Go With the Flow
The flow
goes like this: from a design document to a rough drawing to rough geometry
to more detailed geometry. But what to take from where -- which part should
be left to your imagination and which part taken from real life. A good
rule of thumb I follow is to try to not to reinvent the wheel. By this
I mean it's much better to take certain amount of detail directly from
real environments and not to try use your imagination to invent it (somebody
has already designed certain machinery for certain purposes, so why not
use that information?) -- some may see it as a personal challenge to figure
out everything by themselves, but to me it's a challenge not to. Not only
does real world equipment/machinery/pieces of furniture/geometry help
make the environment more real, but also the end result more consistent
-- just remember to make everything to the scale (but not necessarily
make the furniture to the same scale as the room geometry; basically whatever
looks good is good, unless the space becomes too small, making
the game unplayable). This same rule applies to the textures as well.
Doesn't sound simple? Maybe so, but it really is!
In More Detail
Now
that the idea behind the workflow is (hopefully) clear, let's go through
another example in much greater detail. In this case I needed to make
the lobby (and connecting areas) to a sleek apartment building (one with
a portiere and such).
As before, I made a rough sketch of the place (4x4x8m module) and worked
from there; sometimes it may be hard to see what the place looks like
flat, so making a quick render of it with temporary lights helps (figure
1). When adding detail on top of the basic geometry it's usually best
make certain prefabs of pillars, columns, pieces of furniture etc. This
is just to make future updating as well as object 'recycling' easier (figure
2). As I mentioned earlier, it's good to use a certain module (or modules)
on which to base all the geometry in the level. In figure 2, the pillars
on the back wall are all copies of the same prefab object and are spaced
out evenly 4 or 8 meters from each other. Each pillar is 6 meters high
and 1 meter wide at the base (those with keen eyes might notice the pillars
don't reach the highest part of the ceiling, which in fact is 7 meters
high -- the reason is to give one meter space between the ceiling of this
floor and the floor of the next one. Most people will notice several different
ceiling heights within the space; this is not to break the modular thinking
but rather to work with it: if you're aware of the sizes of your space,
it's easy and even recommended to use halves, quarters or other divisions
of those sizes.
Prefabs
are not only handy when it comes to room elements, but even more so when
making pieces of furniture, interactive objects (a door would be one of
the simplest cases), machines, vehicles, plants, or whatever else you
need; instead of having to make several chairs, couches or so, one has
only to make one and just change the textures to get a different piece.
Naturally this doesn't solve the problem of different shape pieces of
furniture, but does help out.
Even when I talk about modularity and its importance, it's good to remember
modules are not the only thing that's there. Modularity brings in consistency
for the grand outlines, but its the smaller objects bring in the necessary
discontinuity to the whole. Environments would become disturbingly repetitive
if it wasn't for the 'little' elements there to break it all up, just
like how things are in real life.
Getting Smaller
Even
as it may feel strange sometimes, level designing usually works in cycles.
It's a bit like carving stone, first you make the general shapes and every
pass bring in more detail until you're satisfied with the result (basically
this can be done indefinitely, thus it's good to draw a line somewhere:
three passes seems to do the trick for me).
Each of these cycles are divided into parts: the obvious first part is
to make out the geometry and the second part is to make the textures for
the geometry and texture it and the possible third part could be lighting.
With basic shapes you only need basic lighting, with more elaborate shapes
you need more defined lights. Each step add to the refinement of the space,
adding and adjusting details to create the desired effect. The images
below show the earlier figure in varying stages on the road to completion.
And as mentioned
previously, I didn't make up the small stuff. For example the screen,
keyboard, lamps, chairs and pillars are based on real life objects (as
are their textures).
Not Only
3D
Even though
modern level design (at least when it comes to shooters) is all about
3D, it's important to remember that 3D space would be next to useless
if it wasn't for certain 2D elements put into the 3D space: textures.
Plainly put, textures are the thing that either make or break a level.
Also, with clever usage of textures it's possible to hide or fix mistakes
in the geometry, add a good sense of scale and most of all define the
level of realism that the space has; having the textures in the same scale
fortifies the consistency achieved with the modular approach to the geometry.
The worst mistake you can make is use clearly different resolution textures
next to each other -- not only will that break believability but also
looks plain ugly.
Basically it's best to try texturing the level once you have the basic
modeling done. At this stage it's still relatively easy to change or fix
things within the space without much extra trouble.
But textures are not just about scale or detail, the important fact often
overlooked by artists is harmony; you frequently find 3D environments
that have solid geometry and lighting but the textures just don't seem
to fit. I'm not talking about single textures or single features in those
textures, but the textures that are just too different from each other
either due to poor use of color and color combinations or simply because
of too much saturation in them. If you strive for realism, once again,
take a look at your surroundings -- if you haven't hired a bad interior
decorator, what you see should have certain harmony of color and texture,
a certain balance. This is largely due to light reflecting from surfaces
and taking with the color-value of the surface: different color objects
'color' each other because of the reflected light.
Compare the images below: in the first one the surfaces don't reflect
their color in the second one they do. See the difference and the added
harmony?
Scale
Need is
the usual factor that determines size and scale -- if you're working on
futuristic alien locations, it's of less importance to have the structures
in scale with each other or in any sensible scale in general (making the
ceiling 100 meters high can work as well as making it 5 meters high --
who is to say what an alien location looks like?). Since I am working
on realistic environments, the sizes of things and consistency of scale
is very much important; people seldom think about the fact that making
levels for a first person shooter needs different scale than making levels
for a third person shooter - in a TPS the player and the camera need more
space than in an FPS, thus bigger extensions and bigger spaces (Compare:
Figure 3 has real life scale while figure 4 is what we used in Max).
As I'm not
only into realistic geometry, but also into third person POV, the needs
may be a bit different than what people are used to.
In an FPS realistic room sizes would be pretty much what they are in real
life, in a TPS they're closer to double that of real life. If your average
bedroom is 4x5 meters and 2.5 meters high, in a TPS the size would be
8x10 meters and the height 4 meters; the great thing about larger sizes
is that the characters are easier to control and the spaces don't even
feel too big!
But what about furniture? If the room is 150-200 percent of realistic
size, surely the pieces of furniture need to be large as well? Not exactly.
The best approach really is to make the furniture close to real life scale
as the characters in the game are as well of real size -- making the furniture
larger would result in the characters looking like children and that's
definitely something you should avoid. Please note I'm not saying you
shouldn't scale the furniture, but rather than the effect should be kept
to a bare minimum; making the pieces 10-20 percent larger than what's
realistic still results in close enough real size tables, chairs, couches
etc., but it also ensures the rooms don't look overly large. Its also
important to remember the spacing between the pieces -- even if they are
about real life size, the space between doesn't need to be, go with whatever
still looks good and makes the movement of the characters easier.
A good rule of thumb for all this is to make things the player gets near
closer to the their real life size. Objects further away can be too large,
as it often makes the space look of more realistically sized. Another
pointer to keep in mind is a thing they teach people studying architecture:
one centimeter on the floor is ten on the wall is a meter in the ceiling
- as your gaze is usually downward, you tend notice small things on the
ground more easily than larger ones in the ceiling.