michi.be's "Pixel Park"

[michi:be]

Time to get one of this Sketchbooks too.

Having more time again (and finally my Crytek Award at home) i feel to do some new art, levels and other things.
I'm working with the CE² (Cryengine²) the most time recently.

This time I would like to show progress of my upcoming European Nature Set v0.4.
It will feature new flowers, corns and weeds for Crysis. My goal is to deliver some non-tropic stuff to the community.

I'm using my old 4MP Canon to photograph vegetation on a bluebox like blanket. The summer is over and the overcast skies are ideal for doing such things now.





Some pre-production shots hehe:





Needed to hurry up because the maize will be gone soon.

[michi:be]

A lot of comments going on here, hehe.

Testing destrucable buildings. My vegetation is also full destroyable too now.

Little testmap movie: YouTube - Blasting your way through.

[Snipergen]

Nice michi! Congrats on the award again, you earned it. The stone shack didn't look that good to me but that's maybe the youtube quality, the destruction was impressive though, can you destroy it completely or not?
Keep us updated, I like high quality work+cryengine 2

[laughing_bun]

looks cool but can we get higher res images. The pics you uploaded and the youtube vid its hard to see anything

[michi:be]

this is a bit bigger but I took the vid with the editors .avi function. not that good.

http://michi.be.hosted.dasprids.de/m...breakables.avi

Theres nothing spectacular to see. the physics is the focus.

[michi:be]

Some of you my know that I'm doing a lot of destructable assets at the moment (beside my trees of course hehe).

After some testing and messing around I tried the "Rayfire Tool" made by Mir Vadim. The tool has a lot of awesome features and mainly made for CG scenes/movies/effects.

CE² is like CG but with less polies in my opinion. So I turned down some values for complexity, set some values here and there (mass, limits etc) and connected all the stuff with joints.

My basemodel is a simple wallset I've made. You can use it in a repetitive manner. The UV tiles without issues and no seams are visible (except my sloppy Uv-layout) after the breaking made by the rayfire tool.

Heres a shot made out of my box:



It could be improved with proper Physics_proxy (its set to box at the moment) and sub-breaking pieces for some f the bigger chunks to make it bit more realistic.

The nice thing is if the wall is hit it doesn not break to full pieces at once but shows some cracks. I think its because I set the proxy to "box" and the proxies are a litte bit stuck into each other and finally fall apart after more force is applied. Nice effect.

This is the wall before and after shooting at it.




My next step will be to set up an apartment block with this tool. I will stick to a modular buildup again so I have to do all this pre-breaking only once.
Some more testing is also required to clean up the meshes. Polycrunsher does a good job here and protects my borders and materials.



To sum it up:
Its not a real physics thingie. Its pre-computed and pre-broken. Gameart uses pre-computed stuff for ages now so its ok for me.
Like all other physics going on in the CE2 its CPU bound but can be reduced with good physic_proxies. The higher polycount can be compensated by occluder and lod meshes.

I havn't tested whats up with drawcalls and batches but the materialcount is simple on this wall and the modula pieces can maybe instanced by the engine. This has to be tested too.

If some of you guys do own testings with this method keep me updated.


Finally a movie:
Bad quali: YouTube - Rayfire Tool @ CE2
Better quality: http://michi.be.hosted.dasprids.de/m...e_realtime.avi

[Talon]

Some cool stuff going on here, nice work

The vegetation looks awesome.

The broken wall looks a bit odd, I'd sort of expect more clean shearing in the stone, a sort of smoother break, rather than the more raggedy effect it looks like you have, but good stuff all the same.

[michi:be]

I brought me a Wacom one week ago for christmas. Only a bamboo fun - A5 and its really fun.

So i finally got into zbruh a bit more and its just another feeling.

My polypainting turned out totally cartoony and i couldnt stop mess around with this style. Only the trunk was done in zbrush.

Maybe i will do some more modelling for a scene based on this style.
This chainy model is intended to be a harbor bumper. I throught it in as a filler.



This one in rendered in 3dmax using finalrenders toon shader.would be great to archive such a look in a realtime game.
Its fresh compared to winter where i live.

[michi:be]

another update on my scene. doing the submarine prop.
needs textures and some more details. maybe wires hanging around from the open hatch.
nearly done with the modelling.

[michi:be]

Im in poland for vacation but worked further on the scene for my son.
did the baloon geometry and the scene is growing as well.

i put a lot of details in it because the scene will be printed with a size of 2m x 1m (6k x 3k pixels).

So even the baloon details will be seen at a good size.

theres a lot to do until its finished but its coming together piece for piece.

Texturin will be the last for the stuff. I think i will use base colors with decals in multi-sub materials combined with other CG materials like fr_dirt.

ideas and coments welcome.