Tracy / P Tracy CryENGINE 3 Cookbook

Over 90 recipes written by Crytek developers for creating third-generation real-time games
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-84969-107-9
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 324 Seiten

With every successive console generation, the cost, time, and complexity of developing games has grown. Meet CryENGINE3, a middleware engine that is the perfect fit for most developers allowing users to exceed current generation quality standards while using less people and time than ever thought possible.The CryENGINE3 CookBook is packed full of recipes for junior and senior developers alike. It covers everything from creating photo realistic architectural visualizations to implementing advanced physics such as ragdoll and tornado effects. Topics covered include the sandbox, level layout, environment creation, AI, character creation, creating vehicles, and game logic. Every recipe is designed to add AAA quality to your games. The CryENGINE3 SDK has many tools immediately available to developers of all disciplines. For designers the book has recipes for building up your own levels and populating your levels with intelligent AI and photo realistic assets. For artists we have recipes for practical workflow tools and techniques used when working with the advanced CryENGINE shaders and materials. For animators we have recipes that will bring your creations to life using skinned characters and advanced animation systems like locomotion groups. Finally for programmers we have recipes that show how to employ the core mechanics behind entities such as vehicles and weapons while also utilizing the strengths of the physics engine to create a unique and exciting game.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tracy, Dan

P Tracy, Sean

Fachgebiete

• Mathematik | Informatik EDV | Informatik EDV & Informatik Allgemein

Leseproben

Creating your first time of day using the basic parameters

In this recipe, we will go through the creation of a basic for your level.

A common sunny daylight environment can be easily created using a bright yellowish sun color, a bright blue color sky to be used for ambient lighting, and finally, an angled sun direction to get some interesting shadows.

Getting ready

For this tutorial, you should have the forest level opened. This level is installed automatically as a sample when you install the SDK.

Usually, when creating your own , you should use photo reference or fairly specific concept art. Experimenting will allow you to find an interesting mix of values, but in the end you may want to achieve a certain look. So having a goal before beginning to adjust the is recommended.

How to do it...

1. Open the Time Of Day dialog from View | Open View Pane | Time Of Day.

   Notice, when you highlight any of the basic parameters in the Time Of Day dialog there are already created on the timeline. This timeline is represented by the 24 hour slider at the top of the interface. Since the best way to learn to manipulate the editor is to create your own, let's go ahead and reset all the values.

2. To do this, click Reset Values in the Time of Day Tasks window.

   This will effectively remove all the key frames outside of the default values at 0000 and 2400.

3. Before we adjust the parameters to suit our needs, set Force sky update to True and ensure the record button is highlighted.

   Next, let's set the current time in the level so that we can see the sun.

4. To do this, click-and-drag the arrow on the slider to late afternoon. If you have difficulty getting the current time accurate, you can type in the current time.
5. Set the current time to 1600.

   Note

   
   

   Having the sun intersect some geometry will allow sunrays to be shown more clearly.

   The first setting we will adjust will be the color of the sun. The sun in CryENGINE 3 is an advanced dynamic light. Adjusting the sun color in simple terms will adjust the diffuse color for this light.

6. To adjust the overall color, first click the color sampler box and click-and-drag the black target to your preferred value. In our case, let's take a realistic approach to lighting this level and set the sun color to a warm yellow tone of RGB 235, 230, 190.
7. After clicking OK, you will see that new key frames have now been created on the timeline.

   Note

   
   

   You can see the interpolation of the values from 0000 to 2400. This will be used in case you have an animated time of day.

8. The next parameter we adjust will be the multiplier for the sun color we previously set. Set the Sun color multiplier to a level of 8.

Next, we will set the sky color.

Note

Though the setting is called sky color, it is more accurately the ambient lighting color for the entire level.

To observe the effects of changing this color, simply look anywhere there is no sun affection on objects from the sun lighting.

Let's first set the color to the currently visible color of the sky:

1. To do this, click the color sampler box for the sky color parameter and click the sample tool.
2. Next, click somewhere on the sky in the perspective viewport, this will sample its color.
3. For this tutorial, set your sky color to RGB 150, 200, 210.

The sky color multiplier works as the ambient color multiplier. Since we are going for a more realistic looking , set this down to 0.8.

Next is the subsection of . In our case, we only need to adjust the global density value.

Note

When using a dynamic sky, some haze is already calculated by the sky model. The fog specified by the fog color gets added to that haze. In many cases, the haze may be enough to get properly colored fog for a given time.

As we do not require a high amount of fog for a pleasant realistic scene, let's set the global density to a value of 0.02. The next setting we adjust will be the Sky Light parameters. We can use a handy feature of the Time Of Day dialog to copy and paste the RGB values from the sky color.

Use the sun color for a source color to warm the map or use the sky color to cool the map:

1. Highlight the values in the sky color then right-click and select copy.
2. Next, highlight the sun intensity values then right-click again and select paste.
3. You can also type in the RGB value used in the sky color or sun color. In our case, we will use RGB 150, 200, 210.
4. Adjust the Sun intensity multiplier to a bit higher than normal to get a volumetric look to the fog, use a multiplier of 50.

   For the time being, we will not be setting any parameters for the night sky and night sky multiplier as we will discuss that later. The final setting we will adjust for our basic will be the .

5. This value controls the visibility of sun rays. Higher values will cause brighter rays to appear around the sun, lower values are a bit less stylized but more akin to a realistic look. Set this to 2.0.
6. The last three parameters shown in the Time Of Day dialog are the color filter settings. However, for this process, it is much better to use color grading, which will be discussed later in this book.
7. Leave the color filter settings at default and you should have created a setting that looks like the following screenshot:

How it works...

The sun in the CryENGINE is approximated by a colored directional light without distance attenuation. This is important to understand as its properties are similar to that of a regular light and properties such as color and specular level can be adjusted. However, there is an important distinction to the sun and other lights in the CryENGINE, as the sun uses a technology called cascaded shadow maps.

Sun shadows are achieved in the renderer by splitting up the view frustum into multiple parts that the CryENGINE can handle separately, also known as Cascaded Shadow Maps. Additionally, Variance Shadow Maps are also used for the lower resolution shadows from the terrain.

Sky light parameters are solely used to compute the atmospheric appearance of a dynamic sky. They do not directly affect the rendering of objects in the world (for example, lighting colors and intensities). However, they are used by the engine to compute an approximate fog color to automatically fog the entire scene in the appropriate colors.

Note

For static skyboxes, only the fog color in the fog parameter's group is used.

The Time Of Day dialog has a huge variety of settings to simulate realistic and surrealistic lighting effects. Having completed setting up the basic parameters will make it substantially easier to adjust the advanced effects that the allows you to adjust to achieve a photorealistic-looking outdoor lighting.

There's more...

You may want to know what the reason for forcing sky update is, or what the record and play functions do.

Forcing sky update to true

Setting the Force sky update to True in the Time Of Day dialog forces a complete update of the sky light calculations in each frame shown in the perspective view. Should this not be set to true, the sky light calculations will be distributed over several frames and the time it will take to update will be highly dependent on the platform that is running the engine. You should be aware of this when editing some of the parameters within the as some will take extra time to update.

Record icon

The record icon is highlighted by default. The record button allows the changes made...

Über Autor(innen)

Tracy Dan :

Dan Tracy is Cryteks Technical Level Designer for the award-winning CryENGINE and Crysis 2. He is responsible for the creation and maintenance of numerous technical features and external applications used for telemetry and optimization. Viewed as more than a level designer, Dan prides himself on pushing the envelope when it comes to improving both technical and game related designs across multiple production disciplines. Dan was recruited by Crytek in 2009 after the previous year working as a Quality Assurance Technician for BioWare. He was recruited due to his pivotal role in co-founding and leading development on the award winning total conversion project MechWarrior:Living Legends. Since then, he has been featured in numerous gaming magazines and has been interviewed by multiple media outlets. Dan is a passionate gamer, but an even more passionate modder and game designer with vast knowledge and experience with multiple engines and titles including Never Winter Nights Aurora, Battlefields engine Frostbite, Unreal 3, and CryENGINE.P Tracy Sean :

Sean Tracy is Crytek's Senior Field Application Engineer for the award-wining CryENGINE. He is responsible for adapting the engine and its features to individual licensees, as well as developing full technical and ‘vertical slice' demos for prospective and existing clients. Describing himself as a ‘generalizing specialist', he also gives support directly to CryENGINE licensees, while designing and maintaining their workflows, pipelines and development techniques. Sean was recruited by Crytek in 2008 after working as an electronics technician for the Canadian Military. He was recruited due to his role in founding and leading development on the award winning total conversion project ‘MechWarrior:Living Legends'. Since then, he has been featured in numerous gaming magazines and has been invited to speak at many game related trade shows, conferences and seminars. He is an avid gamer with extensive modding experience on titles including Never Winter Nights, Battlefield, Doom and Quake.