nat.harrold Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 Here is recent project we would like to share some visuals and information from over the near future.It was a design and tendering project for an underground, on ground and on viaduct rail line, stations, maintenance facility and new rolling stock. Would get high res images up if I knew how?? Edit: sorry, had to remove the original 2 images for now. We will replace them when more permissions are granted for public viewing in the future along with some under motion. I have added some closer in shots and some replacements below that don't reveal as much about design arrangements. :ph34r: 2 Link to comment
demostenes Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 Looks great. What vegetation system are you using? It does not look like billboards. Link to comment
nat.harrold Posted January 10, 2014 Author Share Posted January 10, 2014 What vegetation system are you using? It does not look like billboards. There are no billboards, just our 3D meshes for trees (as cluster mesh for accurately positioned trees or clutter for distant trees). There are many grass objects on the ground with long draw distance , long shadow draw and 4096 shadow map for the sun. When we take screenshots / renders for print and publishing, our image capture code increases all settings we want temporarily, then restores them to game settings after image save. Additionally, for this project we had the idea to revisit some of our 'parameters affected by height' code. This was done by creating a 'parameters affected by height' track file which had settings we wanted changed by player height. Track frame zero corresponds to zero elevation and track frame 150 to 150m elevation etc. Simply, this script can get player height and set track value updates based on player height. This may be handy for others allowing a different way of thinking how to use track files sometime. In this case the implementation could allow for easier tweaking control and blends of near clip distances, shadow distances, shadow distribution, draw distances, scattering, fog etc. (Although, you still need at least a bottle of vodka to have any success at tweaking the scattering settings to work across all times of day and probably more for heights... :blink:) some more detail shots attached Link to comment
demostenes Posted January 10, 2014 Share Posted January 10, 2014 (Although, you still need at least a bottle of vodka to have any success at tweaking the scattering settings to work across all times of day and probably more for heights... :blink:) Tuning of scattering and sun color temperatures/intensity etc...is alchemy :) Link to comment
werner.poetzelberger Posted January 15, 2014 Share Posted January 15, 2014 The surface qualities are really stunning. Light and shadow areas do really well intergrate and the shading looks real. Do you use custom materials? How is your rendering pipeline? Do you use a lot of post effects? We basically are aiming for realism, and I always find it very hard to get different material look believable. Very cool! Cheers Werner Link to comment
nat.harrold Posted January 20, 2014 Author Share Posted January 20, 2014 Do you use custom materials? No, all materials are inherited from UNIGINE default. There are a lot of children of cube_reflection_base and this probably is the most common shader used with a lot of careful tweaking of fresnel. HDR cube maps for reflections on glass and smooth metal help enormously. Additionally, very high resolution textures are used in all slots. How is your rendering pipeline? Rendering pipeline is standard, really, It comes down to the skilled artists we have and the care they take if they get the time budget to create the assets and textures. We also push the limits of high end gpu's and usually only have to develop for high end hardware, so it is a little window into the future which excites us. Do you use a lot of post effects? Ha, all of them that we can. The render_use_filmic hdr tweaking has been a welcome addition to the engine; though there is definitely more room for improvements to UNIGINE with procedural post colour grading and post effects so this can be integrated with the tracker. Unigine DOF although ok, still has room for improvement. There are some real amazing examples beginning to appear around the place. Particularly the controls in this software: http://quixel.se/ddo/ (Seems the best realtime DOF I have seen). The SSAO in Unigine is also not that good in architectural scenes and is quite obvious when under motion due to the swimming. It is better than not having it, but the best AO is baked in to its own texture. Working out which parts of dynamic objects to bake is a worthwhile debate. A nice trick in this project was to attach mesh decals as children to the underside of all vehicles and trains for the extra AO. This really gave more definition and range to the shadow areas and looked a magnitude better than ssao on its own; and works perfectly, animated or not. We basically are aiming for realism, and I always find it very hard to get different material look believable. Realism is always a challenge, and it is in the forefront of how we expect our projects to look once completed. It is not easy. Anything not right can ruin the illusion, we get close to real in the important parts of our scenes but not all. A team effort is required. Sometimes we surprise ourselves with how good Unigine can look, sometimes you just have to go back and remake parts, or upgrade parts around what is working well. Then you go outside and look around and think... man... there is just so so much detail... Link to comment
binstream Posted January 20, 2014 Share Posted January 20, 2014 Simply amazing, you guys rock! 1 Link to comment
werner.poetzelberger Posted January 24, 2014 Share Posted January 24, 2014 Thx for the detailed answers. One of our next challenges will be to do visualizations 24/7/365 with day and night lighting. I actually did a lot by rendering lightmaps for each situation and blending them into each other. But this is far to much effort and as well is a 'static' solution. Just a naive question without testing and evaluating very far. Do you think that dynamic lit scenes can be realized within unigine for day and night (especially when we have artificially lights during night) in visual pleasing quality? How would you approach this? Best. Werner 1 Link to comment
nat.harrold Posted January 24, 2014 Author Share Posted January 24, 2014 Hi Werner, Sure, pretty much all our scenes are dynamically lit. We need to set anytime of day, month or year. I think only our interior apartments are the only projects we ever did with non-dynamic lighting. When we bake, we are carefully selecting parts of the scene to only bake the AO (not shadows or direct light). Quite often, we don't even get time for this. So we are using SSAO, though this can swim around a lot on thin geometry and is really noticeable on clean architectural geometry. If SSAO is not doing enough, or is not contrasted enough in ambient (eg, under cars in ambient light), then we add a 'shadow decal' as a child of the car. The main purpose of only baking the AO is so that this solution works 24/7/365 with dynamic sun & moon and provides for a richer range of contrast in ambient light. Certainly Unigine can look convincing without any baking so long as there is good SSAO and a mix of direct and indirect light. We do try to keep the moon up at night where possible so that there is some room for shadows and subtle direct light. Suitable cube maps with a bit of colour also help make more variation in ambient lighting. Valley has a good start for a day / night system with tracks if you have not already looked there. Heaven, Tropics and some other samples have some examples of night lighting. Night lighting is very hard to make look real, I would not rate myself as having much success with real looking night scene yet. Best Regards, N. 1 Link to comment
Recommended Posts