Evolution of a Monster pt5 - The Magic of the Doci image - Yuuzhan Vong at War mod for Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption
Behold the Yuuzhan Vong Army! This mod adds the Yuuzhan Vong Race as a playable faction and all units of this era. We are a community of modders working for the greater goal, so anyone who wants to help or support us is welcome!
so... anyone can create a big model, that is not hard.
The real challenge is what follows: How do you get a 2 million poly to render in a game without overloading the engine limits? How do you texture such a model in a way that you are not using an excessive amount of texture memory to lag out the game? Can Ambient Occlusion still be made? Can this have a shadow?
Well, we have worked hard over the last few weeks to solve all of this. Working with Doci, I first asked him to see what he can do to enhance my model. Doci is developing as as exceptional artist, and I thoroughly enjoy his work, so I wanted to give him the opportunity and allow him to 'run with it' just to see what he can envision -- he did not disappoint. Then further working with the model, Doci was able to poly reduce it, make sure we have nice looking crisp textures, AO, and be able to export it to alo later on.
Without further ado, we present Doci to explain his work below in the comments:
(textures shown are not final textures, only used for testing purposes)
I love the texture in the last picture. And I like what you've managed to turn it into.
Just wait until you see the final product with all the details....
*arrives in a x-wing*
THIS IS YAAAVIN!
*gets shot*
Hello ^^ For the huge Vong ships we want to make sure that they also share the same high resolution textures as the rest of the ships do in the mod.
The only problem with the regular methods is that with this size the ship would have gotten around 40-60 2k maps.
Another approach would have been to use either tiling textures or trim sheets which would give us the desired texture resolution but would look very dull and would not have any Ambient Occlusion.
So that´s where the new Vong Shader comes into play to fix all problems we ever had.
We will talk more about that shader later.
For the 3D modell we took the concept Strobe delivered and edited it inside of ZBrush to give it a higher mesh resolution and play with displacement maps we generated inside of Substance Alchemist.
the last image is an early test to see if everything actually works.
Which it does :P
Special thanks to Gaukler for being an awesome teacher when it comes to shaders.
He also edited the alamo tools for blender so that we can transfer vertex colors to the shader. He is awesome!
by importing the model into ZBrush, Doci is able to significantly reduce the poly count while still retaining the organic shape of the model, the difference is not that noticeable since we are working with an organic shape, and in some instances it appears more natural, such as in the 'bead poles' which we will show later. ZBrush allows greyscale textures to be used to create surface height maps which is what we are showing in picture 3. This allowed Doci to instantly create surface detail and control the amount of height difference to create a very nice effect -- this is something that is much more efficient than how I was adding rock bumps to the Miid Roik model manually. Pic 4 shows the end result of this, which looks great. The model was also subdivided into section for easy export later, which will save us time when we have to work with exporting the shadow mesh.
Since the original design´s tricount was mostly on the sticks we can afford to have a higher tricount on the domes.
We use dynamesh and the ZRemesher to reduce the tricount of the sticks and make them watertight.
Inside of Blender we can use the dyntopo tool to reduce detail on simple areas and place them around occluded areas for the AO to work better.
In pic5 one can see the vertex based ambient occlusion which we baked in Blender as a test. Later in development we will use Toolbag 3 to bake all mesh maps and transfer that data into the verteces of the mesh.
We are also currently working on a workflow to ensure that we work efficiently. Since this is a non-standard workflow most software doesnt actually support it. We are currently looking into Blender 2.8´s material editor to display the vertex colors in Realtime using EVEE.
In pic 6 which was later on in the testing phase we realized that we can actually bake texture information into verteces. That way we can use mesh data like i.e. thickness, curvature, convexity, ... to generate masks we can use to place the different materials on the ship.
We will very likley share our process more indepth with future ships.
Yes, this is only our experimental test, in true YVaW fashion, we chose the hardest freaking model ever thought of to test out our concepts and ideas on, thankfully due to Doci, it all works as planned, and the rest of our Vong ships should be much easier.
After we perfect our process, we will show a step-by-step screenshot tutorial of what we are doing to achieve this, perhaps with our mediator-type analog Vong ship....
but in short, this is just freakin cool.... more mesh detail and poly reduction at the same time, while achieving the same texture quality as all our other ships
-- Outstanding work Doci :)
I would say you are increasing polycount. It's quite the opposite since you are partially replacing pixels with vertices. You have to make sacrifices at some areas.
Fantastic work doci, I didn't know that you still modded, With you on the Team nothing is impossible :D
P.S did you recieve the mail i sent you? ;)
Doci I am so damn proud of you! You never cease to blow away all expectations I have with each new model/texture you make. Tremendous job with this.
Doing some pro level work right there. I miss Zbrush sometimes... Why software so expensive? :(
Very nice rotten icecream. How 'bout this sometime?
Vignette.wikia.nocookie.net
I actually have that made already.... ;)
2 variations to be exact......
gewd... geeeewd
I really wish Disney would give all of the developers of all the amazing Star Wars: Empire at War/FoC modifications their own studio to make a new Star Wars RTS. Even just EaW 2. Except not with the fighters the size of corvettes/cruisers etc.
EA are a complete disgrace and the only reason I hold out hope for Star Wars related gaming is because of all the awesome modders on this site. Thanks guys. You're our only hope! <3