Michael Betke

Well everyone improves while practicing. But I discover new things while watching training DVDs or reading forums and articles. But it's nice to see others notice that my work seems to get better. Sometimes I notice not and see only the probles I have here and there hehe.

Ok the project is done and you can comment on in my latest Blog: http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/index.php?/blog/47/entry-565-kabul-street/

I hope so! But great news too.

Maybe some of you have seen my work in progress thread for some while now but the final screenshots and work breakdown deserve an own Blog entry in my opinion. I think the snippet from my company website explains the project quite well: "The city environment of a sub-urb in Kabul was done for "serious gaming" purposes which simply means a simulation of trained tasks in a save environment - like a flight simulator. Our task was to develop seven buildings with complete additional props setup. The client will add vehicles and people with his simulation editor to fill the environment." Doing the project was pretty much straight forward. Collecting references, thinking about what buildings would make sense. Extracting textures - mostly for billbaords - from the references. Other textures are from CG-textures which is great source for an artists needs. I also used the decals from there which saved me a lot of time. After doing the assets all stuff has been added into Leadwerks Editor. Last thing was light setup and a small surrounding mountain terrain like Kabul has. Leadwerks did very well using the project. I get a decent performance around 40-50 fps on maximum details with an 1680px screen resolution. Most work was involved into modeling but Leadwerks handeld the polycount of the city well plus "ADN Shadereditor" was a real timesaver although I have some wishes for improvements in further versions. I'm now looking into new journeys with Pure3d like doing Arch-Viz based realtime work and a CG rendered job for the next months. Most of it is NDA'ed so I will only post some stuff via Twitter. Check the Pure3d Twitter (https://twitter.com/pure3d) channel also to get notice of the Kabul Street video which will be released the next view days. Enough writing, some screenshots: I'm not yet sure if I want to sell the models from this project plus the rural area together in a asset-pack because the last vegetation collection wasn't such a success I was hoping for although a lot of bushes are in which could be used in every project. Maybe I should have used another name or people don't need more vegetation.

Is vertex illumination supported in Leadwerks? I know vertex colors are supported and its fine. I use vertex colors to bake some Ambient Occlusion into it and it looks very well. But it's very static and with the ability to use Vertex Illumination it won't fight with the dynamic lighting. Any informations on this?

After some more work on the city I'm coming to an end. Made props today and placed wires. Tomorrow there is some more modeling on my To-Do list plus the final Leveldesign. I would love to see the level poppulated with cars and people but this was (unfortunatly) not part of my task. I also had some fun with panorama images. So I just took screenshots with "print screen" key pasted into Photoshop and let "Photomerge" (it's part of Photoshop) do some work. I had to cut the result because of roundings on the merged screenshots. Thats why it's so small in height. Those tryouts had the background of doing very high-res screenshots suitable for print media in A1/A2 format or 10.000k pixels. I can render the buffer to a screenshots so I also get nice AA if I crop the image later. For just one try it's not bad so I decided to share the result plus you see the current project state.

I worked for people with other engines some times and just submitted the models withthe requested setup. Your artist could use a realtime shader tool for previewing the assets right in the modelling app. For example in 3ds max: http://www.3pointstudios.com/3pointshader_about.shtml http://www.game-artist.net/forums/support-tech-discussion/9181-xoliul-s-3ds-max-viewport-shader.html This would give him a good direction how his textures are working. A small executable would also be a good way to help him. But I would definitly stick with the above mentioned preview plus maybe a revision if the assets look very different so he knows where to take care of.

Here is an example of decals I was talking about. No problems with this setup in Leadwerks. I attach them to the walls with a little bit space between the decal and the wall. Ned to fix up some stuff and these are just paint decals. But you should get the idea what I mean. The material is this: texture0="abstract::dirtgrime_a.dds" texture1="abstract::dirtgrime_a-norm.dds" blend=alpha depthmask=0 zsort=1 overlay=1

Never had any issues with it. I'll post an update on the setup after I finished all decals on the models. Had some delays today because my son got ill and I had to care about the little guy.

No. A simple plane with a transparent texture on the model itself.

Yeah I will do it with decals. Some worn plaster, cracks, decals and edges. Paint can also be add with decals. Still trying to figure out how to use efficient GI for some cases. But this will be last step. Plus all textures are just diffuse maps at the moment. I think I'll get a bunch of work done today with wires and attachments.

I have another project going on which I would like to show so far in todays snapshot. My current job is to produce 7 city buildings with complete props and city set like pavement, vendor carts and so on. Goal is to take some beauty renders to show the capabilities of the engine as good as possible plus what can be done from an artistic point of view in a given timeline. Final images should look like a street in Afghanistan and all assets should be extendable to produce a mission area later. At the moment the building texturing is done but misses a complete decal pass with dirt and grime plus the street stuff and props of course. I'll also try some GI pass at the end of the project and see what I can archieve. For the moment I'm doing attachments for the buildings and distribute them. I have one and a half week left until deadline. I need to do a lot of cables along the buildings and use splines but a more automated manner would be cool too. The Soulburn scripts (or was it haywood, hehe) have some Wire script which is nice but maybe more for longer wires. I also tried reactor but it looked a bit strange. Maybe I'll mix the three methods a bit until I doscover a tool with a "make-a-nice-cable-button".

Call it CSG, Brushes, Solids, Volumes.....but a solution to block out geometry within the editor and export it to an 3d app is a MUST for professional usage. You won't even be able to block out a bridge over a valley without it in a comfortable way. They way I would like it is to block out my rough geometry, group it to an object and have a right-click menu which exports directly into my already opened 3d-suite. Something like GoZ from Pixologic. This is just the trend and candy to have people using your engine. Less clicks and inter-application-operability.

I really doupt LE3 will be available so soon.

Okay, thanks for the explanaitions. I'll contact Josh about teh texture load stuff.

Makes sense.

I used the editor now for some basic materials and it's working very well. One thing I don't like is the automated copying of textures to the material folder. A switch in the Settings if I want itor now would be nice. In some situations it's cool to have such auto-copy feature but mostly I do my texture in Photoshop, save it at the right spot, do the material then. So it#s saved to the right folder anyways. Plus I seperate the material folder from my texture folder in most cases.

But this would limit me to 60.000 tris because of the format. So I have to split it in some situations. Plus what about using one texture in several materials? Would your engine load the texture with each material again, or does it check if a texture is loaded already but only change material properties? I hope you know what I mean.

As far as I understand the purelight concept it bakes GI to my models. The GI seems to be bound to a material. How does it handle the following scenario: Let's say I have a small object like a lamp hanging in two rooms. One room is lit the other one is dark. This would result in two different lightmaps for one object. One dark and one bright. But as far as I know my lightmap is material bound. So I would have to A.) Do a different material for every re-used lamp in my level with a unique lightmap for each lamp. This would be pretty much work for a simple re-used prop plus how would the LE load the texture? Would it load the lightmaps (which is ok) but also load the texture of my lamp over and over again and my Vram will be filled with it? B.) Don't use Purelight on small objects which would be silly because big objects are also reused, like lets say a pile of crates or palletes in a storage level. What does Purelight do in such a simple situation? Does it bake all geometry to one or more huge Lightmaps where every lamp-UV will get its own spot?

Its hard to give feedback based on screenshots. I usually dont get more then 2 comments feedback if I announce a new asset pack in my Blog but after release the people buy it anyways. Don't judge the interest for a product on the amount of feedback. Just finish some work get yourself some testers or do a trial version and you will get feedback. Middlewerks looks like a good Toolbox for me so don't stop working on it!

Now I see how cool it is! Great tool. I'll try it soon in my pipeline.

yes you have to change the model itself so they get updated as soon as you restart the editor.

The pivot of the tree needs to be moved so the tree just moves more into the terrain.

Looks very good. I like the gaustics.

After more work the project has finally come to an end. It was very interesting to do a 4000x4000 tile 1 project with Leadwerks. Some things are running nicely with LE2.4 others gave me real pain. But Josh gave excellent customer support and reacted very quikly with engine updates to the problems and even improved things like the terrain scultping speed. Most projects will have no problems but placing 2.750.000 vegetation assets plus thousends of models on the landscape will push engines to the limit. So I'm very pleased how this project ended from a technical point of view. From an artists point of view I always would like to put more effort into art but you have to think economically too so the artists real showcase are his personal projects most time. Some arch-viz people (what I've read in several interviews) only show personal work on their portfolios or participate at contests to "relax" from the daily work. I wish I would have the time to do it do. Followers of the Blog may have noticed that I only had 4-6 weeks for this project and was starting from scratch. Next time I'll work with freelancers again... Doing things with Leadwerks in such a tight timeframe speaks for the engine and editor in my opinion. You don't just get lost in features or menues but stay focused. Another nice thing for other people is that Josh gets valuable feedback how the editor "feels" in commercial production of big projects and can improve things in Leadwerks 3.0. Finally beside hard work the project was also fun to do. So here are the final screenshots of the 16 square kilometer project.