Hey guys-
I was asked my the marketing department to make a first post here, and I generally like them and don't want them to cut me wide open with swords I'll talk about something.
So with the players in the game, we want nice looking characters, but you can see very VERY far. This means we need to implement Level of Detail on almost everything, mostly generated by hand. This means it's a huge pain in the butt. This more or less invisible to the end user because by the time it switches to a new level of detail the character is small or smaller on the screen, so we don't need as much detail as if it was up close. Here's some images that demonstrate the various levels of detail on the players. 1 is if the player is really close, and 4 if the player is minuscule on the screen:
So, with art, one of the most annoying parts about making a that is generally outdoors is the lighting. Normals, woohoo! Yeah, that's great if you have a few point lights. Outside, the sun washes everything out. So to tackle this approach we do a few different things with our character lighting. Here's some knowledge, illustrated by use of the special Legions Developer Team skin.
First the mesh is rendered with just geometry. From this geometry, we can apply a specular highlight to the model, as well as cast simple shadows, as well as some self-shadowing (ie arm casts shadow across chest, etc). Overall, it looks like a huge mass of clay but it's being lit properly.
From here, the next step is to take a normal map, which we've generated from a high poly model in 3D Studio Max, and apply it to this shape. This normal map can also read the light direction and properly light the small details within the normal map with specular lights and shadows. We also use a black and white specular mask to control how shiny parts of the texture are, and generally how they shine. Now that lump of clay is looking like a lump of clay with some details. Check out those metallic man nips. Yeah!
From here we need to add some color data and generally surface texturing. We do this through the diffuse texture. We create a new texture that contains all this information, and this is applied with the previous normal map, specular, and shadow data and we have something that resembles a character in a video game:
So this is how the players are lit in Legions. Hopefully the marketing guys will get someone in here to talk about something more fun, but at least I can talk about art. In the meantime, I need to get back to work to make sure this thing doesn't get off the rails!
-Tim
