Gori Behind the scenes Episode 05: Fuel from A to Ö (Patreon)

Hello Again Everyone! =D

Victor here again with some more behind the stuffs stuff! 

Today I'm gonna show you the creation of a 3D asset by me =D, it's a bit different from how John works with characters so I hope it will be  interesting. I will also not go as fully in depth into explaining concepts like Low and Highpoly so I hope that's ok =/. My reasoning being that if you wanna have that  further explained, look at Episode 3 =D. But tell me if this was a bad idea! I can also see that the newer posts will come first so maybe it's better to explain it every time like every post could be the first one people read. But I'll try it this time xD and I'll let you people decide if I should explain every time or not =P.

Without further ado... letz get into it!

So starting out the fuel as in the resource has this far changed in what and how it's supposed to be used a couple of times. When we first talked about adding Fuel as a resource we wanted to add Fuel purely as something to stop the player from always boosting without a purpose. So instead the player would have sort of "mini goals" when they play like: ohhh fuel! I need that! This is nothing new really xD. I'm purely explaining something we knew is kind of a proven classic concept. At that point we started talking a bit about fuel and how it should look and more importantly, where do you get it? We knew we wanted it to be something like weirdly cyberpunky/toy thing. So here are some early drawings from Caroline of both the Fuel tower and the pickup cells. 

As you can see we thought about a couple of different things xD. First we saw it more like a real gas station thing, but we kinda wanted fuel to be something more silly weird. So here you can see the early idea for things like the bubble gum / gachapon machine aesthetic. We saw that idea as we could put anything into this and it would in a way make sense. 

The things in the second image above are ideas on the pickups that would drop out of the fueltower and mostly mainly from other toys when you kill them. So you can see we looked at a couple different things xD. Like that for example you would break off the Unicorns horns or slam their brains out for fuel xD. Pretty funny ideas, but we thought about how small these would be and meaty red things are more of a health pickup color.  That's when we started going down the track of batteries. And at some point we also thought about  making it some sort of energy drink. So we then just combined those two ideas xD. A drinkable energy fuel cell that could fuel your car and yourself through the day. We also liked how we could with this have the option to change the color of the fuel to pretty much anything depending on what would work best. So that's why we finally landed in the little ball design you can see. So it ended up like this:

Very simple compared to our other ideas, but it just worked the best. So with this concept in mind we continued the concept for the fueltower. We still thought and found the bubble gum / gachapon machine idea fun, so we let Caroline explore that a bit more. 

So here we had a varying kind of ideas. As you might see most of these are a lot more toyish than the current thing in the game. But that's kinda purely my fault. At the time I had a lot of environment things to make and only had a short time to make this. So I said that for me at the time that the more simple concept you can see in the last picture would work best for me to get done on time. So that's the concept that was chosen to develop.

Even if the idea was simpler we thought of some simple things we could add to it as you can see that would make it more fun to hit, and add a bit of movement to it. 

So at this point it was handed over to me to actually make it in 3D =D.  

I started by simply just doing some size test in Unreal to get a blockout going. And as it was a lot of rather simple shapes, you can probably already see that it looks kinda right xD.

When I was modelling on the highpoly of this adding some detail and stuff, I started thinking on maybe branding this in some sort of way xD. So as a joke I started to make a logo with the silly name RAD Juice. Funnily enough I was prepared to scrap this but the rest of the team seemed to think it was a pretty ok idea so we Simply kept it in xD.

Just as I explained in episode 3 at this point it was a bit back and forth finishing the highpoly. It's not as interesting as Gori was xD as it's just sometimes it was a bit higher, sometimes the glass bowl was bigger/smaller etc. But anyway... Working through that i landed in the highpoly looking something like this:

I know some of you might be like what's going on? Why do the logos look like they are clipping? Well I can tell you that's just Maya xD, the program doesn't handle transparency at a distance so well so it looks a bit weird here. But anyway. Here you can also see I had already made the fuel cells. They are not so interesting to look at but here is how they looked close up:

You can also see I painted some more decals and stickers for both the pickup and the fueltower. If you wonder how I made them, they are simply just painted in Photoshop xD. For baking these I then in contrast to John use Marmoset Toolbag 3 for baking my things. I know maybe someone might be curious on: well... how do the baking actually look? And sorry xD I didn't show it in episode 3 but... there is actually not much to look at.

As you can see not much difference xD. But optimization wise it's a lot more viable to use in a game than before. And yes the glass is not there cause it doesn't really have any detail in it so it might as well just use no textures. I did this because it saves space for other things in the texture too =). 

So with this it was time to do some texturing =D.

And just like John I also use Substance Painter to texture my meshes. Quixel Mixer did also around this time maybe just have released their 3D painting =/ but I hadn't tried it yet xD so I still use Substance Painter for a while longer =P. What is Substance Painter you might ask? Well it's a bit like a 3D version of Photoshop that you use to make textures for games and movies. It looks like this:

Might be a bit confusing at a first glance, but it's really not bad at all. You can see there are layers and brush things to the right of the screen. those things might look a bit familiar if you used a layer based painting program. To the right of the screen are settings for rendering/project settings etc. and in the middle is an asset library filled with brushes, materials, mask generators and a bunch of other stuff. Substance painter is an awesome tool for most of your texturing needs =D the only thing it lacks for the future is mainly stability. You don't really need to make 4K or 8K resolution textures right now very often but those two modes are not working that great xD (Sorry for getting very technical for a sec). 

But anyhow, with this program I created all the textures for the Fuel Tower and Fuel Pickup.  
Through this I get things like metall looking like metal and stuff etc. Maybe I'll do tutorial video or something at some point about texturing if you people think that sounds interesting too =D (So many ideas for future posts xD). 

And in the game the fuel tower then finally looks like this:

As you might see there are some flare things added here like fake light and some rolling banners. So you know what that means? 

Yeah! So this is as usual a little more of a technical part so I understand if it's not everyone's cup of tea but for the people that like it (like me) let's get into some neardys stuff.

So first as mentioned we got some fake glow going. And fake light is really easy to make. I used it for things like lights in Apsulov here and there too. Why? might some of you say, why not just use blom? Well doing it this way has a lot more individual control over bloom. Like how far should this specific light reach, what shape has the light etc. But also because bloom is what is called a  screenspace effect, as fast as its off screen it wont cast bloom. And we want these to be visible even in the corner of your eye offscreen. 

And fake light is easily made by making a unlit material with the blendmode of Additive. Like this:

And then you just mask it with like a spherical gradient in the opacity and set the "brightness" of the light in the opacity. As I said before xD, very technical stuff. I think about this part as a little of a tips and tricks for people that already use Unreal or so =P. And I might do some tutorials on basic Unreal stuff further in the future, and maybe also some extended cool shader tips breakdown. But anyway, using this setup you can also throw it on a mesh and get a bit of a retro faked volumetrics look:

So yeah the other major interesting shader thing happening with the fueltowers, is this "hit bounce" effect we got going. You might be like ugh now when I say this but... xD this is an effect I saw that Fornite has, when you hit things in the environment. I don't play Fortnite it's not really my thing at all xD. But the effect was cool so I looked up how you can achieve the same feel. 

If you also wanna make the same type of function it's actually really easy. It's a mix between some light coding and a material you have to do =P. First you make a material function like this:

Then each asset that can bounce when hit needs to be assigned their own dynamic material instance in a blueprint. And finally you just check on hot what's happening and set the values in the material instances like this:

Really really simple setup xD but for anyone new to Unreal I think this is a great entry to making something with Blueprints and Materials talking to each other. If you want to know where I learned this and want a more detailed breakdown this is what I looked at when I made it:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnJarsAsWwo  . This guy also makes a lot of other awesome shader effects breakdowns so check his other stuff out if you want to see more cool stuff =D. And yes I don't always make everything from scratch, I always check google before I start making anything =P. But It's always great to try to break down what's actually happening in the shader so you can tweak it / change it later and even better combine and implement different things from different functions later when you wanna make new stuff =D. 

That's about it! The only thing left is the banner screen setup. But I think that's actually more interesting to break down on itself xD. I have never seen anyone talk about making banners and screens that way so =S it's a kinda fun and cool way of doing it =P. 

That's it! =D

The only thing left to say is that we after I had made this, put more things you could do with fuel like special moves and stuff =D. And currently it's quite a fun system. 

Anyhow...  I hope this was interesting =D and next time... I think it's time to show the old first SGC concept test we did. get ready for Andersson on a skateboard ;)

All right!

Have a rest of a good day! Laterz people!