Cafe Races Demo!

Hello everyone, 

It's finally here. A brief glimpse of what is to come for Cafe Races. This tech demo give you the change to see the CB750 up close and personal. 

The demo will run on normal machines by default, and if you happen to currently own a VR headset. Pressing Alt+Enter will begin VR mode. (Alt+Enter will fullscreen the demo on regular screens)

The project was built as a developer version. Meaning developers can use console commands to dive a little but deeper into render features. 

Have fun!

Download

Cafe Races - Coming to VR

An extremely belated update: I would like to announce that Cafe Races will be coming to VR!

Shortly after GDC last year I moved to Los Angeles to develop VR content for a VFX studio named Pixomondo. The work I was doing there was industry leading, but unfortunately it was short lived. Pixo lost interest in VR and let me go. Since then I have joined an amazing team at a studio named Psyop. There I have access to Oculus, Vive, and PS4 VR dev kits. I truly believe in the future of VR. Although I love the work I am doing at Psyop, I have always been eager to complete the vertical slice of Cafe Races

Next weekend I will try my best to release a downloadable tech demo of Cafe Races for the first time! Keep an eye out!!

Thanks to everyone who still keeps interest in Cafe Races. You are the best!

GDC 2015

It's finally here, GDC! I look forward to the conference each year and I have got a feeling this year will be a big one!

After seeing a session about Forza last year, I was inspired to create a complex car paint shader. I always learn a great deal about the industry.

I will be spending as much time as I can speaking with team members from Epic. UE4 has been amazing to use over the past year and I am looking forward to what they might have coming next. 

Before leaving for San Francisco, I put together a short sequence to use for experimenting with DirectX12 (Microsoft is letting devs get a taste) and I thought I would share the video will you all!

Its nearly identical to the original CB750 showcase, with a few extra improvements. Just a sneak peak at more to come!

Marketplace Release

After nearly a year of development, my car paint materials are finally available on the Unreal 4 Marketplace! I feel lucky to be a part of the Marketplace, so early on. I'm really excited to see what developers will come up with, using the system. 

The documentation is being finalized this weekend. Those who have bought the shaders will be able to follow along with a tutorial series which will highlight features, tools, and optimization techniques. 

The shaders reflect the level of quality which Cafe Races is striving to achieve in every facet of visuals. During the next few months of development, I would like to give another push for a top quality vertical slice. 

Originally the idea was to release a playable demo for download. A much shorter vertical slice is my new target. Focus on quality over quantity. 

If you are interested in working on Cafe Races, send me an email (vincent.stimpson@gmail.com) I'm always looking for gear head talent to join the project.  

 

Yellow Brick Road

It's been more than a month since my last update, but interesting research has been going on behind scenes. Yesterday I gave a shot at using real world terrain data to generate height maps, from SRTM data. Thanks NASA! The data is nearly 15 years old, and the accuracy isn't top of the line these days, but it is exciting to see real world terrain in UE4! There are a few companies which sell higher quality images. Nasa's data is accurate to 90m per pixel. New terrain data being sold is accurate to sub meter accuracy. Although, these options are pricey and will remain out of reach for the time being. Perhaps in the future it will be possible to map the UK far beyond this video, but at least we have a start!

Sorting Out Rendering Bugs

I have started focusing some of my time sorting out some of the bugs that were causing ugly graphics. Screen space reflections are an integral part of UE4's reflection system. It's starting to become a common tool in the industry, but the system still has a few bugs. When applied to dynamic objects, a distracting ghosting effect renders on screen. Thankfully, I spent a great deal of time developing the car paint shader. It is capable of rendering realistic chrome with realtime reflections. Using my own materials it is possible to retain SSR, by use of the environment assets, and assigning my material to anything dynamic.

There were also a couple other features in UE4 that needed some attention, to be better behaved. After all the tweaking, I found a level of quality which I am happy with. Here is a look at one of my test levels:

Rust and Grime

One of the last features I wanted to implement into the car paint shader, before submitting it to Epic, was rust. Now it's finished! The rust is driven through vertex colors, which means you can paint where you want the rust to form. It's still using parameters to affect the look. Which means changes can still be made at run-time! Here is an example of what an instance of the shader is now capable of. 

A Couple New Shaders

I'm currently working on putting together a package for the UE4 marketplace, which includes the car paint shader. UE4 requires a minimum of 5 unique assets. I decided to build a carbon fiber material and a glass material which both take advantage of my reflections system. Take a look at the results! I am planning to have all the assets ready for submission by next weekend.

Testing Out Vehicle Physics

Using Unreal's own vehicle physics simulator, I have put together a very rough blueprint to drive the bike. Because the physics engine is optimized for four wheeled vehicles, I will have to do a lot of tinkering to get the desired effect of riding a motorcycle. 

I've also discovered a bug within UE4. While using a scene capture actor with the highest render settings, there is a distracting ghosting effect. In a previous youtube video, I demonstrated the problem and since then, a quick fix hasn't surfaced. It is likely that the problem is hardware related. For now, using the medium detail settings within the editor removes the ghosting, which allows for my carpaint shader to function properly.

   

Car Paint Shader Improvements

I'm am finishing up the final features of the car paint material. Already, there is a functioning masking system and the added ability to use custom normal maps which affect all layers! The last couple of features I would like to add are: grunge/rust based on either mask or vertex colors, and maybe a rain layer. As soon as I implement a feature, there is another good idea around the corner. 

Here is a little preview of what's now possible with the system. 

Teaching a College Course

This news is slightly belated, but I am teaching a course in 3D composition for video games at Columbia College Chicago! It's really exciting to be back at Columbia, where students are learning the skills it takes to be a part of the industry. 

If you yourself are an aspiring artist, or maybe a developer who wants to learn their way around Maya, you can follow the tutorial series I give my students. You can find them on my youtube page: Asset Creation Playlist

Car Paint Shader - Tutorial

Over the summer I spent some of my free time developing the car paint shader which I plan on using in Cafe Races. Initially, it started out as a simple idea, but it quickly evolved into a massive project. It grew in complexity and the graphic qualities also grew. Now I have a system which can simulate hundreds of different types of car paints, and if you are a UE4 developer, I want to share it with you! The tutorial is being hosted here at CafeRaces.com you can find the specific page here: tutorial 

If you give it a shot, I wish you luck. The effort is certainly worth it!

A few 4K captures

I have spent the day creating a few images to help drum up excitement for Café Races. These images represent the final quality of the motorcycle assets. The final car paint shader has been applied and I used more complex lighting methods in UE4 to render the scene. All together, it adds up to images of a bike that I want to hop on and ride into the distance. 

Link to full quality images: http://imgur.com/a/f8tnM

A Newlywed

At 4:30 PM on June 28th I was wed to my best friend and girlfriend of nearly five years.

The night was the bet of my life. Every preparation and every handmade craft was well worth the effort. Our wedding was classic video game themed. We spent countless nights creating centerpieces, invitations, a miniature arcade machine, and in secret; my wife's wedding ring.


Now that the special day has passed I will have my free time back, which enables me to develop my game at a much quicker pace. I will be publishing a tutorial on my process for developing a car paint shader soon, to give back to the UE4 community, which has been so helpful to me so far.

I will be adding some footage of early, early in-process game play physics as well. And I will be finally putting together a kickstarter to gain the funding which will enable me to work full time on the game. It's going to be a very busy couple of months as everything begins to get underway. I will also update this blog much more frequently! So keep a close eye!


Cheers,
-Vince

Showcasing My Shader / Vehicle Movement

While working on my current goal, developing the dynamic metallic paint shader, I have continually posted my progress on the UE4 forums. The forums are extremely useful for sharing techniques for development. My posts have received some attention from the guys who develop the engine at Epic, and they decided to showcase it on their new list: "Seen And Heard In The Forums"

A link for the list is highlighted in the UE4 launcher, so I am thrilled! I have had little time for production work these past few months, but I am proud that my passion for developing this game is enough to produce results worth highlighting by the guys at Epic.

I have a lot more work ahead of me but Epic's updates shrink my task list all the time! In the next release of UE4, Epic is releasing code for their custom vehicle physics system. Although it is not optimized for motorcycles, it will work as an excellent base for my own system. I believe it is going to save me weeks, if not months of development time. It also means that the game will be playable much sooner!



If you are interested in being one of the first to play test my game, please send me an email at caferacesgame@gmail.com

More work with the paint shaders!

I have been spending some time putting together a fully dynamic car paint shader. It now handles reflection with added flake effect.

Take a look!

Metallic Flake Paint shader

After testing a few methods, I have developed a pretty decent car paint shader. There is a lot more work to be done for it. It's not particularly adaptable. It takes a very specific environment to make it look this way. Its also not very well optimized. These shortcomings ironed out in the next couple of weeks while I start work on the first phase of the playable portion of the project. The customization garage. 

Base Coat Shader

Base Coat + Clear Coat

Flake + Clear Coat

Full Shader with All Layers

Getting Familiar with UE4

I have been loving UE4 so far! The UI makes life easy, the tools are powerful, and the documentation has been incredibly useful so far. I wish I had every hour of every day to spend learning the system better and building Cafe Races.

Here are a test for the new shader systems. I'm still developing the base shaders which will be used for all the bikes. Reflections which used to cause weeks of work and countless headaches in Unreal 3, are all integrated perfectly this time around, so I can spend a lot more of my time focusing on other aspects.

Better car paint and flake coming soon! Just as soon as I can construct a multi-layered, multi-functional shader.

Upgrading to UE4!

It has been a long, long, very long wait but it is finally available to the public - Unreal Engine 4

All of my previous work was implemented inside Unreal 3. Unreal 4 is going to cut development time down, by a huge margin, despite having to learn its new features. In the next few days, I am going to use whatever free time I can scrounge up to import the CB750 asset into UE4, to illustrate the difference in visual quality.

UE4 is also going to allow me to develop all of the programming with its new node based visual scripting system, blueprints. This means less time wasted on programming, more iterations, easier bug fixing - which results in a much more playable experience, more time for experimenting and polish.  

The Bikes

One of the most important features of this demo will be the ability to race several, distinctly different motorcycles. Another essential mechanic is the use of tuning to get the best performance out of a bike. The demo will have a taste of customization and tuning. The actual process of tuning will be done through simple "mini games." There are a lot of features that I would like to implement and I hope to get as many as I can into the demo.

Bike One: The Starter Bike

The 1961 Norton ES2, with the featherbed frame was legendary for its handling ability. It could out perform almost any other bike in the corners. Its single cylinder and single carburetor setup was also easy to tune, and light. Although the ES2 did not have the most power, it was a quick bike.

Created by Vince

Bike Two: The Powerhouse

Triumph was making arguably the best motorcycle engines in the 1960s. The Bonneville T120 had a 649cc twin cylinder, twin carbureted engine producing 50% more horsepower than the ES2. Although it was a little harder to tune, it was capable of handling a lot of extra power. The T120 engine was reliable and sophisticated. The twin cylinder also made the Triumph a little heavier than the ES2.

Created by Vince

Bike Three: The Superbike

The Honda CB750 is one of the most significant motorcycles in the history of fast bikes. When it was released in 1969 it showed the world that innovation can come from anywhere. Originally designed for the American market, Honda quickly showed the world that it was possible to develop a bike with cutting edge race components, and make it affordable to the average rider. It was faster, stopped quicker, and more reliable than any other bike before it.

Created by Vince