Umbra occlusion benchmark
This project was a bit different from the more normal print/animation work we do at Undo. We were asked to create a benchmark level for the finnish company Umbra Software and their object occlusion middleware.
The project was done by two guys in couple of weeks, with no previous experience with the engine or the editor. I did much of the modeling and texturing work, plus played around in the game editor whenever I could. Majority of the work was done in Lightwave and Modo, with some conversion issues (those were numerous) solved in Max.
The final scene included around 30 000 individual instanced objects and about 65 million tris. The framerate remained fairly solid even with those numbers, which speaks volumes about the capabilities of Umbra's occlusion tech. The end product was showcased by Umbra at GDC in March 2009.
Being the ideal oppoturnity for it, I hid a few scifi easter eggs into the benchmark, some of which are quite visible on the screenshots. See how many you can spot ;)
A view from the inside of the starting apartment, showing the unusually huge scale for an fps game.
Note the huge blimp of the foreground. Blade Runner fans wont have to wonder where the inspiration for that came from.
The futuristic crates and barrels were pretty much the only objects to get their own textures, almost everything else was surfaced with generic tiling bitmaps. Time and memory constraints are to blame.
Yes, those cars in the sky do fly in lines, just like in the Star Wars or Fifth Element.
Many of the building designs took cues from Star Wars and the city-planet Coruscant, while the neon-signs and the ground level fog were intended to bring a more Blade Runnerish feeling to the scene.
We also created a few interiors for the level, like the cafe here, but due to time limits they don't look that spectacular from the inside. Great for demoing the occlusion effect though.
