Plan for Neil Marshall
by Neil Marshall · 09/11/2005 (8:48 am) · 6 comments
I have been putting this off for a while. I needed to put together a video of Virtual Canada for my demo reel before it gets taken offline (As often happens with unpopular MMO games). so I loaded it up and recorded 4 gigs of video captures of the parts that I worked on (And some I just helped out with) and compiled them into this 4MB Quicktime montage.
www.eightlines.com/neil/reels/4.mov
Stuff I did in the video:
Particle animations. They're very simple but improved the scenes dramatically.
Path animations. The Avro Arrow at the end is a huge DTS animated by someone else.
Building placement for the entire city of Niagara Falls.
Some of the buildings in Niagara Falls.
Cleanup and import of the Mocap data.
Just in case anyone asks... this is 100% torque. Even the interiors (They're DTS interiors - they can be done).
www.eightlines.com/neil/reels/4.mov
Stuff I did in the video:
Particle animations. They're very simple but improved the scenes dramatically.
Path animations. The Avro Arrow at the end is a huge DTS animated by someone else.
Building placement for the entire city of Niagara Falls.
Some of the buildings in Niagara Falls.
Cleanup and import of the Mocap data.
Just in case anyone asks... this is 100% torque. Even the interiors (They're DTS interiors - they can be done).
About the author
#2
09/11/2005 (9:19 am)
That's some impressive stuff. :) 
#3
09/11/2005 (10:45 am)
Awesome, keep it up. 
#4
Question - did you do the mocap yourself, or did you get it from elsewhere?
How much of the building interiors are actually navigable?
09/11/2005 (12:28 pm)
Heh - that looks like it was a lot of work. I'm very impressed with the density of stuff in the scenes.Question - did you do the mocap yourself, or did you get it from elsewhere?
How much of the building interiors are actually navigable?
#5
Very cool. :) There's an art museum about a 1/5th of the way through the clip - is that TGE, pre-rendered, or real video?
Great work!
-John
09/11/2005 (1:16 pm)
Hi Neil,Very cool. :) There's an art museum about a 1/5th of the way through the clip - is that TGE, pre-rendered, or real video?
Great work!
-John
#6
The mocap was done by a school in Toronto and given to us by the Ontario Science Center. For the life of me I can't remember which on but Senica College is popping into my head.
"I'm very impressed with the density of stuff in the scenes."
Actually they cut down the scenes. They had more buildings about a week before release but it slowed down 1GHz boxes too much and we had to cut cut cut.
"How much of the building interiors are actually navigable?"
Originally every building was. In the end only 5 schools per city, up to 4 museums per city, and 5 galleries per city. In the galleries each photo links to content such as Hinterlands Whose Who videos and stuff. The programmers built a Home Builder where you could go in, purchase any unused house and it would give you an interior which you could customize by uploading photos and stuff. The problem was that it was government driven and they have to be politically correct. So even though we had moderators setup to verify all the photos and stuff, it got cut. Same with the chat feature. You could chat with people, but the government can't control what people say so they decided it was best to not allow them to say anything. I voted them in though so I guess I can't complain.
You can see screenshots inside one of the galleries in my old .plan
John Kabus "There's an art museum about a 1/5th of the way through the clip - is that TGE, pre-rendered, or real video?"
Yeah, that's Torque with no lighting pack :P The clip is of the interior of the Gardner Museum. It's a DTS interior with baked on lighting done in 3dsmax. We tried a number of different things, but that one in particular was an interior all done as a DTS with no collisions. Then we made walls and floors in groups of 8 and exported all those dts'. Place them all at the same spot and you have a whole building with collisions.
In other places I believe we created a DTS building with a DIF collision. We made one poly that was out of view with a texture and then notex on the rest of it.
All of our interiors were done as DTS interiors that were different missions. There is no landscape outside.
09/12/2005 (7:51 am)
Jay Barnson "Question - did you do the mocap yourself, or did you get it from elsewhere?"The mocap was done by a school in Toronto and given to us by the Ontario Science Center. For the life of me I can't remember which on but Senica College is popping into my head.
"I'm very impressed with the density of stuff in the scenes."
Actually they cut down the scenes. They had more buildings about a week before release but it slowed down 1GHz boxes too much and we had to cut cut cut.
"How much of the building interiors are actually navigable?"
Originally every building was. In the end only 5 schools per city, up to 4 museums per city, and 5 galleries per city. In the galleries each photo links to content such as Hinterlands Whose Who videos and stuff. The programmers built a Home Builder where you could go in, purchase any unused house and it would give you an interior which you could customize by uploading photos and stuff. The problem was that it was government driven and they have to be politically correct. So even though we had moderators setup to verify all the photos and stuff, it got cut. Same with the chat feature. You could chat with people, but the government can't control what people say so they decided it was best to not allow them to say anything. I voted them in though so I guess I can't complain
You can see screenshots inside one of the galleries in my old .plan
John Kabus "There's an art museum about a 1/5th of the way through the clip - is that TGE, pre-rendered, or real video?"
Yeah, that's Torque with no lighting pack :P The clip is of the interior of the Gardner Museum. It's a DTS interior with baked on lighting done in 3dsmax. We tried a number of different things, but that one in particular was an interior all done as a DTS with no collisions. Then we made walls and floors in groups of 8 and exported all those dts'. Place them all at the same spot and you have a whole building with collisions.
In other places I believe we created a DTS building with a DIF collision. We made one poly that was out of view with a texture and then notex on the rest of it.
All of our interiors were done as DTS interiors that were different missions. There is no landscape outside.
Torque Owner Brian Hunter