CE2 - Visualisation

[michi.be]

Althought it's silent about me and my procjets I'm happy to be able to share some of my latest contract work with you.

Currently I'm working for an upcoming Cryngine² licensee on realtime visualisation for solar technology.

There's no NDA and I'm allowed to share some stuff.

This level is a prototype I did to iron out a concept and workflow of doing such a visualisation for a public presentation. Its a complete 2 square kilometers rebuild of a place in Bavaria Germany.

This work is a bit different from game-developing since you fly around it on a high of around 5-8 metres and you have to see the whole level but with reasonably frames.

So most techniques for culling geometry into fog or just fading it out by adjusting the viewdistance doesn't apply here. It has to be a sunny athmosphere.

Last but not least the geometry has to be as photorealistic as possible which usally means performance impacts for complex shaders.

There are over 750.000 vegetation objects in the level plus nearly 6.000 solarpanel models which needed to be alligned mostly "by hand" to fit the shape of the terrain.

I got around some performance problems with intensive use of LoD models. The solarpanel for example reaches from 1600 tris to 133tris.

Secondly I used a short spriteviewdistance for my fields. Sprites cover a good volume of screenspace. So a low values was better here.

Occluders were used for the geometry, even the solarpanel got one.

The problem of tiling textures from such a high perspective was solved by importing a heavily photoshoped satellite picture which blends smooth into the detail layer.

Vegetation details like the flowers were archived by scaling them a little bit bigger as usualy. So you still notice them from 5 metres.

We had a lot of other issues to sort out and I don't want to get into detail too much but the CryEngine has awesome possibilities here and did a great job althought I really pushed it hard to the limit.

There's still some Crysis vegetation in it which is going to be changed until the license arrives. I'm working hard on my European Nature Set with specific vegetation for all the stuff so I decided to work out a working concept first and replace the crysis assets step-by-step.

But for now I call it finished for the stuff I can show here.

Thank for reading - now the pics.

[Skjalg]

I'm digging the last image, you can see that the plates are uneven and it really adds to the image =)

[michi.be]

yeah they are made out of glass in reality and very thin. i added a slight cloud cubemap to break up the black color they are made of.

[-HP-]

So awesome! Congrats mate

[AlexM]

wow! just..... wow

[Josch]

Wow

Looks really incredible. Very authentic.

Just the little trafo-houses in picture three are looking as if they were made of plastic

Is there any possibility that we could see a video of this masterpiece in any far future?

[Deathy]

Astonishing work you made there. Great job!

[Freak]

some screenshots look like photos... really nice work!

[Sentura]

for some reason i'm not really persuaded by this.

the grass in the first shot looks like noise, the asphalt in the second looks like it doesn't have a normal map (or almost any contrast whatsoever), the buildings in the third really need some dirt on them.

a general effect through all the shots was that i could see it was made in a game. usually looking at crysis shots, you see near photo realism; with what you have here you could have convinced me it was made in unreal or source.

also, what's with the love-in people? don't you have any sense of critique to give whatsoever?

[michi.be]

Thanks for the feedback guys especially Sentura for the constructive critics.

Some words about it:

The main objective of this visualisation is to show the citizens near this upcoming solar parc on a public demonstration what it would like if they agree to build a parc which is bigger than their village.

some citizens think a solar panel is about 7meters high and will destroy the landscape.

So my task was (shortend in a few sentences):

Do a shiny summer setting with a new build in solar parc. It has to consist of several switchable vegetation layers based on architectural plans to show the final looking of the parc. And show it new. Not 20 years old! It has to be a realistic rebuild of the landscape (based on references from local government and google earth plus dozents of films and photos delivered by the contractor) but do it a way to influence the citizens to agree in building a (huge) solar parc.

I personally know it would never ever look like this vanilla skies version in reality with all this beautiful flowers and shiny objects.

Plus I love old grundged building and abandoned industrial buildings. But it was simply not the task. Its a illusion. Take it like a commercial.

Unfortunatly I cant show a video at this time or tell you which exact location it is in Bavaria.

[Steppenwolf]

I think it looks great. Two crits:

The houses look a bit uncanny. Some (faked) ambient occlusion or dirt would make them look more realistic.

Something about the colors seems off. Everything looks a kinda gray and death, the greens are maybe too dark. This contradicts the "sunny atmosphere" that you are aiming for. I think some fresher green colors and less desaturation wouldn't harm.

on a side note: It's Level Designer not Leveldesigner (common trap for german speaker to write stuff together)

[michi.be]

thanks steppenwolf. i used a little daker color palette to make it looking good for a beamer presentation.

i will update the leveld designer typo. I read booth variations on the internet. so i was confused hehe.

[MaVrOs]

Look great, I realy like the mood. The road seem a bit strange, maybe the borders are too sharp, and as Steppenwolf said, there is something wrong on the atmosphere. The lights are to weak compared to the sky, not enought brightness. Anyway some screens are amazing.

[Buddy]

wow! just..... wow

Astonishing work you made there. Great job!

":3akbfqhm]So awesome! Congrats mate

LOL! just... LOL!

I agree with Sentura here tbh

While i like the images, i see few common problems, you seem to fill the ground with few plant models that are next to each other very closely and share almost same height. I would think about using bigger batches/models of plants (few types) and fill ground with this,

There are few aspects of it that make it a bit monotone BUT it's a prototype as you said.

There are some issues with scale it seems, the road seems awfully small in comparision to rest, atleast thats the impression i'm getting, i've ready you scaled some foliage up so it might be the reason.

And yeah, the sky seems a bit too bright in comparision to the terrain which could use some more brightness.

Good work, keep us updated.

[mjens]

Buddy, have you tried to do something in CryEngine 2? Or Crysis Wars SDK Mod Tools? It's the most unstable and buggy SDK I've ever seen so saying "wow" is right in that place.

1st image:

did you used "sharpen" in Photoshop? Grass looks to sharp and it's really big or the point of view is on little kids eyes height

2nd:

weird road material, no road sides, shadows and leaves on road looks like someone vomits there, cool water color but weird shore - water edge is to clean - check for some lake photos for references

3rd:

building is to small or grass is to big, that object is unnaturally clean, compare flower size to doors - that flower is oversized, ivy on the building need some "start point" - you need to check how ivy grows to make it look natural

4rd:

nothing abnormal

5th:

dark

6th:

it's hard to make so long distance between fence pillars (when you are using netting as fence material)

7th:

grass is too big