CryEngine 3 Enterprise D playable recreation (early WIP)

[scragnog]

Hey guys,

last year I posted this thread here covering my progress of trying to build the interior of the Enterprise D in the Valve Source Engine. I gave up fairly fast due to the clunkiness of the engine (I love the Source engine, but not for something like this sadly).
I've been toying with the idea of starting the project back up for months, just for my own amusement if nothing else and yesterday I started looking into CryEngine 3 in the hopes of seeing if the engine would be suitable for this.
I think it is! The following video is a few hours progress today (importing some of my assets from the Source Engine project).

I know this doesn't contain a lot of content, but I'm new to this game engine and I reckon this is gonna take me some time :-/

Anyway, have a watch if you like and let me know what you think. I'll keep this thread updated with progress.

http://youtu.be/g0qdM0s3v8o

 

[Donny]

Nice! I recently switched from using the Quake III engine to the Unreal3 engine for my Trek projects. Was considering using the Crytek engine, but U3 won me over. It's such a joy working with a modern engine.

How do you like CryTek so far?

 

[scragnog]

Hey man, been following your work on here, some really astounding stuff :-D

So far, I love it. Absolutely no compiling involved, everything is realtime, you can switch straight to the game with one click (I think you can do this in UE3 too). It accepts any image type for materials, as opposed to the Source Engine which needed conversion to VTF file format and even then the image dimensions were very specific.

It doesn't really have much in the way of brushes though, I think the CryEngine is more targeted towards using static meshes produced in other 3D modelling apps, but that's cool.

Also, the ability to apply any material to any model, and set the reflection, gloss, bumpmap etc straight from the editor blows my mind. The Source Engine really has fell behind.

But yeah, to answer your question, I'm VERY impressed so far :-)

 

[Donny]

Unreal3 is very similar, and all the differences between CryEngine 3 and Source Engine are about the same as the difference between Quake III and Unreal3. I love the fact that I can build shaders, scripts, etc with an in-editor visual system rather than outside text systems. And real time editing is awesome.

The fact that modern engines are no longer as heavily dependent on brushes really scared me at first, but now I actually only use brushes for floors, and maybe an occasional wall. I build 99% of the environments as a collection of static meshes built inside 3DS Max, ported into Unreal. The workflow took some getting used to, but the results are much better than using brushes.

Good luck with the learning curve! Took me a few months to get used to the differences but it was worth the transition!

And btw, if you ever need any help, reference materials, etc, let me know! I've studied the Desilu Stage 9 sets enough that I can lend a hand if needed!

 

[JarodRussell]

Ooooh, I was already wondering when someone was going to use the CryEngine to recreate Star Trek sets.

CryEngine seems to be an absolutely beast. I really need to play with it some day.

 

[scragnog]

yeah Donny that's the thing, there's no need to get a notepad file for every texture to set the config for it. This is so much easier.
Also, Unless I'm completely doing this wrong, you no longer need a separate model file for the physical hitbox of the model, it looks like CryEngine determines the properties from the mesh itself automatically.

I agree regarding the death of brushes, I'm probably still going to use them for the basics, but they really do seem like they're only supposed to be for very very simple things like floors.
Thanks for the offer of help with reference materials, I may well take you up on that. I've got as many images as I could find on the web, and admittedly the new TNG Blu-rays are turning out to be incredibly useful :-D

Here's a few screenies of todays progress. I'm going overboard with the specular and gloss, but I'm just enjoying these new toys too much, I'll tone them down.
Also, there's like zero texture work here, I'm just using RGB diffuse maps currently, I'll start getting proper textures on here soon.

 

[Donny]

I'm liking everything so far! I know the lighting is probably a work in progress, but everything seems a little too bright.

It's difficult to get good subtle reflections like that in Unreal3. Is it just a matter of changing some settings on a material in CryEngine 3? In Unreal, you have to set up all these image reflection planes and special textures.

 

[Irishman]

Hey guys,

last year I posted this thread here covering my progress of trying to build the interior of the Enterprise D in the Valve Source Engine. I gave up fairly fast due to the clunkiness of the engine (I love the Source engine, but not for something like this sadly).
I've been toying with the idea of starting the project back up for months, just for my own amusement if nothing else and yesterday I started looking into CryEngine 3 in the hopes of seeing if the engine would be suitable for this.
I think it is! The following video is a few hours progress today (importing some of my assets from the Source Engine project).

I know this doesn't contain a lot of content, but I'm new to this game engine and I reckon this is gonna take me some time :-/

Anyway, have a watch if you like and let me know what you think. I'll keep this thread updated with progress.

http://youtu.be/g0qdM0s3v8o

Love the concreteness of the corridor. I'm curious - how screen accurate are your colors? I think once you start varying your materials, it will really come alive.

 

[scragnog]

I'm liking everything so far! I know the lighting is probably a work in progress, but everything seems a little too bright.

It's difficult to get good subtle reflections like that in Unreal3. Is it just a matter of changing some settings on a material in CryEngine 3? In Unreal, you have to set up all these image reflection planes and special textures.

Well, the main issue I'm having with lighting is that CryEngine seems to force dynamic planet lighting, I suppose because the engine is usually used for outdoor natural stuff. For this, I don't necessarily want any external lighting to take effect. I want each individual light panel to provide the lights for each section.

As far as the reflections go, this is completely dynamic, you just change the reflectivity properties of the material and tweak it to get it right. Everything is very much WIP at the moment, but it seems to offer everything I need to get it all just right.

 

[scragnog]

Love the concreteness of the corridor. I'm curious - how screen accurate are your colors? I think once you start varying your materials, it will really come alive.

Not overly screen accurate, it's all placeholder stuff for now. I'm just using single colours for pretty much everything right now and these are just roughly based on screencaptures from the HD TNG footage. I'm going to be replacing these with proper textures as soon as I've got all the meshes in and then tweak these to get it right.

 

[Donny]

Well, the main issue I'm having with lighting is that CryEngine seems to force dynamic planet lighting, I suppose because the engine is usually used for outdoor natural stuff. For this, I don't necessarily want any external lighting to take effect. I want each individual light panel to provide the lights for each section.

Ah...I think that was one of the reasons I chose UDK over CryEngine3 when I upgraded. I hope you get that worked out, as I'd love to watch your progress on this!