Now we step into the strange land of live-action performances for 3D game play.  I know it doesn't seem intuitive to dive back into 2D for character performances.  It started as a weird limitation imposed upon us by a client and ended up making a lot of sense for a "camera-on-rails" style game play.

So now it's lights, camera, beards!  That's right a big scruffy beard.  I actually get in the mix on this one and play a pair of brothers.  It took me about three months to grow out this bush and I'm glad to be done with it.

I'm having so much fun working with Vitaly to get our saloon built out.  Recently, I paid to get some photography time at the Clear Creek History Park in Golden (just down the street).  It's this great collection of western cabins that are kept up and are stocked with great western era relics.  So I got to drop in a cold snowy day and photoscan several of their furnaces and wood cook stove.  I would have like to stay longer and scan a bunch of the available props but I got what I came for.

I processed out the RAW images and threw them into Agisoft Photoscan.  Aligned the photos, generated point clouds and then meshed it.  I built a rough texture and sent it all over to Vitaly with a handful of the original images.  Then he repaired the high poly version and built a low poly version.  Baked it all, created LOD's et cetera.  And here is the beautiful small furnace asset.  This is why I love photoscanned assets and Vitaly's work. :)

Vitaly did a bang up job creating these western oil lamps for our saloon environment.  I really wanted something that felt familiar to the genre but didn't look like everything we've seen before.

The interior of the saloon is coming along beautifully.  There are lots of wood surfaces and Vitaly's work it just beautiful.  The style of the saloon is a bit rustic; not quite as fancy as saloons in those upscale western towns, but still trying.

Here is a quick series of images showing our process from a 3D scan of a subject to game asset.

Here I scanned a great looking western styled, wooden pillar out at Red Rocks Park.

The exterior of the Saloon is complete!  Woohoo!  Here are some WIP images showing the building up of the boardwalk outside the building.

And here is the beautiful PBR texturing and geometry build of the exterior windows!

Our next game is a Western Saloon bar shoot game.  This game is interesting because it is going to be a cross over game.  We are developing this for a video wall shooting system but we also intend to deliver this game as a VR 360 game for a system we are trying to develop.  At any rate, the fantastic Saloon work by Vitaly is very fun and the coding work already completed by Sven is already awesome!  I can't wait to get this one put together.  It's going to look great!

We'll also be using textures from my Old Well scan.  Here is an in development texture without geometry.  It is so rewarding to get to put my 3D scans into Vitaly's hands!