It lets you witness the destructive fallout of our dynamic battles at a level of detail that wasn’t possible before. Thanks to these new innovations in Homeworld 3, we not only have a more realistic portrayal of ship destruction, but a much more visceral one too. This tool also models the internal rooms and mechanisms of a given ship, and then warps and crinkles them so they bulge realistically - just like what would happen if an explosion from within a ship forced all its guts out into space. This tool realistically simulates the different ways a ship hull will collapse under the immense pressure of an explosion. Thanks to the hard work of Adrian “Ed” Lee, Francisco Múrias, Liam Smyth, and many others, we developed a procedural “Ship Breaking” tool leveraging the power of a great piece of software called Houdini. One that allowed us to dynamically generate the debris meshes on the fly. For a game with many different ships of all shapes and sizes, you can imagine how time consuming that was. This old system relied on artists hand modeling the debris meshes using a 3D app like Maya or Blender. We then add additional fire, hull breach FX and sparks to show the severity of the damage as we progress through different damage stages.īack in our Fig update detailing the new Railgun Frigate, we revealed an older version of our wreckage and debris system that litters the battlefield with persistent wrecks. Light damage is what you might imagine: Smoke, which consequently gets thicker and darker the more damage a unit sustains. We also have a range of damage stages we call light, heavy, critical, and “it was a pleasure serving with you, Captain”. Stylistically it looks much better and, overall, the system is more adaptable to how Fighters behave in combat.įor larger ships, we use a series of “damage sockets” placed around the hull where we can spawn required FX to help simulate damage. Now, at low speeds we use sprites to simulate the smoke, but at higher speeds we swap to this inky trail that streams out of the back of a damaged Fighter. We knew we could do better, so we moved onto using a Ribbon/Sprite system. Needless to say, we felt it was a little ugly and dated. This was a good solution, but it did have issues like resource cost and, if a unit was too fast, you would have this “popcorn” effect where the smoke from a damaged ship looked like individual puffs rather than a consistent stream. In the Homeworld 3 Official Gameplay Trailer, you can see a distinct camera-facing smoke sprite when Fighters take damage. This is a little more unit-specific, so I’ll break it down into Fighters/Corvettes, Frigates and Capital Ships.īecause Fighters are so small, they don’t require such nuanced damage modeling, but we wanted to make sure that a player can see what condition they are in regardless of distance. Let’s switch gears and talk about ship damage. I’m sure you can already imagine how each damage type would affect a ship hull, but we wanted to go further and add to the realism with realistic lighting and fluid-based simulations. The Homeworld 3 Design Team needed us to produce four distinct damage types (Kinetic, High Explosive, Energy, and Ion) - each with their own visual treatment and effects on units. Broadly speaking, this can be broken down into three stages: weapon damage, ship damage and wreckage. Looking at the health bars of your ships is one thing, but we want you to see the scars of your hard-won battles. In our latest Fig Update, I’m going to go over some of the work we’ve been doing to make sure your battles in Homeworld 3 look and feel as climactic as possible.įrom the very start of development on Homeworld 3, we knew we needed to use the latest tech, better looking FX, and dynamic damage to make the results of hostile engagements as thrilling as possible. Hi, I’m Tim O’Connell, Senior FX Artist here at Blackbird Interactive. We’ve spent years developing Homeworld 3’s gorgeous ships, so it’s only appropriate that they explode in equally spectacular fashion. You can check out the full blog here, or read the highlights I have conveniently below: It’s clear to see a ton of time and team effort have gone into making Homeworld 3 the best version it can be. The blog was written by Blackbird Senior FX Artist Tim O’Connell. Homeworld 3 is scheduled to release sometime this year, and today we got new info surrounding weapon damage, ship damage, and immersive combat.
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