August Progress Update (Part 1)! (Patreon)

Thanks for being patient with me for being a day late on the progress update! I had some technical difficulties that needed solving in order to get these character renders up to spec :D.  This post will actually be a three-parter, as again there’s a lot to talk about as we push on with v0.06 and edge nearer to the engine upgrade and various overhauls we have planned. The fun bits are spread throughout, but I feel the technical details are also important to give you an idea of the growth the project will be experiencing after v0.06!

Our new artist, Ubercharge, has introduced us to a lot of new technology this month that opens doors for us both in terms of improving quality as well as improving efficiency. Many of these things I had considered but seemed over my skill level, however with his guidance TK and I have learned a ridiculous amount about AAA workflow and CG production in just a few short weeks. Admittedly, this all made some waves as we had to pause to orient our methods of development for v0.06 in light of what will be a lot of improvements in software/workflow soon thereafter during the aforementioned artwork overhaul, but overall, it’s been an incredibly productive month!  

July Achievement Overview

Here’s an overview of our achievements for July. What I don’t go into detail on today will be in the posts tomorrow and the next day!

• TK and I have gotten Ubercharge up to speed on map creation rules, tools, and workflow, and he is now working on maps for v0.06. We’ll be showing off his work tomorrow!
• TK and I have learned the basics of two new rendering engines; Nvdia Iray, which will be used in Daz Studio and for v0.06 art, and Redshift, which will be used for v0.06 maps/environments and eventually become our primary engine for all artwork after the artwork overhaul. Learn more about this below, and how it relates to the look of the new character’s artwork!
• New design for the female police character/enemy is almost finished! See all the latest renders below!
• After a messy week long period where Ubercharge’s ISP throttled his internet access due to downloading all our cloud files, Uber is now synced with TK and I and has full access to our asset libraries and scenes. 
• AltairPL has MATM in RPG Maker almost entirely working in 16:9, meaning it’s very likely v0.06 will be in 720p (see his update tomorrow for more details and screenshots). 1080p will come with the new engine, but the sooner the art team starts working in widescreen, the better.
• AltairPL has GLSL shaders working in the new engine, opening the door for more advanced effects.
• Ubercharge has enlisted the help of a script programmer that worked with him on Wonder Woman. His specialty is coding scripts for aiding in CG development, and he has already developed a script for us that converts materials for our current and future licensed assets to Redshift, the new rendering engine we plan to use in Maya for maps and environments. Converting these assets by hand for use in Maya has consumed a lot of TK’s time in the past, so this is a real boon for him.
• TK finished his work on his “concrete mixer” tool, which will help us develop large-scale non-tiling layered textures for environments using Substance Designer and Substance Painter.
• TK and I learned the basics of liquid particle simulation. With Uber’s help we then experimented with shader/materials for creating high quality 3D liquids. It was all successful enough that we think there’s potential for creating a fleshed out 3D liquid system during the artwork overhaul (post v0.06), which would replace the need to hand paint liquid and cum effects in every image and thus allow for it in animations (something not feasible right now). You can see some of our experiment results as well as Uber’s latest material tests in tomorrow’s post!
• After a set of experiments we’ve made a breakthrough and believe we can convert our Daz characters to Maya, which will allow for a huge host of benefits and more powerful tools for working with characters. This is expected to be done after v0.06 during the artwork overhaul, and will be the primary topic for part 3 of this update.

Transition to Redshift

Sorry to hit you straight out the gate with technical stuff, but this will help explain some of the dramatic improvements in visuals you’ll be seeing throughout these posts! The Inner Circle guys have already had to suffer through most of this :D.

One of Ubercharge’s specialties is being able to quickly create physically realistic materials. He does this using a physically based renderer (PBR) called Redshift. He has pretty easily convinced TK and I that transitioning from Mental Ray to Redshift for map creation is a good move, and with TK’s help he already has the basis for TK’s map creation workflow working with it. It has impressed us enough that by the end of the month we had decided that Redshift will most likely be our sole rendering engine after the artwork overhaul. 

Obviously, our game’s art is highly stylized, so why should we be looking at PBR? Basically, stylization doesn’t mean the materials have to look simplistic or that lighting has to be flat. Overwatch is a great example of a stylized game that uses physically based rendering yet maintains its own look.  Ultimately, the switch will offer room for growth we don’t have with our current technology.

Here are some of the potential benefits of switching to Redshift:

• It’s a GPU renderer (uses the graphics card instead of CPU). 
• Better lighting effects such as global illumination and reflections, and an improved capacity for volumetric lighting.
• Rounded edges via renderer 
• Procedural dirt, puddles etc.. (image by Ubercharge)
• Much faster render time than Mental Ray, which took a long time without any calculation intensive scenes.
• RS has much better shaders, where we can create absolutely any material you can think of. 
• Good integration with Substance Designer and Substance Painter outputs, where we can use metalness/roughness textures that are in newer licensed assets. 
• We can quickly recreate better shaders for old assets we had since it offers high interactivity during render testing.

That’s not to say it won’t take some tweaking to get it to fit what we want to accomplish, but testing in this regard has been one of the themes throughout our work this month. Here’s a simple lighting and environment test render I came up with during my experimentation with the engine. Not bad, yeah :D?

Nvidia Iray Rendering Engine

At some point last week Ubercharge gave TK and I a two hour presentation via Skype on physically based rendering to sell the idea of using Redshift for maps. Afterward I felt more confident with trying out Daz Studio’s included physically based render, Nvidia Iray. I had originally tested it out with the intent of figuring out some good liquid materials, but got to thinking how much it’s been bothering me that our map graphic style and character art style have been diverging since we began doing maps with 3D. I went ahead and ran some tests on the characters with Iray and discovered I could quite easily get something very near to our character art style that doesn’t require any post processing. In that example, the image on the left was done using our old render and required compositing and post processing, whereas the image on the right (a relatively quick practice render) was done using Iray. At that point, I showed what I had to Uber and he was excited enough to download and learn the basics of Daz and Iray over the next day or so. Here’s a set of images he captured while testing out its capabilities. 

Using this knowledge as a starting point, TK and I conducted further tests and learned about its built-in render management system. While initially successful, we found some major bugs with Daz’s implementation of the engine later on that would spark my interest in converting our characters to Maya to see about using Redshift for all our rendering purposes (we’ll talk about that in the post the day after tomorrow). While that’s all well and good, it won’t happen until after v0.06. In the meantime however Uber has already been helping me use Iray to refine our artwork style by focusing more on improved materials and advanced lighting and reflection techniques. An example of this is our newest work-in-progress character, which I’ll talk about more below. Using Iray for v0.06 artwork will be a great learning experience and transition for me as we develop the style further during the artwork overhaul.

Iray offers us a lot of benefits that the previous rendering engine, 3Delight, didn’t have. All of these (non-Daz related) benefits and even more are available in Redshift, so they apply there as well. Some of these include:

• GPU based rendering
• Near real-time preview rendering right in the Daz viewport
• Global tone mapping options, meaning I can set brightness/saturation/etc. within the renderer instead of having to do it in Photoshop in post.
• HDR rendering via the EXR file format
• Normal map output via the render manager, which could be invaluable if we attempt a shader-based 2D sprite lighting engine down the road.
• Physically based, meaning our character and story art can take advantage of Ubercharge’s PBR material expertise and match the look and high quality of the new rendering engine we intend to use for maps.
• Related to the above, Iray’s shaders will work properly in all lighting colors/conditions. Nonstandard lighting was something that had to be done in post with our old shaders.

If you’re wondering how those liquid material tests turned out, check back tomorrow when we talk about our liquid simulation experiments!

Our Newest Character/Enemy Design!

Finally, time for some eye candy! The artwork has been updated since our Inner Circle preview by the way!

I tossed around the idea of adding a female police enemy in to v0.06, and went for it after I realized I could work in a neat little story event as an introduction. She’s still a work in progress, but I’m closing in on a final design; most of what’s left is improving the hair, adding her weapon and adding insignias and text to her outfit.  Here are the latest high-resolution images!

Torso 1 

Torso 2 

Torso 3 

Full Body 1 

Full Body 2 

Full Body 3 

About the Artwork

So, you’ll notice straight away that the art is different for this character. That’s because this is the first character I’ve created entirely with the intent to use a physically based rendering engine. I had expressed concern to the IC crowd over mixing art assets created between the new/old rendering engines for v0.06, but as I mentioned above I figure I’d rather get the experience and have the opportunity to develop the new artwork style in advance of the artwork overhaul than to simply strive for consistency with an artwork style we are probably growing out of anyways.  

She is in a lot of ways an experiment due to having to create new PBR materials and to test various lighting situations to see how they behave. We’re really trying to avoid the use of cheesy post processing filters post artwork overhaul (such as heavy outlines without the stylized assets to support them), and one area this makes things a bit difficult is layering portraits onto backgrounds or map artwork and not having them clash. When everything gets run through a filter it makes things mesh quite nicely, but with this style we have to rely on informed lighting choices and more advanced techniques. 

Some things I think are obvious improvements are the possibilities for improved detail in materials, Fresnel reflections (this is a staple in getting an animated look out of modern 3D), accurate translucency (see the light shining through the hair), and way better skin due to subsurface scattering. 

Keep in mind the style is still in the early stages and will probably develop quite a bit, and also that this is simply one example, but definitely let me know what you think so far! Oh, and just to clarify, the “new style” is entirely about the rendering, lighting, materials/shaders, and processing methods, and has nothing to do with body shapes or character anatomy. 

That’s it for part 1! Check back tomorrow for AltairPL's update, Ubercharge's map artwork progress and more!