Optimized TVs

Very excited about this one, real working TVs for UE4! The TVs were designed to behave like real world TVs, with options for inputs similar to game consoles and DVD players, etc., as well as a global broadcast continuously playing movie content, set up as many channels as you'd like! The pack also includes working Remote Controls! Special thanks to dev guru Caleb Longmire for his incredible help in making these TVs possible.
The Optimized TVs pack is available to purchase on the UE4 Marketplace here: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/optimized-tvs 

Optimized Rocks asset pack available on the Marketplace!

I present to you, the Optimized Rocks asset pack!:

Available for purchase here: https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/optimized-rocks

Some personal notes: I had taken great pains to create some beautiful and highly optimized rocks for my game, when the prospect of selling them was presented to me, prudence dictated I moved toward that end post haste. So I prepared them by fixing various details needing polish, cleaning up UVs, fixing normals etc., and even upgrading them by including a new distance fading normal material!

Submitting the pack was daunting, as I had heard Epic could take up to a month or more to assess submissions (and indeed I experienced that very time frame), also the thought of rejection was a bit stressful, but after 4 re-submission requests to correct various technical aspects and obscure guidelines (naming conventions and other minor things), it was accepted! For posterity I want to mention the road was not an easy one. Each iteration came at the cost of more time waiting for a word from Epic, but having now become a veteran of the process I understand the reason for Epic's stringent adherence to guidelines and agree with it. A comforting sense of accomplishment is awarded for the efforts!

Grass: Nature's Carpet

What on earth would anyone do without tutorials? Of all the trial and error and tutorial taking I've done thus far, grass has to be the easiest. I've created a nice grass from scratch, first using Maya to create the geometry and UVs, Photoshop to hand paint the blades/tufts, then a nice material with wind properties in UE4. The result is quite nice, and the overdraw is not bad at all! An astute individual shared his findings online concerning overdraw, and it turns out that while more polygons alleviate overdraw, polygon rich foliage noticeably impacted frame rate negatively, while acceptable levels of overdraw did not. My only regret in hind sight is the amount of transparency on the tree branch cards, I could have trimmed them quite a bit at the cost of a few extra triangles, but as it stands the computational impact is still low.

Cliffs / Ledges

Photogrammetry is excellent, but always keep modular design in mind I discovered, that is, the pieces must be able to be retrofitted into the landscape, not an easy task with semi-flat actors. Unless you can find a nice relatively uniform shelf of rock and earth in the world somewhere to use for photogrammetry, you'll have to model one by hand. The more I go along, the more I understand the importance of modular design, try to create things that can be used many times over with variation, this cannot be understated!

Trees via SpeedTree

At first SpeedTree is a pretty intimidating program, once I sort of got the hang of it I noticed that within just a few simple steps triangle count can skyrocket into the tens of thousands! But did some research and found that the target poly count should be around 8k to 15k for games, the first thing that came to my mind was the game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, those trees are so beautiful and high poly looking, how did they pull it off? I jumped into the game and spent some good time just studying the trees, at last I found the secret. Though they've taken optimization a step further than I have, I'm not far off. The secret is to optimize the heck out of the trunk and branches (low triangle count), and at the end of each branch place a generated mesh (much like the shape of a shovel head, or rooftop) that does not move (not camera facing billboards), then on the branch between the generated mesh and the trunk place centered camera facing cards to give the look of fullness! Brilliant. Here are the results (note: all textures were created by me except the pine needles, SpeedTree includes a nice pine needle texture and I didn't see the need to reinvent the wheel) -

Weighing in at just over 8k tris, a beautiful old oak tree:

And at just over 4k tris, a wonderful and tall pine tree:

Materials via Substance

Although it's better I find to use actual photos as a base for creating materials in Substance, I love to just jump in and whip up something I need if I don't have it. It's not always easy to do that, but there are multiple ways to achieve what you are looking for.

A nice wall or ceiling material, with scrapes of drywall compound and spatters of paint:

Wood paneling w/o knots:

Wooden rooftop shingles with parallax occlusion:

Cracked rock surface with water gathered in its crevasses:

CC51: Let's Make a Game! Interview with Caleb Merrick

An interview with Character Crusade at the Glitchcon indie developer convention! These guys are all about story, and were gracious enough to interview me! They are so professional, kind and awesome at what they do, I was nervous at first but they know what they're doing and made me feel right at home quickly! You can see their site at: www.charactercrusade.com

Parallax Occlusion Mapping

I can't get a straight answer about whether parallax occlusion mapping is better for cpu/gpu performance than tessellation?? At the moment I'm using POM (parallax occlusion mapping) to achieve height parallax, but it has it's issues. I'm honestly thinking of just using tessellation, which will depend on people having DX11. I don't know, I'll run some tests.

I checked up on Steam's stats and found that easily the majority of people on Steam are using DX12 on Windows 10 machines, and still quite a lot using DX11, so it could very well be that I'd be in the clear to just proceed with tessellation instead of POM. My head is starting to hurt again.

Substance Designer

Jumping into Substance to create materials from scratch, seriously starting from nothing and eventually ending up with some unbelievable materials. The program blows my mind, not just because of how powerful it is, but because the learning curve is pretty steep, my brain is on full melt down mode constantly.

I also want to add a little note here; that this project has literally brought me to tears a couple times, it's almost enough to break a man. I had read about that but didn't really take it to heart. My wife Elissa has been such a source of strength and comfort for me, I honestly don't see how God could have blessed me with a companion like her <3

Making Mountains out of B-Splines

Oh now things are getting fun, making terrain! I'm using World Machine to generate height maps and masks for various terrain regions, it's pretty freaking amazing. First you define various landscape characteristics as shown below:

Then you let the "machine" go to work after carefully tweaking a bunch of settings, and what you get is a beautiful masterpiece, what a fascinating program, there's just something about the ability to make your own little world:

Photogrammetry

So, currently I'm doing photogrammetry, a process of using a series of photos to interpolate between pixel patterns, thereby generating 3d data.

I started by taking some pics of rocks and stuff up in Colorado, not sure really whether I was doing it right or not, but the principle seemed simple enough so I snapped away:

I then took the images into Photoshop and balanced shadow and highlight values (evened them out):

After all that was done (time consuming), I took the photos into a program that uses magic (point cloud data), and generated high resolution geometry. After seeing the result I was pretty pleased that I had done it right! After that, I hauled the geometry into Maya:

Now the tedious task of modeling low poly versions begins. There are other ways of doing this, but the results can be kind of sloppy, if you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself:

When it looks about right, UV map that sucker and transfer maps (diffuse and normal), check this baby out:

From almost 132 thousand polygons, down to just over 3 hundred. Not bad says I.

Articy Draft 2

Blocking out the story flow and filling in the details using Articy Draft 2. Getting the layout correct is ultra helpful and the tool has been indispensable, filling in those details is another thing altogether.

A Forest Sketch

The woods are lovely dark and deep, well maybe not so dark in this sketch. Just a piece for inspiration, maybe I'll add something to it, it needs something for sure.

Monster Concepts

Some quick monster concepts. I have an idea of the kind of thing I want to see, I need to be careful though about how many appendages I give it, need to think about animation, but I need it to be scary. I think it will form itself as I go but in the meantime I think this is a good start.

The monster's head and legs can tuck up against its body. Also, I want darkness to surround it like smoke, perhaps.

Cabin Concept

A quick concept for the cabin, I always had this idea in my head for some rough little cabin on a rainy night with rumbling and strobe light lightning illuminating the billowy clouds above. Painted in ArtRage on my Wacom Cintiq Companion.

MindTex

This isn't an asset you'll find in the game, but some time ago I did a little test to use a program called MindTex, a Normal Map Generator. It's super easy and fast to use, it can't really be compared with something like Substance Painter, but if you need to crank out a pretty good looking material in a hurry, it's very much worth a go. I haven't used it in my game development as of yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if I did at some point, it's an awesome little program. Below is a picture of the asset (I really lazed out on the hasps polycount-wise, but whatever), and a link to one of my Youtube channels briefly showcasing the chest!

artistcaleb's Game Trove, a new review only Youtube channel. Check out the intro and you'll spot the chest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SjnTjixbrI

Mountain Cabin

I had to blur out a tiny part of it for secrecy reasons ;) All fully UV mapped. Maya.

Truck with UV layout

Can't wait to texture this thing!

A Beautiful Oak Desk

An oak desk, note the areas of wear and subtle stains. Maya, Substance Painter.