In today’s chapter we’re taking the fast lane to providing you with deep insights into the production of the ‘Best Sports Game’ at this year’s International Mobile Gaming Awards. Let’s kick-off with a fundamental question: What would a Snowboard Hero be without  a snowy mountain track to board down on? Definitely no snowboarding hero. And that’s precisely the reason why today I’d like to shed some light on the process of modeling the environment of a 3D mobile game. What is it about? 3D modeling is concerned with the physical creation of tracks and spaces that characters move through and you’ll find it is both a fine art and a lot of work. It is truly elemental to any gaming experience and comprises the practical part of level design. You’ll find Fishlab’s 3D artists modeling, framing, shaping, texturing and lighting all day to give you an exciting, challenging and overall appealing boarder paradise. To get the big picture of the entire process myself I spoke with one of our 3D heroes, Simon Richter.  [full]

In the beginning was a plain simple area in 3D modeling program. Each and every one of Fishlab’s digital worlds starts with a single piece of digital clay, so to speak. It is the basis for textures and wire frames that are applied and modeled into the desired shape. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It sounds so simple when put into one sentence, yet the process is lengthy and labor-intensive. It takes Simon up to three months to create a track from scratch and implement it into the final game. Once you realize that the entire model is shaped and textured manually you start to grasp the dimensions of this task. As it is the case with wire frame models you might know from school, digital modeling is just as tedious. Every wire is dragged and stretched by hand before the textures are applied manually. Every single wire, every house and every object. The textures are coloured before the lightmap is applied. When everything is in place Simon exports the file to the engine, where more effects are included. The screenshots below illustrate the process.

To me, the last step – the one in which horizon and skyline are added – was the most striking. Suddenly the scene seemed very real. A feature you might not recognize at first glance is the fog that came in with the Sky Box. If you look carefully at the ski-lift in the picture with the blue background, you’ll find that it simply ends at some point in the distance. Just as the whole environment does. In order to minimize required processing power the level actually builds up piece by piece as you progress. Simon refers to this progressive addition of level pieces as far-clipping. And this is where the fog comes into play. In a beautifully discreet fashion it hides the abrupt ending of the track in the distance and thus makes the digital reality look truly authentic. Simple, effective, beautiful – exactly how we like our games. If you wonder if far-clipping is really necessary, take a look at the pictures below. The digital worlds in Snowboard Hero are massive and would consume too much memory and processing power of mobile devices. The final track is as huge as the production effort needed for it. Each track takes up to three month to produce while at launch there will be 6 tracks in the game. 3D artwork is quite a work load of art.

One of the most important texture layers necessary for creating a ‘real’ feel and look is the lighting texture. It contains the information on what the light situation is at every single point of the track. Every shadow, every spot of light is put in place manually. There are two different lighting textures for every track. One contains the information for the track itself, i.e. how the light shows in the environment. The second layer includes the lighting situation for the game characters at any given point on a track, as they are boarding down the piste or half pipe. The different layers of textures are put on top of the 3D mesh, which in turn consists of the collision mesh and the environment. The collision mesh is the area your character can not exit, its name is derived from collision detection in physics, which in turn explains why game engines are called physics engines. At the end of the day you have layers on layers of information, telling the program in what formation it should arrange the digital matter at hand.

Last but not least I proudly unveil a piece of 3D games trickery that instantly reminded me of “The Truman Show” with Jim Carrey: The Sky Box. What made the track on the screenshots look totally real in the end was the skyline. But how is it done technically? After all, it rides along with your character and reacts to every move you make. Yet again, the answer is genuinely genius and simple. Put the character into a box that goes wherever he goes. That way you always see the horizon you normally would in the position you are actually in. Just as Truman lived in a studio box he could not outrun, the characters in Snowboard Hero have their very own Sky Box. Please don’t try to do what Truman did, though, there really is no escape for game characters. To produce a Sky Box a landscape picture is brought onto a panorama model. This model looks a lot like a 3D cinema with the shape of an arena. The character is driving in in the middle of it throughout the entire game. It’s so simple yet huge that it really changed my perspective on gaming. Having said this, I sincerely hope this chapter of the Snowboard Hero dev diary was equally enlightening for you, too. Have a view-altering day and game on!