Firefighter Project
February 28th, 2019 by Marvin Spahn, János WeyhknechtThe demo depicts a concept for an Immersive Key Art, an idea that was developed for my Bachelor Thesis, in which the player is introduced to the setting of a hypothetical game.
In the example demo, the setting is about firefighters in the not so distant future and their struggles to fight against the increased outbreaks of wildfires which was caused by global warming. The scene features visual representation of a possible game level in which the characters are performing possible gameplay tasks.
Responsibilites
- Blockout iterative level creation in accordance to setting and narrative
- Crafting realistic and atmospheric assets through photogrammetry as an Environment Artist
- Simulated and implemented fire and smoke effects in Houdini
- Implemented gameplay mechanics / UI as the Programmer
Software
- Houdini
- Blender/Zbrush
- Substance 3D
- Agisoft Metashape
- Unreal Engine 4
Examples
Alot of this project’s work was in the creation of high fidelity assets with the help of photogrammetry, which I gained knowledge about during my internship at Infinite Vision.
In addition to the environment I was responsible for the visual effects in the scene which came down to alot of fire effects. I used a workflow in which I would simulate fire in Houdini and render out flipbook textures which would be used with Unreal. Since the effect would be slowed down dramatically and texture size was limited I generated motion vectors in Houdini and used them to interpolate between frames for a smooth progression of the animation.
To quickly create the illusion of a burning forest the leaf material of the trees made use of vertex colors to enable a burn mask which could be easily painted where it is necessary.
Since our player is able to traverse through the scene in form of viewpoint switching we needed a camera blueprint that allows for seamless transition between characters as well as zooming and focusing on the central object.
The city in the background is just a simple cutout with some basic shapes to convey the 3d effect. Big smoke planes and fire decals give the impression of a larger scale incident.
With the use of worldmachine I was able to create a sourrounding mountain range for the backdrop. I was able to make use of Google’s map data to extract a palette in the California region for the dry coloring and apply it as a texture.
