Environments

Personal Project: Rube Goldberg

3Ds Max / VRay

This ‘environment’ is a bit different from the rest — it is of the pre-rendered variety! I haven’t had the opportunity to work on a new environment in quite some time so this was an absolute blast to design and construct.

GROOVR: Intergalactic Planetarium

GROOVR Experience
GearVR

Where do you want to go in VR?

Intergalactic Planetarium is the result of spending many days, nights and weekends finding the answer to that very question. Like many, I wanted to go to  outer space, I always have, and you know what?  I'm going to do it!  And so I set off on my very first VR adventure.

I started Intergalactic Planetarium by collecting reference images of interesting celestial bodies.  I found myself in NASA's online archive searching for the cosmos' best kept secrets.  In fact, if you look closely you may recognize one of the nebula formations as one of Hubble's most famous discoveries, The Pillars Of Creation.  A few high-resolution images later, I began painting the base-layer of the skybox, comprised of gaseous undulations (deep blues & indigo) and all the stars in the universe. 

After testing the preliminary skybox on an Oculus DK2 I noticed something was off with the stars -- they were lifeless.  They needed motion, variation. I made the decision to create the starfield from geometry (quads) rather than relying on the skybox.  The stars are in fact just 3 meshes,  each with a unique (shader-controlled) color, intensity, pulse behavior, and texture (alpha sprite).

Rather than rendering thousands of billboard'ed particles (on a mobile device no less) the same result was achieved with just 3 meshes, each requiring a single draw call to render.  This of course means all stars are being drawn at all times, no occlusion culling -- which sounds less than ideal, but it was the best option for mobile-device performance.

(One of the color graded variants)

A Brave New World

Bear with my pride here — every mesh, vertex, prefab, material, texture, probe, volume and light source of The Atrium was delicately and painstakingly authored and/or composed by my mouse hand.  I take pride in being able to say that now that it's all over, but The Atrium was more work than I ever could've imagined; from the very beginning to the last detail, this scene was a challenge which I was not sure could be met with a mobile device (i.e. iPhone 4S).  Note: The gallery below is for PC/Console; for the mobile version just keep on scrolling.

The Mobile Version:

During production of the first three installments of the RÉPUBLIQUE series, we didn't author assets of any kind with PBR in mind; in fact PBR wasn't even possible with Unity 4.x -- not until the Unity 5 beta, more than a year away from release [at the time].

In this situation the ideal art pipeline would have begun with high-resolution source textures which could then be downsampled to mobile-friendly values for iOS and use the originals for the PC/Console port -- but that clearly wasn't possible with a mobile game which had already been designed and optimized from the ground-up to be a killer mobile-only app.  It was clear to us all, RÉPUBLIQUE's transformation from a cutting-edge mobile title to a  "next-gen" console title was going to have some hiccups along the way.

And so we were tasked with the immense challenge of up-scaling all of RÉPUBLIQUE's thousands of materials and their supporting textures to physically based standards. Thankfully it turned out that most of the geometry in the environments was sufficiently optimized that very little additional geometry detail was necessary to hit console-quality fidelity during the port from mobile to console (i.e. iPhone to PS4).

The only difference between the mobile version and the PC version, at a high level, is the implementation of physically-based shaders and lighting -- that's it.

Ornate Wall detail

Welcome to 1984.

The Brig - a utilitarian, oppressive, and dare I say drab  environment which housed the undesirable residents of République - was intended to be the antithesis to the palatial beauty and grandeur of The Atrium.  

The contrast reaches a polarizing new height when the player discovers the way out of the Atrium, in fact, a doorway leading straight to hell.

This clashing of worlds is inextricably woven in to the story of République. The entire series is based upon the idea of "lifting the veil" of a beautiful façade to reveal the dark seedy underbelly of a totalitarian state of oppression.

As with The Atrium there was virtually no concept art available for visual reference. I went through multiple color and lighting schemes until I landed on what you see here.

Pebble (Rolling ball platform game)

3Ds Max / Unity

Just a fun, simple environment I made for a friend’s Unity based mobile game, “Pebble”. I loved working with this art style!