Robot hordes

A key feature of the Xbox 360 is its ability to instance one character thousands of times. 3D World demonstrates how to create a fully textured robot model ready for a next-gen game engine to turn into an instant droid army

Movie clips and images of next-gen games are popping up left, right and centre at the moment. Each reveals the power and abilities of the upcoming next-gen consoles.

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In among the flashy imagery are identifiable key features of the hardware that have been picked up by studios to give their projects a little extra ‘wow factor’. Notably, we’re seeing hundreds of characters on screen at once. This isn’t just down to the sheer power of the machine, but more to an ability to instance one character thousands of times with almost no hit to the processor’s performance. Shaders are also clearly playing the role that we expected – not just Normal maps, but multiple passes of specular, diffuse and opacity – to provide a rich canvas of colour for characters and environments. To some extent, fur and hair will also be simulated, though not to the level of an FMV sequence. Likewise, cloth will become more flexible, with faster calculations allowing for higher subdivisions and more instances of it dressing the key characters.

But while there’s more room to manoeuvre, the importance of using the poly count and texture space wisely is crucial. The more you save in one area, the more it can be put to good use elsewhere. A studio is just as likely to hire someone who can do a job in half the time as they are to hire someone who can make a model in half the polys!

In this tutorial, we’ll build a low-poly robot ready to be instanced hundreds of times in a game engine to create an army, similar to that seen in the next-gen Sonic the Hedgehog title. After modelling and unwrapping, we’ll cover diffuse, specular and opacity tricks to give our robot some colour coding, as well as the all-important Normal map for cost-effective detail. Finally, we’ll combine these textures into an .fx shader ready for next-gen gaming use. The article is intended more as an overview of key techniques than a complete step-by-step guide, so scene files are provided for you to deconstruct at your leisure.

Click here to download the support files (~10MB)

Click here to download the tutorial for free