Awesome Terrain & Cinematic Artist Joins Em8ER!
Marc Carratala, aka Daarkth, is a very talented, upcoming cinematics and terrain artist who is now a part of the Em-8ER team!
In the video below, you can see some of the gorgeous work he has done so far on his student project. Those crystals scattered across the land almost scream “mine Crystite here!” The entire cinematic is made in Unreal Engine 4.
While this is a rendered cinematic, it is done entirely in real-time inside Unreal Engine 4. Many of the techniques Daarkth has used here are applicable to game terrain, and that is why we have asked him to lead the terrain and world creation efforts for Em-8ER. In addition, Daarkth will also lend his talents to the Kickstarter cinematic for Em-8ER itself!
The Whitebox Phase
We’ve already broken ground on new terrain for Em-8ER. Daarkth and Grummz have been drawing, conceptualizing, and whiteboxing the main playable demo space for Em8ER’s upcoming Kickstarter demo.
For Em-8ER, we have started whiteboxing the terrain. Whiteboxing is the process of placing and sizing the play areas and major elements of interest which will feature in the demo.
Whiteboxing is the most important phase. It is during this phase that we actually spend the most time. It is far easier to try different ideas and make big changes in this phase.
Crodus is Too Big! Make the Map Bigger!
We tried a few different layouts, each attempt helping us realize the scale of the world we need. For example, when we put Crodus, one of our Kaiju Prime, into the map, we realized it was far too small! Crodus is well over 120 meters tall (Godzilla territory), and we quickly realized we needed to expand the size of the level when we placed him into the world.
Not only did we need more room for Crodus, but for the player built cities and bases, he will be attacking. So we are back at the drawing board, doing yet another whitebox revision with much bigger terrain areas. We only plan for one area to be playable in the Kickstarter demo, with the other areas waiting for production post Kickstarter when full-time development begins.
Workflow & Tools
Another part of the puzzle is workflow. Just what tools and procedures do we need to realize our vision for Em-8ER’s planetary surface? After trying many tools, including World Creator, Gaia, and many others, we quickly realized we needed finer grain control over how we procedurally generate the landscape. We settled on Houdini, a high end visual VFX tool used in many Hollywood blockbusters, as the right tool for the job.
Houdini can be used for many things, but we are primarily using their terrain tools to help us blend procedural, artist driven, and designer driven level design into Em-8ER main MMO spaces.
Populating the Terrain. Doodads and Things.
Terrain isn’t complete without decorations like rock formations and other “Doodads” (the technical game design term for objects placed to decorate terrain).
We’ve started to concept some of the rock formations and tree like structures that our level designers will be able to populate into the terrain. These will help delineate spaces and provide variety across the map. We’ve approved a couple of these designs to proceed to “speed sculpting,” where artists quickly create temporary 3D models to test in our whitebox levels before we bring them into final production.
We hope you enjoyed this update for Em-8ER. You can expect more developer blogs posted to Medium in the future. By using Medium, we hope to grow the community by making it easier to discover and share news about Em-8ER. If you liked this developer update, please consider sharing it with a few friends!
