This was a little render test for a game that Maxis wound up canceling called Simsville.
I'd just finished up SimCity 4, where we'd made our buildings using this technique called "impostering". It involved building out really detailed models in 3DStudio Max, rendering them out to sprites, and then applying the sprites to simple geometry (often not much more than boxes).
For SimCity we used the simple geometry to sort the buildings, so that they would have 3D shapes instead of being flat textures.
But impostering can do lots more. The camera can move around within constraints, and the simple geometry makes the textures look like really complicated models. And it allows for all kinds of illustrative styles in a 3D world, because the elements are really just fancy sprites.
You can see where the effect breaks down on the roofs of the yellow houses. The texture is projected onto the underlying geometry, right through onto the back roof. I should have narrowed the field-of-view to conceal that..
O.
Not a minute goes by that I wish Simsville was released. I was so looking forward to that game. I guess not all was lost considering the various aspects were introduced and split into other Sim games.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, Ocean
-Jud
My pleasure!
ReplyDeleteYeah, we learned tons from Simsville that we applied to later games, so it wasn't a complete loss. Still, I would have loved to have seen it ship!
O.
Wow cool! Could you make a tutorial on how to do impostering?
ReplyDelete