MAV : Renders

I’ve recently worked on some ‘Beauty shots’ (promotional renders) for MAV ‘Modular Assault Vehicle’ by Bombdog studios, using the mech parts and environments i’ve modeled and textured in the past year (always starting from the concepts and specs i receive, most recent parts i modeled from scratch, others starting from concept hipoly models by the main dev. Chad Mauldin) .

These images are rendered in Unity 5, so technically realtime, but at 4k res, with very high general settings and a bit more postfx than would be ‘sane’ for actual in-game use. Models and textures though, are the same used in the game.

One of the coolest (and heaviest) effects in this kind of render is volumetrics, here i used ‘Fog Volume 3’ . An alternative to the whole setup would have been the new ‘Eevee’ viewport/realtime/render engine in dev. for Blender 2.8, which i’m sure would have been more fun for volumetrics, since you can make actual sims of fire/smoke systems in Blender and then render them with Eevee in near-realtime, with accurate volume shadows too. I’m really looking forward to Eevee, but since 2.8 is still alpha and this was production work, i didn’t risk messing up the schedule.

Unity’s fog volume is more limited to primitive volumes and a general cloudy-noise ( understandably, it’s already heavy as it is for use in ‘proper’ realtime ) In any case, having a fog/smoke you can shape is a great tool to hide or reveal more parts of the shot and balance clutter and contrast.

One thing i’m still working on, is the fact that rendering stills in unity means having many lighting types going on at once : pure realtime direct light and shadows, baked GI and the realtime GI. It’s great to be able to bake something and have still 2 out of 3 of those ‘tweakable’ after, but you have to balance them, for stills is often good to use the static baked light heavily since it allows softer shadows and ao,  but it’s the less ‘interactive’ part.

There are more of these renders, but as usual, i only post here assets already published in the game updates 🙂