Context
This was my first school project designed within a month and a half with my classmate Amélie Franza.
The environment we have chosen to replicate is the main city from Stray.
Learning Unreal Engine 5 at the same time taught me that the time is one of the most valuable ressource in game development.
Challenge
The main thing that brings life to this world is the lightning with all of these neons.
The space of this aera is rather big and the deadline for this exercise was quite short.
The space of this aera is rather big and the deadline for this exercise was quite short.
Solution
For the production of the city, we opted for a template-based approach to get into a scale where it is easy to apply a repeatable texture with a texel density of 512 per square meter.
Neon lights were a particular factor in the level build of Stray and it led us to do the same. The main idea was to be able to change the color of a mesh without having to reapply a different instance of material which implies the use of custom primitive data.
Neon lights were a particular factor in the level build of Stray and it led us to do the same. The main idea was to be able to change the color of a mesh without having to reapply a different instance of material which implies the use of custom primitive data.
Blocking
I have made the player path blocking by calculated the modules heights based on the player height.
Vertex Painting
Since the main path needed more artistic care, I have made a vertex painting shader that uses parallax occlusion mapping.
Shader
This shader uses height blend for more realistic layer blending.
Material Instance
The material’s variables have been arranged by categories and clamped or not if need.
Designer
In the city level, the main identity is the colorful tiled facade so in order to quickly create a lot of iterations, I have choose to create these texture with Substance Designer.
Here they are some of them.
Flag Simulation
Houdini Sim
In order to explore different workflows, I have tried to use the alembic format, this one can be used as a geometry cache within Unreal engine 5 to store complex simulation.
For the flags movement, I have used Vellum simulation in Houdini using a mask attribute that I have painted on the mesh, I can drive constraints on the simulation in order to simulate the places where the flag is attached.
Then I have looped the simulation for an endless animation.
Geometry cache
Depending of the simulation size, this workflow fit for cinematic purposes but can be used in real time if you are cautious about performance cost as for example Gears of war 5.
Speed Tree
Speed Tree
Due to a lack of time, we opted to do the foliage using the Speedtree software.
Here is one of the tree that i have made using procedural creation and hand draw option.
Glowing Material
The material was made in Unreal engine by using Fresnel effect in world space normal and mixing it to another one in normal texture space.
Result
There is the result in the environment.
Optimization
Before LODs
With this gigantic level the polycount was up to 100 millions which causes FPS drops, this leads me to make LOD in order to gain FPC back.
After LODs
Using LODs the overall polycount drop to nearly 15 millions.
This may be a lot but with this, the polycount was not the bottleneck now.
This may be a lot but with this, the polycount was not the bottleneck now.
Before Draw
The main bottleneck is now the drawcount that is up to 20000.
After Draw
The use of distance culling and instances helps to reduce the draw significantly to 7000.
With this the level run at 60 FPS with a RTX 3060 graphic card.
Other projects
Level Build