Reshape the battlefield, Reshape the battle

Exis Interactve: Project Showcase
5 /13/ 2010,  By: Peter Kojesta

Although we’re now working with Day 1 on their latest project, back in ‘07 we had the pleasure of doing artwork for Fracture. The game’s aesthetic was really appealing to us because on the one hand you have the Pacifican’s with organic based technology, and on the other you have the Alliance with hardcore metal tech. Working with the two styles allowed us to explore some very interesting shapes and techniques.

Weapons:

A quick rundown of  some weapons we did for the game, show the very interesting stylistic choices by the concept team:

Contrasted against the Ice rifle which is a player/Alliance weapon.

Lastly the lodestone, which is one of my favorite designs overall; with the extending arms.

Vehicles

Fracture didn’t have a lot of wheeled vehicles, so the client asked us define the quality and set the tone. We developed the supply truck below using great concept art provided by Day 1. Our main objective was to maintain clean geometry that could be changed very quickly should the need arise. The major fluid forms are setup in such a way to allow easy editing, mixed with floating geometry to enhance the normal and AO bakes.

Buildings:

We created a good number of buildings and environments for the game as well, Some of my favorites use Day 1’s engine properties to great effect for shields. The buildings used modular sections, and specialty parts,  along with set dressing. It was key to maintain proper texel density across the various elements so the set dressing and the overall environment maintain visual cohesion.   You an see some of the environment models we made around this building as well.

Props / Set dressing / Environment Models:

We did too many props to enumerate here; lest we display a catalog. Instead lets consider a simple process diagram for one of the props. As you can see below, once the high and low poly are ready to go, you need to prepare properly in order to achieve clean Normal and AO bakes. If you leave the model in its combined state, you’ll find many errors on the bakes; overlapping normals, incorrect shadows, so on. So it’s important, as a matter of quality control, to explode the object  and then bake. Now, make sure that when you do this, you set 1 keyframe at frame 0, and after you’ve moved the objects, set another keyframe at “x” (doesn’t matter really). The point of this is that when you scrub your bar, you can get the object into it’s original shape again.  When you bake like this, you often end up with very clean normals. Generally, you will want to bake your AO with the object recombined, so you can get some nice interplay with the cavities.

Thanks for taking the time to check out our work on fracture. Once we finish our work with Day 1 on the latest project, we hope to create another such showcase for your reading.viewing pleasure. Our main objective is to produce high caliber work, each piece must stand out, but also work in concert with everything else. Feel free to drop us a line if you have any questions or comments.