The day we cut Nettie's curls, she was 7 years old

Hi,

I hope this post isn't too long.

I've uploaded a WIP to...

http://www.stalkingtheelusivepilky.net/ (5.5 MBs)

The terrain consists of 32258 polygons, a 2048 x 2048 texture, a diffuse detail shader, and a mesh collider.

The inverted terrain consists of 7938 polygons, a 2048 x 2048 texture, a diffuse detail shader, and a mesh collider (the latter necessary for some things I've tried).

The terrain is bound by a 12 polygon unrendered C4D cube imported with a collider (so the fps controller doesn't fall off the terrain).

The larger C4D cube consists of 12 polygons, the same texture as the inverted terrain, a self-illuminated diffuse material, and no collider.

Thanks to a post I read I made sure all the geometry uses one-sided polys.

The GUIText is updated by a "for loop" that at most will loop 150 times before exiting, but immediately after loading loops just once, tests true, and exits (because the fps controller begins within the first bounds: see next sentence). The terrain is "covered" by 150 bounds stored in an array, and the aforementioned "for loop" tests to determine which bounds contains the fps controller and, if different from before, updates the GUIText with another snippet of text from an array of strings.

Another script keeps a point light above the fps controller at a height of 75 units.

So far, that's all there is to it. I've tried many different things, including trees, water, line renderers, a sphere zipping around to allow the reading of the stories, particle systems, stained glass windows.... What I've uploaded represents the only stuff I'm sure of (and I'm not sure about being able to wander up 90 degree slopes).

The terrain and its "ceiling" are created by lofting the photograph into polygons using Bryce then texturing the terrain with the photo.

I have a 1.67 GHz PPC Powerbook with 1.5 MBs RAM and a 128 MB ATI 9700 GPU. It seems to me that the thing is close to starting to chug along. If I add another 512 x 512 texture the framerate difference is noticeable.

So...any performance suggestions or other thoughts would be appreciated. For example, a post I read elsewhere in the forums made me wonder whether busting the terrain into smaller sections would improve performance (and maybe even allow me to up the poly count for greater, smoother detail).

Everything about this centers around the photograph and stories got by interviewing the two eldest females in it (I'm still working on the "stories"). So I've been judging anything I add by whether it serves the photograph. Although adding a tree model might seem to go with the photograph, it struck me as kind of a lame thing to do, not really adding anything. What seems more appropriate is to play with aspects of photography, like glass effects, lighting, questions about photography, etc.

I can't claim to be 100% happy with the thing so far. I could use a poke in the head.

I'm very, very new to this 3D stuff and am excited about it.

Thanks,
Rick

 

That is somewhat disturbing, but not altogether bad. Good start, and good luck!

 

I am very confused.. Am I supposed to walk around in a way that makes the story make sense?

 

You're right to be confused. I still have to re-write the text so that it works in a freeform structure. Sorry for presenting something still so unformed.

I wonder though...I've read in the forums that a 20,000 poly object performs better than ten 2,000 poly objects. Is that true for a situation like this? It kind of feels like collisions are being tested for in Italy when the fps controller is in England because all of Europe is one object. Also, I wonder if I break the terrain into multiple objects whether I could then give more complex areas higher poly counts and flatter areas fewer.

Maybe I should just go ahead and test this by doing it.

 

hehe, can't tell if i'm in silent hill or if it's gonna be some nice story! pretty funky. it ran fine for me on a 733 mhz machine. i wouldn't worry much on poly count. that's rarely the bottle neck these days, especially at that count. 30K might be on the high side for that terrain but usually it's materials and object count that cause too many render passes. textures, audio and movies take the most memory. you might look at the layered terrain shader approach instead of 2048 textures. tiling will give you much cleaner textures and you can use 512s (or even less) to save memory. interesting approach with the quadrant thing. not sure if triggers would have been easier but i guess what you did is more adaptable to what you're doing. either way, it works! art-wise, if the game's centered around the photo, maybe make it a bigger part of the game. there's only certain clear views of it and it just kind of felt like some weird background. anyway, obviously it's a wip - keep going!

[edit: posted at the same time...

>>a 20,000 poly object performs better than ten 2,000 poly

pretty much. you dump ten objects on the gpu instead of one. that causes more render passes/processing. modern cards can handle a lot though. how you optimize depends on your target min specs]

 

No, not necessarily. The "Sweet Spot" for poly count per object is 1000 to 4000. But a single 20,000 poly mesh won't hurt.

Anything will be fine except for something like 2000 objects.

 

Breaking the terrain mesh into a bunch of parts won't improve performance. And don't worry about the collision detection...it's well-optimized. I'm sure it uses some sort of, er, [insert technical term here]...anyway, it's not like it has to check 32,000 polygons for collision every frame. That's what the whole mesh pre-processing thing is about.

--Eric

 

interesting but i'm a bit confused - can i ask what exactly is going on? i'm not sure if this was your intent but with the ethereal vibe it kinda felt like a memorial to me. like pete i think you should tile your textures (use the terrain 2-layer for variation) - you'll get much less blocky results on the terrain.

 

Hi,

Hmm...

You guys aren't confused. Yoggy sensed the current unsatisfactory nature of the text and drJones sensed a memorial vibe to the thing.

First, I understand the tiling of the texture and you're right. It's just that the terrain you're walking on is the photograph (the same one you can glimpse past the hills or fully from one side of the terrain) extruded into a kind of histogram (histograph?) by Bryce: whites of the grayscale photograph lofted into peaks, blacks kept low as valleys, grays forming slopes (except I fed Bryce a negative of the photograph). The terrain's texture is the same photograph mapped back onto the terrain. There are a few places where if you look up you'll see the faces of the girls or mother clearly in the "ceiling terrain", which is a low poly, mirrored version of what you're walking on.

So, you're walking on the photo beneath a flipped version of the photo surrounded by glimpses of the photo reading text associated with the photo. If I tile the texture I lose the 1-to-1 mapping of geometry to image. Personally, I don't mind the blockiness. Looking up into the ceiling terrain feels like looking up into clouds and imagining shapes.

Maybe the piece needs a clear explanation associated with it.

As to the memorial feel, all the females in the photograph are still alive, but there is loss involved. It's not really any particular concrete loss for them all, just hard lives. As examples, the mother had been born into wealth that was lost to the Russian revolution; they immigrated by foot and cattle ship to Canada; that ship crossing, given how many wanted it, involved sex; all the women lived in communities that didn't value education or intellectual curiosity, which was horrible, considering how intelligent these women are. So it's memorial in the sense that life can be hard, not in the sense that anything terminal happened. I think the cutting of the hair got me because that's often a symbol of hobbling.

Anyway, I'm trying to feel my way around this gaming technology to see if it lets me...um...well in this case I suppose the technology lets me be in the photograph, kind of feel its grayscale. And I mean in the photograph, not in the scene depicted by the photograph. Something like that. Still trying to figure it out, so your comments, perceptions are helpful.

--Rick

 

I got a real spooky feeling from wandering around, looking for pieces of the story. Which I think I managed to piece together.

If you wanted to make it easier to follow the story, you could place little beacons around the landscape. Maybe when you are at a particular point in the story, let the one belonging to the next point in the story become a little more visible than the others. (No I am nut suggesting 30+ light sources. That would kill performance) But something like a beacon, or a breadcrumb...

But it already is cool in a weird way.

 

I like what you are doing.

I really like not knowing what bit of the story I'm going to get, and having to figure it out. It makes me work a little.

It is spooky--

Some sound would be awesome.

The visuals aren't quite working for your story yet as well as they could--but this has some potential!

 

That's a very intriguing suggestion. The notion of one part of the terrain calling with a light. For one thing, I've been stuggling with how to appropriately "animate" or enliven the scene and your suggestion would additionally help me structure the text. Thank you.

 

Hi Brian,

Would you mind elaborating on the visuals? Do you mean because the terrain features don't match or particularly relate to the text?

To everybody: thanks very much for your responses. They're really helping me.

--Rick

 

Very nice and dreamlike, rickdyck. It's like walking through a poem. Somehow I didn't feel the need to search for a story, and just wanted to "experience" it. Reminded me of David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Kafka and Burrough's "Naked Lunch." It's great to see people taking Unity to new realms.

 

naked lunch?! YEAH! oh that's so cool. my and my bro's "cult classic" love it, ya mugwamp!

rick, layered terrain shader + decals = joy

 

pete said:

Yeah, it's been a while since I read it. I actually saw William S. Burroughs on stage in the '80's, dancing with performance artist Laurie Anderson. Pretty surreal.

Damn, I always have a way of getting posts off-topic....

 

Reminded me of a favorite artist of mine, Ilya Kabakov. He works with memory and fragments in a way that you reminded me of.

Apparently he has a website now: http://www.ilya-emilia-kabakov.com/

d.

 

Wow, David! That is a beautiful site. And beautiful work!

From "The Antenna": "When you are lying in the grass, with your head thrown back...."

Or, "The Boat of My Life". I mean, nevermind the artwork...just that title!

That's one of the things I'm loving about their work, that you barely need to get close to it before it starts having an effect. And then more and more....

This whole post is worth that referral. Gotta go and spend more time there. Bye!

But first, thank you terransage, you've touched on what is keeping me going on this project. Language within this medium and also a relationship to the photograph, which I last felt walking past a window and seeing the view slide past the frame. I don't know if that makes sense, but some sort of slipping away feel to a photo and what's connected to it. As to a cinematic feel, I think there's some of that in how the geometry affects the sentences: "Jacob is very strong" feels very different to me depending whether I've approached it on the flat, or cresting a peak, or plummeting off an edge. So this medium has those dramatic devices inherent to it. Eh, there's so much that's interesting about the medium that Unity gives us access to, I hardly know where to start discussing it.

 

When I wandered around the inner part of the "architecture," through the peaks and valleys, I kept trying to figure out where I was, just like in a dream. The words kept coming like stray thoughts that made it even more dreamlike. There was also a claustrophobic feel, like being trapped in a memory that's not fully formed. I mean that in a good way--it evoked a feeling that folks here have referred to as "spooky," which is really how our nostalgia feels to us. We want to go back to the past, but know instinctively that it may not be a good thing. These are just my impressions, anyway.

Man, that Kabakov site really is pretty cool....

 

very very interesting. The only thing I would do to make it more eerie is to script morphs into the landscape. You could have the player walking in one direction, and all of a sudden a big hill shows up in front of them... not rapidly, but subtly. Just odd things like that.

 

Thanks Deram,

I have a list of around 4 or 5 things I want to try. Yours is an interesting suggestion.

I hope to have a modified piece to show in a few days.

--Rick