Rigs - Dubai

Here's a fairly representative shot of what we found worked quite well for Rigs. Large areas of calm with strong colour coding. Materials are broken up with mirco details but are kept fairly low contrast to reduce strobing when running over them at speed.

Throughout Rigs I used natural light as much as possible. This generally helped give a fresher vibrant feel to a level. Picking a sun angle that provides a good balance of light and shade is always key for a level.

This is a lighting only view of the centre of the map. you can see a fair bit of coloured bounce being kicked up from the sand and from the red pillars in the background. You can also see some penumbra shadows from the sun on the foreground.

Coloured bounce and penumbra sun shadows were new features that got added to the baked lighting for Rigs.

I didn't want the sun to be too high, long shadows tend to be a lot more dramatic. However the geometry of the stadium canopy meant that one end would be in shadow. This helped reinforce the warm/cold colour palette between spawns.

You can see here we deliberately tried to transition in strong yellows as we reached the centre of the map. This helped signify you were reaching the powerslam game objective.

To stop the blue end feeling too cold we set the canopy to be slightly translucent. This helped add some slight warmth to the light coming through this section.

Translucency was another new lighting feature we added to Rigs. In hindsight we didn't really make use of it enough!

Here you can see an implementation of spline lights that we added support for. Unfortunately there are bake issues due to insufficient virtual point lights that caused a smooth line of light to go slightly blotchy.

Here you can see the opposite side of the spawn tubes that the player starts the level with. Where possible we put in incidental detail like these into the background of environments to add believability and scale.

This area originally had additional light fittings but we decided to simplify it and just use light from advertising billboards. You can also see a huge amount of red bounce here from the strongly red floor.

The brightness of the pillar screen shader was originally much brighter but this caused a distraction for players during testing so it was reduced. This leaves a bit of a disconnect between the brightness of the surface and the amount of light it produces

Though the colour palette of the map was fairly simple we were able to achieve some nice vibrant views when everything combined together correctly.

Here you can see how some of the sand surfaces were broken up into busy and smoother sections. You can also see some of the decal work needed to blend sand edges onto nearby materials.

A panoramic screenshot from the centre of the map. We found panoramic screenshots were quite useful for gettting an impression of what it would look like in VR. TV screenshots tended to feel too cropped in due to the field of view.

Screenshot from part of the Paris games week trailer. Here you can see the effects and dynamic lights quality has been bumped up a touch.

Screenshot from part of the Paris games week trailer. Here you can see screen space reflections has been turned back on.

Screenshot from part of the Paris games week trailer. One area that with hindsight could have been better was to consistently handle the Rig headlights self illuminating the pilots. The look here is quite effective. Lens flares help too.

Screenshot from part of the Paris games week trailer. You can see here the ramp colours changed very slightly between this trailer and release. I believe the blue/yellow strobing here caused too much discomfort.

Screenshot from part of the Paris games week trailer. Here you can see the effects and dynamic lights quality has been bumped up a touch.

Screenshot from part of the Paris games week trailer. Here you can see the effects and dynamic lights quality has been bumped up a touch.