Anatomy of an enviroment

As the subsurface game is a submarine adventure, it wouldn't be complete without a loading bay. Part of the surface ship supporting the expedition the loading bay is where the player gets introduced to the story and the characters, as well as the main interface for starting the gameplay.

It will serve as a brief exploratory space and enviroment to showcase the virtools 5.0 character animation features.

Just to showcase how easily the scene has been accomplished inside the engine, here are a few steps of implementation

step 1 : importing the model. This image is of the bare model including only vertex colors for a base shading, and as a base for future shaders (ambient occlusion etc etc)

step 2 : Adding lightmaps. Basically this is a static scene, there will be caustics (more on that further on), but the general area can be lit with a static lightmap generated in this case from 3Dstudio Max.

step 3: Detail. Due to the speed of production and the online requirements we forego explicit lighting on the detail and interactive objects, this also serves to shows you can combine many techniques to get an overall result. In this case the details receive vertex coloring to light them from the same solution as the lightmap. The waterplane in the bassin receives a virtools standard water shader with some reflection effects.

step 4 : Postprocessing. As this particular doesn't have a HDR solution (time limits prohibit this), its more an example of how to combine effects and techniques to achieve a certain artistic result.

We've add some bloom post processing to enhance the lighting and get a decent amount of glare to expose the sunlight coming from the deck opening. Also as it features a water bassin or moonpool we figured it would require some form of caustic on the ceiling and ambient area's of the pool. For this we're projecting a video of waves on those area's, which gives the illusion of reflection of light on the water surfaces.