Parsimonia 1st Floor Walkthrough

We recently finished putting together a in-engine proof-of-concept of the first floor of the house in our upcoming exploratory adventure game, codenamed Parsimonia. We'd been nervously waiting to see if it would actually run after our Mac Pro finished its month-long run cranking out light maps in Mental Ray. Luckily it seems to be smooth sailing!

This video shows off 8 of the house’s 19 distinct rooms, about 25% of our full environment. The house sits atop a rocky continental island with more areas to explore.

The video is a bit choppy due to our screen recorder, but we're otherwise getting about 40fps on last generation laptop graphics hardware.


Walkthrough Video

 

Simply Amazing

 

Spectacular.

 

Beautiful. Perfect example of how "it's all in the art."

 

I want that house! Really beautiful work, the lighting in particular makes everything so realistic.

 

this one is one of the most amazing environments in unity I ever saw.
You´ve got a great taste for colors and lighting.

 

beautiful! proof up!

 

Nice! I'm so glad that technology these days enables more people to create art and games a lot easier than back in the 80s.

 

How did you get the perspective type of view? like sorta foggy more so around edges or whatever.

 

Simply Amazing!
Just out of curiosity, what is the spec of your Mac Pro?! It took A MONTH to bake all that ?!

 

gore23- We are using variations of the Vignette and Bloom and Flare screen shaders. The Vignette's blur attribute is what's making the edge of the screen more blurred.

I am da Bawss- I'm running 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 8 gigs of ram that's about 3 years old. There are many reason it took a long time to render. One is that Mental Ray is somewhat slow compared to more modern renderes, but I still love it. Another reason is that because of this light set up, there are potentially dozens of area lights in each render with a high sample rate using photometric light shaders to get the really nice distribution and physically accurate shadows. If we were just rendering a single light source outside it would be much simpler. I am also rendering 2k maps that I am scaling down so that we can rez-up in the future. There is probably some optimization that could be done but there are also lighting decisions that require more render time.

 

oh my god!

 

What shader did you use with the lightmaps? I'd like to know what kind of shaders your materials are using.

 

Most of the materials are just the plain diffuse material. Mike wrote a shader for specular objects that receives dynamic light for specularity but not for diffuse. This way specular objects can get spec highlights from unity lights and direct lighting from our Mental Ray light maps.

 

WOOOOOOOAH! That looks amazing. Must of taken so long to make. Speaking of, how long did it take to make? Modeling wise.

 

We've been working on the entire game for about a year. A lot of the time was spent designing the house, modeling it, figuring out the lighting set up and getting it to run smooth in Unity. It would be hard to tell you exactly how long it took to model what you are seeing because so much of the time is design and iteration. Once the house started coming together, we'd see things we didn't like and change the layout a lot. If it was already designed the modeling would probably take a few months.

Also a few things are from turbosquid and a good number of things are models I made based on higher res models I bought but needed to be rebuilt to run in a game engine.

 

The video looks very impressive it's a little dull (sound wise) I was expecting some music. But nonetheless very very nice.

 

Could be the most photo-realistic game environment I have ever seen. I'm hard pressed to find any kind of flaw or giveaway as to how it's made. And I simply can't.

 

how do I get a bloom, and vignette shader? i look around and I cant find any, and atm I am still learning unityscript and slight shader (reading on it).

Is it possible by chance you could share yours O.O its amazing XD

Even if it was not as strong a bloom would be awesome.

 

To be clear, you need Unity pro to do these post process effects. If you have unity Pro, simply go to Assetts -> Import Package -> Image effects. You can then select your camera and add the component. If you don't have Unity pro, I think you can get a 30 day demo to mess around with these effects.

 

Congratulations! You put alot of effort in to details and its simply awesome. How close do you think you can get to this result if you used Unity to bake the light?

 

I think you can get a lot of nice results if you bake with Beast in Unity, however I'm not sure if you can get the type of architectural lighting we can get in mental ray. We are using area lights with IES profiles to define our light distribution. What's great about Unity's light mapping system is that it doesn't tie you to any one program for baking. You can choose to use beast or you can go use Maya or 3ds max or modo and just import your hdr files. You could even bake some of your maps in Maya and some in beast.

 

Wow... simply wow. Well done guys, looks amazing!

 

Stunning work! Well done

 

Nice everything is places perfectly and looks awesome/

 

Works well

 

Very nice work.

 

I am super impressed by this. Is it going to be a PC / Mac game ?

Can't wait to have a look around in there for myself.

 

Very nice but i'm wondering. How large is this environment in Mb? To me it looks basically like alot of highres lightmaps? Don't get me wrong its really beautifully executed i'm just thinking if is this approach is worklable for a whole game? Is anything interactive? Can you open and close doors etc and do you have a realtime lighting solution for these occasions?

 

Spectacular artwork, nicely done!

 

This really looks just great, I'm curious about the game!

 

po8iuytr

 

Zomby138 - Yes we will primarily be targeting PC and Mac.

Filto The current size of the compile is about 600 mb. However what you see represents about 25% of the environment so we will likely be able to get it all on a DVD. This isn't going to be a huge epic game with dozens of environments rather a game about uncovering things about the environment in different times.

It would not be a workable way to make Grand Theft Auto or something but for our story it works fine. We are also engineering game play around some of these limitations so there won't be physics based doors or anything like that. It's more about simple interactions that put together to form more complex game dynamics.


I know Mirrors Edge used a ton of light maps, maybe smaller than our but it looked great any wasn't too big. I think because hard drive space is becoming less of an issue, it's okay to target a higher resolution environment, by the time the game's done it might not be an issue. The important things is that we've gotten it to run smooth on mediocre hardware. The frame rate is actually a lot better than the video capture which is a result of video capture choppiness.

 

Beautiful...very well made! compliments!
Max

 

Woo!!Wonderful!!
How long did you make this great stuff??
you are already a great interior designer!
what kind of game will be ?ACT ?AVG??I can`t wait for playing this game for one minutes !

 

Awesome!!!

 

Did you draw up all the paintings?
The house is beast

 

No about half the paintings are famous paintings I got from wiki commons and the other half were done by my mom.

 

Fantastic work indeed!

Regards,
Matt.

 

I didn't even know you could use Mental Ray to do the lighting, it looks really impressive. I'm curious how the rest will turn out when you start putting in some gameplay and moving objects.

Make's me want to do something artsy...

 

We've been creating the art and the gameplay mechanics in parallel, so we're very close to being able to blend the two. Now that we've proven to ourselves that a walkthrough of the house is actually technically feasible, we should be able to make some really good progress on gameplay.

 

A very good question - it would be a shame to have such a great looking environment be ruined by dynamic objects that stand out a mile away. I'm excited to see more

Out of interest, what's the average No. of drawcalls you get in your scenes?

 

really good lighting, congratulations!

 

We are hoping Light Probes will be useful for integrating dynamic objects into the environment. The other option is just to have a bunch of dynamic light on another render layer that mimic the general color and brightness of the environment. Most the things you interact will be small like putting a tape into a VCR or something. There will be other puzzles where you will actually change the environment but we will use multiple baked version of environments for that.

This isn't a physics based game like Pnumbra where you are knocking everything over or breaking doors down or anything like that. It more about simple interactions that you have to figure out that have a meaningful effect on the environment. The environment will also be there to provide you with lots of clues about what you need to do.

 

I've always been curious about the rules on using famous paintings in games. Are you sure it's legal? How does it work?

Are you going to have characters in the game?

 

Wow, that looks beautiful!

I'm wondering: Given the fact that you're going for lots of high fidelity texturing, would a virtual texturing solution such as Amplify not help you achieve that goal even better? I recon you could get a lot of performance gains, while also cranking up the viewing resolution of details like the paintings.

 

Light probes should be able to give your dynamic objects good ambient lighting to match the scene, the biggest issue I see will be matching the quality of the shadows. Although from what you describe, you have the advantage that objects that the player interacts with won't be moving about the scene. With some careful object placement and a bit of 'faking it' with additional real time lights where needed, you should be able to get a pretty good match

That's why I was asking about draw calls - I was going to suggest that too

 

Zomby138 I think any thing you use that was created before 1920 something is public domain. The way to check is to see if it is on commons.wikimedia.org. All the paintings in the house that are famous are before 1900. We are not planning to have characters in the game in terms of actual rigged models. It's an idea we toyed with but ultimately we think it will add too much time to our production.

Tinus I don't know much about virtual textures but I'll look in to it. Right now we are using detail textures to add up close detail to paintings.

NomadKing Draw calls range from about 200-400

 

This looks fantastic. I will be very interested to see the finished product.
Congratulations and keep up the good work.

 

Here's a neat before and after Mike put together. Before we were just using spot lights and final gather.

New library:


Old library: