone 7 or the Samsung Galaxy S7. We had to really cut back a lot to have the game perform within acceptable limits on supported devices which did cover a range of older devices. For instance, all textures had a max limit of 1024 and those were only for characters. Environments were kept at 512, particles even lower. In addition, we didn't make u nique texture atlases per mesh asset, but rather, a modular texture atlas that several assets could use. So UVs were cutup so that they could make use of the appropriate texture on the atlas.
Below is an example of one of our texture atlases.
The arch in the picture above uses 2 textures. One for the "feet" area where grunge was painted on, one for the rest of the body. For the UVs to be cutup so that the look could be obtained, we had to cut in the geometry. The gold lines, the dark underside lines were all cut in with geo first, UVs were detached and placed on the atlas.
Because this is for mobile, we found ourselves relying more on geometry to get the form we wanted since normal maps would be too expensive to make use of. There would be more texture fetches, higher shader instruction counts, higher app size, all of which we needed to keep low for this game. The only exceptions were, of course, the characters and weapons.
Other than environments, I also did work on characters and weapons.
Now the two above are not beauty shots, obviously, but just to show some examples of what I worked on. For example, the first image is an alien shotgun. The modeling, UVing and textureing work was outsourced, but the blue camo pattern and additional polish/optimizations were done in house by me.
The modeling and texturing for the character Cromax was outsourced, but I did the retopology of the ZBrush mesh, improvements to the UV layout and baking out diffuse, normal and specular textures from the ZBrush mesh using xNormal.
Admittedly there were ups and downs to the reception of the game, but I was happy to be able to work with a bunch of great people. While the USC game gave me a jump start into wh at it would be like to work professionally as a game development, this was my first real professional success in the industry.
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