Comments - r0tzbua

Are you guys still looking for help in development? 3D Artist/2D Artist here, living a life as an UX Designer, Trekkie and Modder by night.

"Upcoming games" have their own section in the IndieDB Top 100 voting.

right now including bullets, stripper clip and bayonet we're sitting at 10250 tris. There are still some places of optimization of course, and we may take polys away here and add them there inside when we find out while playtesting that there is something that looks odd or can take some refinement.

It is very much a fluid development in that case, especially regarding optimisation. Adding loops to round things off here and there is a very quick process, same with removing polys and tris where we find out we won't need them.

On why the general look somehow feels off I'm sad that I can't say more, to my eye and the team and people I shared it with it looks right, and the general side and top proportions were modelled off blueprints and only changed slighty when I put it into the engine and cross checked with some "camera" shots I had and a real rifle I was allowed to check out when visiting the viennese army history museum.

Maybe you'll get the feel when you are using it ingame :)

The mesh was exploded for the bake, yes. I use both xNormal and 3dsmax to bake as I found out that both have their own strenghts in different places, like you said. That's why I bake it in both and pick out the parts of each bake that work on the end product.

Like we said in the post we aren't of course immune to making mistakes, that's why we love all the community involvement that helps us out on a lot of things.

First things first: Captain-Arse is right, there are some distortions right there in the screen that simply happen because of CRYENGINE editors FOV of 55, others were made deliberately to bring the end first person product on screen closer to what you see in reality because of how the engine simply distorts some of the parts in your view. If you remember the old Day of Defeat times: Those weapons were horribly distorted to make up for the GoldSrc engines' FOV. While I won't do that I did play around with the scale of some parts here and there to make basically up for this in first person.

Some other parts you are of course right, like the missing part behind the safety, that was a misinterpretion of references and will be fixed in a later iteration, same with the hole in the front of the reciever and the pin on the iron sights.

The shape of the reciever and it's not round form is simply because of how it works, the more rounder it gets, the more it will eat up of the polycount in the end which we try to save for the parts that need it, like the iron sights and the general shape.

The part where it "eats away the wood": it was planned out more like missing coating on the wood from various usage, seen this on some rifles, but to be honest: It didn't work 100% out like it was supposed to be, it looks nice from a distance but in close shots it just doesn't look right. That may be revised in a later iteration.

Please note, that we ultimately don't "pride ourselves" in accuracy, we pride ourselves with trying to achieve the most accuracy possible. We are all humans and prone to making errors, neither one of us is perfect (even though we'd love to be of course).

Remember: We read everything you guys send our way and we take your criticism serious! Help us squash historical inconsistency as early as possible!

Very nice stuff. I think you could put some more variation into the fence, maybe do another module where some of the wood planks are a bit damaged. Right now it's very repetitive, but that's just nitpicking I'd say :)

Heh, yeah I'm here since March, doing my thing :). All props for this nice dev diary go to Jan who is the dev behind it and Rico who wrote up the rest of the post, I'm just the distributing part here at IndieDB. A lot of our insight derives down to literature and first hand stories from survivors that were written down and shared with the world. While that may not be the same as a real eye to eye contact with surviving combatants it comes pretty close I think, also we combine lots of other source material.

These particular shots aswell as the Enfield No. 4 were done in 3.5 yes. All our model renders are done in-engine for the particular reason that we want to show the people what they will get in the end and not what a rendering engine can do.

And for the details, I'm pretty sure they give you some little "Wow-effects" here and there too, simply because we take care to get super-close to the real-life variants simply by adding all the details like serial numbers and production markings exactly where they belong so you can spot a detail here and there that hasn't been spotted by you before :)

Thanks for the input, these are in-engine renders already in CryEngine with the materials. CryEngine like many modern engine gives us a lot of possibilities for variation though. So for example if we want to play around with the material feedback we can easily do that on a dirtmap and have that take care for us. This works usually best if we start with a half-clean slate at least.

The decoloration you mentioned in the previous picture is something I often see in game art, but never really saw in the real life versions. Thats why I rarely do it in my texture work.

Plus we are very much used to see rifles in pretty bad condition in games, when you take into account that these weapons see extensive use that is understandable. You take of your rifle on the battlefield though too, that is very important because that thing keeps you alive! And you still got to take into account that in most images of that weapons they are 50 or more years old, back then they saw maybe 2 or 3 years of action.

epic username!

nice in-game scene! You should try and play with some of the reflection values of the material and put an environment cubemap in maybe, that would surely enhance the in-engine stuff even more :)

Data center technical guys are working on it, Bringing it back ASAP.

Hey guys, our website is experiencing some unplanned downtime at the moment. Looking like a serverhardwarefailure right now, working on getting it up again ASAP, stay sharp.

Nice to have you looking here mate! Greetings over to The Somme :)

Whistle. :D

Nah, just kidding. At the moment we are still discussing the gameplay element itself, but as said in the description, expect us to release some more info on that later.

Well since this is a free mod, Release 1 will be kind of a demo ;)

There will be an early war version of the models which will feature the Pickelhaube, yes.

This is the late-war version of the german infantry. We will of course feature an early war variant with the Pickelhaube.

As I am an Austrian I lobby very hard for adding the italian front into the game at a later point, so I think we will see that some time in the future ;)

We currently haven't set a release date. Mostly for the fact that we don't want to fail at delivering at that date and disappoint everyone. For the moment just keep your eyes open.

Well, historically this version is accurate. Blackened recievers were introduced with the 1917 models, you can find a lot of reference pictures using this style of reciever.

I guess the "easier" version would be to light it otherwise. All playermodels with cigarettes in their mouth won't look
*that* good :D

You can do quite nice shots directly in Sandbox 3, maybe you could try this to make the texture pop really nicely, helps represent the final asset a lot more. You could do a small scene or maybe just a normal studio environment in there.

very nice. The metal texture seems a bit "painted" though. Does this have spec & gloss maps on already?

A bit of internal misinformation there, seems I have to pin the weapon list higher ;) Maschinenpistole 18 is a planned weapon for Release 1 at the moment. Since there is no counter-part to it we're going for a bit of asymetrical gameplay here, you'll see the weapons counterpart for the british soon.

very nice, there may be still some place for tri-count improvement, but a nice model nevertheless :)

Since I never had a single argument in the TT Dev team about "going retail" that would have been after my time there I guess. I'm the only one from The Trenches working on this so far.

Yeah I was the one working on The Trenches back then. It was a fun time :)

very nice start, is that the high poly or the low poly?

Yes, exactly :)