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cltreherne · 6 years ago

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Applications of 3D Essay

From CGI in movies to creating entire worlds in games, 3D Modelling has become an incredibly helpful asset to many sectors of the creative industry.

In product design, 3D modelling can be used to render packaging work for a client. A designer can simply create a model of a can, bottle or packet based upon the product that the client provides, the artists can design the packaging, and finally display it on the model to pitch that work to the client.

Before 3D modelling, these companies would need to create 2D renders in programmes like photoshop or illustrator. This provided a neat but less realistic image of the potential product and took significantly longer than simply applying the design to a model that had potentially been made weeks ago.

3D modelling has become crucial in the games industry for some of the worlds, characters and stories that many designers want to create. Before the application of 3D modelling, companies would make 3D spaces using 2D images and animations. This can be seen in classic games like Qbert which are entirely 2D but try to create 3D worlds. 3D has allowed the games industry to use photorealistic graphics and real-time raytracing which becomes more and more accessible with every generation of graphics cards and consoles. With designers and artists learning to make 3D models from the comfort of their homes, the games industry is seeing better talent and original work from younger people who are passionate about games and their creation.

Similarly, with the Visual Effects companies working in film and TV, 3D has provided a great number of opportunities. 3D modelling allows VFX artist to capture realistic scene lighting, create characters to visualise in the real world and create spectacles that completely defy reality. A fantastic example of this is Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’. The blackhole known as Gargantua was a 3D model that had painstakingly accurate physics simulated for it and the result of that simulation created a beautiful and awe-inspiring model to be used for the movie. Without 3D modelling, simulations for physics and lighting like this would be far more difficult or even impossible.

3D Development Software

3DS Max is a proprietary suite designed to do particle effects with 3D modelling. 3DS Max saves projects in .3ds format, which is made up of the textures, polies and lighting of a model. The programme can also support motion capture, resulting in more realistic animations. This can be seen in James Cameron’s Avatar which features a whole race of CGI people in a CGI world. However, the programme can also place CG images into a real-life scene. Other examples of films made using 3DS Max are Alice in Wonderland, 2012, Blade Trinity and Cats & Dogs.

Maya is designed to be used along-side 3DS Max, using the proprietary file format .mb. This format is lossless but saves space using binary algebra. Maya is used for loads of things from texturing, lighting and particle effects to modelling and animation. Maya has the capability to transfer files to programmes like Unreal or Unity for games. Maya is currently used by Rooster Teeth Animation to make the series ‘RWBY’ which is modelled and animated within the programme. Other films made using Maya are Finding Nemo, Hugo, Rango and Frozen. Games created with Maya include Mirror’s Edge, For Honor and Dead by Daylight.

Cinema 4D is used by a wider range of industries such as architecture and science, and has been used to make Inception, The Golden Compass and Monster House. The programme uses .c4d, which is another proprietary file format. C4D focuses on motion graphics and sciences because of its simulation capabilities with particles and fluids.

Plugins are added to these programmes to add features that the default suit couldn’t use. Maya features a number of plugins that make the application easier to use. In Maya, Massive has been used for games on the Wii and the XBOX wherein it simulated crowds which, before the plugin, would have needed to be created manually. When your project is facing a budget, Massive bridges the gap and saves you time and money.

Application Programming Interface

Games are written in one language and machines like your PC or console use a different language. The API acts as a translator between these systems so that the game can use all of hardware that it needs to be able to run. There are two key APIs made for this process. These are Direct3D and OpenGL.

Direct3D is a part of Microsoft’s DirectX. PCs running windows primarily use DirectX as well as Microsoft’s XBOX which is where it got its name.

OpenGL is open source, meaning it can be changed by anyone who has access to a copy. Open GL is cross platform and so can run on PC and consoles. This means a game can be made for PS and also be released for PC or XBOX.

These two programmes are the leaders in the API market because of their complex nature and ongoing support. Around 60% of all computers use DirectX as it’s Microsoft Windows proprietary software. However, OpenGL can also be used on Windows as well as all other operating systems it supports such as OSX, IOS, Android, Linux and Playstation. Being open source, OpenGL receives constant community support but no official support. On the other hand, DirectX is proprietary so receives no community support, but Microsoft is constantly working on it.

3D models are made up of lines, vertices, faces and polygons. Working as dimensions, a vertices is a dot anywhere on an x,y,z axis and creates a line when two vertices are connected. When you join 3 or more vertices together you make a polygon and when you join polygons together, they act as faces of a mesh. More complicated models have more polygons and therefore a higher ‘Poly Count’, making a model take longer to render book look far more realistic. 3D software usually features pre-made meshes called Poly Primitives which can be moulded and modified to make different shapes such as a sphere being turned in to a head. Basic primitives are a cube, sphere, cylinder, pyramid and a Torus (Ring). Starting with these primitives can save an artist a lot of time and effort; This is called Box modelling.

With Box modelling, the artist usually needs to create many subdivisions in the primitive to be able to model it concisely and flexibly. Another way of modelling is with extrusion, where you stretch individual faces of the model which creates more faces and doesn’t require subdivisions. Both these methods can be used together to achieve more complex models.

When an artist is creating 3D models, they face limits and constraints. One constraint is the polycount. Considering rendering time, polycount may need to be lowered to complete the project for a deadline. As well as time saving, lowering the polycount allows the model to perform better when used in console games. Limiting compatible platforms by heightening the polycount makes for a smaller market and having to high a polycount can cause performance issues as they take more processing power to load in. When a company wants to render high quality assets quickly, they use a Render Farm. Other effective methods are also used such as fogging and draw distance so that objects in the distance are either fogged out and invisible or dynamically changed to a lower poly to save on performance whilst still being immersive for the player and saving on memory.

Lighting in 3D space can be crucial and has 3 core types: Point Light, Spot-Light and Area Light. Point lights are common for studio lighting effects and are close to real life lightbulbs. In this way, they emit light in every direction and disperses over distance. Spotlights operate like torches, being mainly directional in a cone shape and is typically used as a torch that the player can use. Area lights represent windows or screens, with a square of directional light. In Portal 2, Windows with fully lit offices behind them provided a large light source for the level scene. When lighting has been built, shadows are created relative to the 3 types of light used. Shadows add depth and realism to a scene and can potentially be built with raytracing when a light source is added.

Texturing is also important to 3D models as it provides realism and feel to an object. An artist can add colours and materials to an object and the object can match the properties of the material. With clear materials like glass, light is reflected and dispersed differently to hard opaque surfaces. Changing aspects like these when modelling leads to photorealistic graphics and convincing immersive worlds. To simulate lighting for textures, normal mapping and UV mapping are used. This makes clear what parts of the texture to pop out, and that has an effect on how lighting affects the model. UV Mapping refers to opening out a shape as a 2D net to best apply a design and tailor it to each face.

Pixel shaders are used with normal mapping to create more detain without eating up processing power, determining the characteristics and colour of a pixel to bring out more detail in models during animations. When rendering a scene as a 2D image, projection and clipping come in to play. Essentially, only what the camera sees is rendered and anything outside of the frame or obscured by an object is ignored. ‘Rendering’ itself refers to creating the 3D model using the aforementioned tools, tricks and methods. In this process, raytracing or radiosity can be employed to create a more realistic image. Radiosity is mainly used for real time rendering in games as it takes less processing power and runs more smoothly. Raytracing, however, is best used when rendering a single image as it works out lighting down to the individual pixels. Raytracing is becoming more accessible as technology improves and is beginning to find its way into film, TV and some games; though the gameplay performance does suffer significantly.

When rendering many frames of an animation or many images under a strict time budget, Render Farms are used to distribute work between multiple servers. This saves a lot of time as one computer doing every frame of a CG sequence in a movie is ineffective and very time consuming. These servers will be running Rendering Engines, which translate the 3D model or scene into a two-dimensional image or frame. Many different engines produce different results as they use a variety of different methods. The three leading Rendering Engines are Lux, Maxwell and Blender. Lux is the fastest of the three, but the results are less detailed and blurrier with the poorest lighting. Maxwell handles colours the best, but each frame takes the longest to render. Blender produces images with sharp, crisp lighting and shadows and looks more realistic but lacks the colours that Maxwell can produce.

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cltreherne · 6 years ago

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The Armillary Project Story

The Armillary Project is a third-person, single player, open-world, quest based, action RPG where other-worldly demigods protect humanity from a ravenous evil. The game is Sci-Fi steampunk with ‘Elven Futurism’ as a visual style. The architecture is Glass and Gold with trees and life running through every wall and machine. These Demigods are called Armien; a magic-using scientifically advanced race of people from the planet Eden.

Armien inhabit large underground environments known as Citadels which are created by hollowing out the mantles of Eden’s moons and building vast cities under the heat and light of the molten core. The Armien moved underground when their sun began to dwindle and the surface became uninhabitable. Both the Armien and the Citadels of Eden were created by a powerful AI known as The Armillary Project, the same AI that invented interstellar travel with the use of mind-boggling machines called Armillary Engines; Bigger-on-the-inside space capsules containing a large structure of spinning rings that fold space to launch the capsule across the cosmos.

All Armien worshipped the Project as their deity, but the equilibrium was disturbed by the arrival of Eris Gwynn; an actual god known as a Seraphim who’s plane of existence outside our reality had been destroyed. Eris sought asylum with the Armien and some began to worship her instead of the Project. Inevitably, this led to a religious war between The Armillary Project’s and Eris Gwynn’s followers. Gwynn followers were granted magical power by Eris whilst Project followers were granted wondrous technologies. In the final days of the war, The Project was losing and desired to turn the tide of the war with the use of time travel. To properly understand and develop time travel, however, it needed Eris’ Seraphim Book which contains all knowledge of the Universe but can’t be easily understood by a mortal mind. The book was stolen and cast in to The Project’s Thinking Flame, and in a single second the entirety of the book’s contents were consumed, inexplicably causing the followers of The Project to vanish quite completely. The AI was extinguished, leaving only the supercomputer’s shell.

With The Project gone and Eris having lost her powers, The Armien now had no gods to worship other than the image of a fox as it was the form Eris took in her hayday. The Armien made use of The Armillary Project’s technology and left Eden centuries ago to colonise the galaxy, but space-capable humans from Earth discovered and repopulated the old and now overgrown Citadels. The main story begins when war returns to Eden between two gods and their disciples. The Project has returned bitter, broken and mad. The book it now holds has destroyed the Project’s once brilliant mind and with the Armien seemingly gone, The Project aims to start life again. It tries to craft new Armien but only makes abominations called Chimera which run rampant and eat human flesh. Eris, with her twin children and their Armien father, has returned to put a stop to The Project once and for all, and to restore Eris’ status as a god.

You play a fully customisable Armien colonist called Tool. A young character with a delinquent life who has been hunted down through the Citadels by a group called ‘Fall of The Seraphim’ . Lilith Gwynn assists you in this altercation and seeks to work out why you were specifically targeted. Lilith employs you as her travel companion and eventually accepts you as her friend. Lilith will begin to teach you the first of three classes the game has to offer. She will teach you to be a Maverick (sharpshooter, ranged), Her brother Canaan will teach you to be a Hadron (caster, AoE) and their father Levan will teach you to be a Vanguard (tank, melee). You as the player can develop and freely switch between each class at the hub, as well as earning the ability later in the game which allows you to use combinations of all classes once you’ve mastered them.

Your job as well as the goal of Lilith, Canaan Levan and Eris is to stop The Armillary Project and its twisted influence before it destroys the human population of the Citadels. The Citadels are open worlds, deeply explorable and are populated by interesting and often critical NPCs who offer different quests, loot and companionship. The Citadels are also populated by other players with their own customisable characters going about their own missions. With the skill based parkour system in the game reminiscent of ‘Mirror’s Edge’ , the intricate winding Citadels reveal many pathways where the player can discover secrets like lore and equipment.

Players can form squads to fight through dungeons with different game modes. For example, the squad can fight their way to a portal to Eden’s surface where they can fight a unique proceedurely generated boss on a similarly generated tile. With the boss defeated, its power no longer holds the portal open and so the players must escape back to the Citadel before the portal collapses and explodes, demolishing the dungeon and rewarding the squad with loot. The Armillary Project aims to be your adventure that moves at your pace. It has stunning environments and a deep world to explore and immerse yourself in.

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