Airborn stuff

[Neox]

some might already know those things but well i guess this is just to keep me motivated, so i open up a thread for my airborn works

Piño

he changed quite a bit over time, got younger in his face by now

Grandpa Alphonso


a small critter


and a new one which i'm going to drop now, i just wanted to do an evil looking soldier dude and ended up (i swear accidentally) at Willam Dafoe
which isn't a bad thing at all, i'll keep at that and keep him for a higher rank



and how some airborn stuff looks ingame (as this board is about sculpts i just keep links for em)

http://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1...ppa_col_04.jpg

will add other stuff later, just need to keep me doing some more character work for msuc

[Codeman]

Really beautiful stuff. The older guy has lots of personality. Reminds me a bit of Michael Jeeters.

Forgive me, but what is airborn? A new game?

[Shadownami92]

It's an UT3 game mod Codeman!

It's all looking good, when the mod comes out I'll be sure to play it. I really love the style your going with, it's a lot different then all the other mods I've been seeing around. I especially love the shaders you made for it.

I'm really looking forward to the future of this and the assets you pump out for it.

[Marcus Dublin]

Wow these are some sweet sculpts and a breath of fresh air! The old guy in particular has a lot of charm.

[BigJohn]

Airborn!!

Yeah, I know the stuff already, but it's still awesome

You should show some of that shader work you did

[Neox]

@codeman: game, mod, univese... i think it's more of an universe, that right now i trying to live as a mod

@shadownami: not really much to play now, we are more establishing the artdirection and go for gameplay when we have that all settled

@marcus: thanks

@bigjohn: also thanks, but talking about shaders brought me enough trouble here ^^

if anyone is interested, i also made a making of video of the zbrush process on tokachu

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=DE&hl=de&v=nKpre8juST4

[Shadownami92]

But your shaders are awesome. I think people would be interested in seeing it. I know someone else has a thread about their Max real-time shaders.

[Neox]

well then what would you like to see? ^^

[Shadownami92]

Ummm...your experiments with shaders. Like the Airborne one or that crosshatching stuff you were trying out before.

*watched stuff on your moddb mod page*

[Neox]

i guess then this thread should go directly to the 3d wip forums?

Well we dropped the hatches and are baking static hatches into the textures as masking the hatches inside unreal ddidn't work as we wanted to.
The First thing i did for that was just hatching based on the mesh uvs blending in different hatches textures.


the problem with this is, that you can't controll the direction of the hatching, ok well you can but then you'll have to controll the uvmapping to be all in the direction you want the hatching to be. i wanted to create a second uvset but UT doesn't support that for skinned meshes, so i had to drop that idea.
i played around with rotator textures to controll the flow it worked on a plane but it went all jaggy on the character


the whole thing applied to an older version of the shader:



later we switched to screenaligned hatching and added the first version of the outlines based on the mesh normals (like a rimlight basicly)


the problem with that outline is, that it doesn't work on flat surfaces, you can see that issue on his bag, where the whole surface gets darkened looking from a flat angle. so using it for env wouldn't work at all, unless we'd change the look of all buildings and waste polygons to make them round. so we dropped that outline.

a little later, a little more tweaking on the hatches and a new outline method, based on a modelled outline, basicly a simplified model with flipped normals that got pushed to be bigger around the mesh.

the problem with that is, that it's sucking A LOT of polygons and isn't working on distance unless you push the mesh based on distance to the camera, which is pretty expansive and therefor we also dropped that outline and also th hatching because it only worked on still images not in movement, we couldn't just tweak it to not be a overall noisy structure. We tweaked it based on screendepth, based on dark areas etc. but we wanted it to be more like on valkyria chronicles, which isn't possible (afaik) in UT, so without having the ability to base it only on shadows (not image dark colours) we have no chance to stabilize it. But maybe we will give it another try when more Env is done and we have a whole scene to look at.

So with no outlines and no hatches i was reall dissappointed to stay just with my ramped shading and wanted to do something different to TF2 (the shader is based on the formula they used, with tweaks and additions where needed) so i dug deeper into outline generation, asking coders and shaderdudes to help me (crazybutcher and kazeohin to name 2 of em ) i dug up a very easy method i just needed to understand.
so i created an outline based on the zbuffer, all i do there is blurring the zbuffer and calculating the difference between blurred and normal version, modify that an in the end i have an pretty precice outline, here some experiments

the first version:


a version not based on the zbuffer but on the scene it self, so with simplified textures that could be used for backflashes, storytelling etc, just a test no final results


with some sort of AA, but in movement it doesn't hurt to have it not that way... all Outline games i know of have just hard outlines when you look at them in big screenshots, but thats no problem in the game


an image to show how precice the outlines are based on the zbuffer, having it based on the worldnormals would be better though but i can't get my hands onto the world normals in UT


and the whole thing on another character

the whole shading now is a combination of a ramped shader like the TF2 one, baked in lighting in the textures and a hatch overlay in the texture, that's easily to controll and helps giving a more unique look, without wasting toooo much time on creating the assets. a whole character can be done in a quite short time as the textures heavily depend on my texture bakes, but won't need too much texturework to slow down the process, so i can concentrate more on forms and colors, then shading.

having done his grandpa we decided to change Piños colourscheme too

not totally happy with it but better then before, still a way to go, but i need to fill the demo a little with some assets and help the env dudes to pimp the surroundings, which is pretty much virgin soil to me *shudder*

[funkdelic]

Wooooot... this is soo awesome mate! congratulationz you´re very skilled :+)

[Neox]

it's not only my work, well the characters basicly are but the concepts and the final appearence have been developed with the team and as part of this our conceptdudes

[Pavel Petrenko]

WOW! Looks amazing! I like your shader and characters style.

[warrior21]

this is some great stuff. i really like the colors and texture work you got going on with the grandpa. awesome work so far.

[Maph]

Oh my, this is excellent stuff! Could you elaborate on the ZBuffer abuse for the outlines?
Are you using a multi pass shader to a screen aligned quad, or are you keeping the outline inside the actual boundaries of the model?

I'm very interested in this technique, as we tend to use outlines on occasions ourselves, but we always had to resort to the "duplicate geometry/inverted normals/pushed outwards along normal"-technique. And as you said, it's too resource heavy and too difficult to maintain a certain look.

The models and texturing themselves are obivously kickass! Great little timelapse as well mate.

[Hearshotkid02]

I've seen this mod on moddb before. You guys have put together some truly amazing work. This is one of the few mods I've seen lately that have made me very excited about the UT3 mod scene.

Great job guys

[Neox]

thank you guys

@maph: i haven't tried it on an per object level, but i think you could just put the posteffect part into any shader. What i'm doing is pretty simple really, if you want to quick understand it, get yourself a zbuffer image from anywhere, open it in photoshop, duplicate it, blur the duplicate, set the duplicate to difference, thats it the outline

@hearshotkid02: i think there are mods that are way further then airborn and even for this MSUC part, we will only have a art demo, no real gameplay, right now what we are developing is the universe at this specific sport of the world to establish the artdirection, when this is done we might need to concentrate more on the game itself, i know normally you should start with the gameplay and do the art later but we are 90% professional gameartists so we do what we can do best, concentrate on the looks for now

[Maph]

@maph: i haven't tried it on an per object level, but i think you could just put the posteffect part into any shader. What i'm doing is pretty simple really, if you want to quick understand it, get yourself a zbuffer image from anywhere, open it in photoshop, duplicate it, blur the duplicate, set the duplicate to difference, thats it the outline

Clever yet effective. I just have to have a go at this. Thanks for the heads up.

[Neox]

wish i could use the world normals as a source for the difference, those would result that in any normaldirection changing an outline could be drawn, this could be used for better close up outlines in the face etc. but unfortunately i can't render out the worldspacenormals inside unreal or use them as an input for a post effect, well i don't know if it's possible so it might be, anyone who can point me to that, it would be highly appreciated

as for the blurring thingy, i'll just copy and paste from Polycount forums how the nodes should be built up:

[...]

a gaussian blur is basicly nothing more then moving your screentexture (alpha is zbuffer) into every direction by X Units (0.001 will do) and giving these directions different weights via multiply

so your nodes should look like this (from right to left, not from left to right how i'm writing)

texture coordinate > add with (0,001;0) > plugged into the UVs of your scene texture> divide by your zdepth value, (you should test that value) > multiply by (1)

this will offset the uvs of your scene textures zbuffer by 0,001 into X direction

now what you need to do is, do that into all 8 directions and add all this together with the initial scene texture, so it looks like

scenetextures alpha > divide by (your zbuffer value) > add with:

(here comes the part from before)

texture coordinate > add with (0,001 ; 0) > plugged into the UVs of your scene texture> divide by your zdepth value, (you should test that value) > multiply by (1) > add with

texture coordinate > add with (0,001 ; 0,001) > plugged into the UVs of your scene texture> divide by your zdepth value, (you should test that value) > multiply by (1) > add with

texture coordinate > add with (0 ; 0,001) > plugged into the UVs of your scene texture> divide by your zdepth value, (you should test that value) > multiply by (1) > add with

texture coordinate > add with (0 ; -0,001) > plugged into the UVs of your scene texture> divide by your zdepth value, (you should test that value) > multiply by (1) > add with

texture coordinate > add with (-0,001 ; 0,001) > plugged into the UVs of your scene texture> divide by your zdepth value, (you should test that value) > multiply by (1) > add with

texture coordinate > add with (0,001 ; - 0,001) > plugged into the UVs of your scene texture> divide by your zdepth value, (you should test that value) > multiply by (1) > add with

texture coordinate > add with (-0,001 ; -0,001) > plugged into the UVs of your scene texture> divide by your zdepth value, (you should test that value) > multiply by (1) > add with

texture coordinate > add with (-0,001 ; 0) > plugged into the UVs of your scene texture> divide by your zdepth value, (you should test that value) > multiply by (1) >

all this added together will gve you a hell of a bright image, but divided by the sum all multiplyvalues you'll get a blurred version of your image/zbuffer (depending on if you'd use the alpha of the scene texture or not)

now divide a scenetexture (in this case the alpha) by that blurred image and you'll get some sort of outline, all you need to do next ist tweak it, power it up, clamp it, whatever, until it looks good to you.
to have better control about the outline i added a multiplyvalue into all fomulars connected to the (add with (X ; Y)) part so its Multiplyvalue*(add with (X ; Y)) so the offset can be controlled by just one Node also i added more fancy stuff like the outline getting thinner by distance etc but that's not of your concern right now ^^

try to understand what i did, all in all it's just basic math, no fancy stuff, just adds, multiplies and divisions, otherwise i might not have understood it
sounds more complicated then it is

what it does in the end is blur the zbuffer and check the difference of the blurred and the normal image, it's not really super detailed[...]

[Maph]

wish i could use the world normals as a source for the difference, those would result that in any normaldirection changing an outline could be drawn, this could be used for better close up outlines in the face etc. but unfortunately i can't render out the worldspacenormals inside unreal or use them as an input for a post effect, well i don't know if it's possible so it might be, anyone who can point me to that, it would be highly appreciated

as for the blurring thingy, i'll just copy and paste from Polycount forums how the nodes should be built up:

I usually just go straight to the code instead of working with nodes. It's slower, but you understand the maths behind it much better imho.
As for the world normals, if you have access to the TBN matrix inside Unreal Ed, you could use the Transpose of that one to go from tangent space to world space, and output that into a render target you can use in your comping passes. Shouldn't be a big hit in performance, unless you plan on doing lighting calcs in world space. But that would be silly.
Or something similar of a technique.

Not sure if you can do all of that inside the UnrealEd material editor though, since it's pretty down into the core stuff.