Ford Kinect Games
Client: Blue Hive
Artists: Ross Mansfield, Tim Brown, Andy Turner, Chris Rawlinson
Ten24 provided all the 3D artwork for a pair of Unity-based Kinect games Blue Hive were developing for Ford of Europe, to demonstrate the advanced features of the New Ford Focus at dealerships and major european motorshows. You can see a video of both the games in action here - Vimeo
The first game is a challenge to parallel park into a space of decreasing size between two other vehicles, in competition with the Ford Active Park Assist system. There were three main assets that needed to be built - the street set/environment, a Transit van, and the New Focus itself.
Blue Hive supplied an ultra high-res CAD model of the Focus which was used as reference, and a game model was built over it. The polycount could be a little higher than normal for a game - there wasn't much else in the scene to render, and it was important the Focus looked as good as it could because the game would be seen on a big screen alongside the real car.
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The game was going to be played from a relatively fixed camera angle, so the parking set could be very simple. Below is a pre-vis image produced to give Blue Hive and their client an early feel for the look of the game, we used the almost-finished set and the high-res CAD model of the Focus for this.
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The Transit was built using Modo 501, with a very low-res render LOD supplied by Blue Hive and some photos for reference. Many of the details were interpreted from Normal maps and modelled in properly, and the model prepared for in-game use with the relevant Locators, Material tags etc. applied.
The second game involved spotting and tagging traffic signs against the clock while travelling along a road, to demonstrate Fords traffic sign recognition system. A freeway-style track was designed that could loop continuously and different sections of which could be used for different stages, without the player having to wait to load different levels.
These are more pre-vis renders produced before development was started on the actual game in Unity, giving Blue Hive a chance to provide feedback and to keep their client informed on the progress and look of the game.
The road was built in Modo by creating a spline and simply extruding a cross-section along it, this also automatically created UV's. This game was to be played only from a first-person view, so the track spline was also used to animate a camera along which was exported straight to Unity as keyframes.
All the roadside scenery was built separately, parented to a locator and then duplicated along the road using the Curve Clone function in Modo. Everything was parented to a locator so that it could be instanced in Unity if neccesary. For the roadsigns, a set of empty locators was created in the same way and exported seperately to the models - the signs could then be placed on the locators in code according to the gameplay required, the renders here show all possible positions of the signs.
