Creating Hyperion part 3

Monday, 26 November 2012

This is the third update on Hyperion. We have made some progress and are in the final stages of the project.

Here is a rundown of the changes up until now.

I have finalized the terrain. The ground (playing area) is now done. I have added small details in terms of bumps and elevations and also tweaked the pathways.

Kevin has been sculpting the walls to make it rocky. He has finished it and this is how it looks like. The first 3 pictures shows the level with the wall extrusions ready for rock sculpting.

Now these are the pictures showing the rock sculpting.

After that Kevin added more rocks on top of that to add elevation and create a sense of depth.

I have also integrated the water path into the map.

After all of that, I poly-reduced the terrain so that it is game friendly. The result is not as nice as the high-poly one but it will be good enough. It will look nicer once textures are added.

There are some holes from where the big peak rocks meet the main terrain. I will have to edit the terrain to cover the holes up.

Now what is left to do, are the UV for the terrain and the decorations (Trees, grass, vines). To place the decorations, we will be painting in where to place the objects and use a VOP SOP to create special "rules" for the placement.

I have shown this method in a previous post. Here is how it looks like.

The main paint. White is where the objects will spawn.

After applying the VOP SOP, i highlighted only the center of that painted area. This is where boxes (just a test) will be spawned.

Another VOP SOP is applied and the outer area is highlighted. This is where spheres will be spawned.

The result.

This is helpful as we can paint in the general areas in where vegetation will grow. Then applying those "rules" can help spawn different objects easily.

Current problems now are that some parts are not procedural. For example, i painted in some parts black to group up parts of the terrain for sculpting. 

If i change anything before that, like for example if i adjust the slopes for the terrain, the black color that i painted will not work anymore.

Besides that, the map is almost finished.

I have also done some exporting tests. I managed to split the main terrain model up into four parts(smaller vertex count) so that i can export the models to Unity without any problems.

I managed to walk around the level. It works!

The problem now is the the model has some very sharp edges. I have since fixed that by smoothing out the model in Houdini.

What is left (in order): 

Tweak the underground path to the central base. 

Final tweaks

Finish Proxy models (especially central base)

UV terrain

Placement of decorations (Trees, Grass, Vines)

Plan for the week:

Tuesday: Finalize map, Start unwrapping extrusions, UV.

Wednesday: Continue UV (while Kevin tests out the placement of objects)

Thursday: Finish UV, Placement of objects, Export tests

Friday: Finalise level, Export.

Weekends: Do the powerpoint slides for the presentation on tuesday.

This is the final stretch of the project and we are almost done.

Here we go.

That is all.