Kabul Streets - Interactive 3D Simulation for "Serious Games"
This project was a special one and was created as a result of the Afghan city "Lashkar Gah" for the same client from overseas. For further research and training purposes, a small street has to be developed in the style of Kabul (Afghanistan) with the goal of creating missions through our client there. The main task was to capture the look and feel of local urban architecture to let the user immerse deeper into the simulation.
The goal was a design of seven enterable digital 3D buildings, including basic furnishings. These 3D objects were combined into a street which was used for an interactive real-time simulation in the field of military simulation / serious gaming. Vehicle models and 3D people were not part of our job.
Before implementing all assets a period of research was required. Useful services for research are online photo services like Flickr or Panoramio plus Google site search and online blogs. Especially Google Earth, with its geo-tagged photos enhances the visual possibility of research.
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Fishes on the market
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One small street
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Animated rabbits for sale (no animals were harmed)
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Streets blocks on the main-street
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View on the wide main-street
The actual development phase was creative and offered a high degree of artistic freedom. Only system compatibility with the client’s computer systems had to be respected. Our experience in performance optimizing was very handy in this stage of development.
All 3D models were optimized and supported with materials. In addition, light information has been integrated into the 3D models via vertex baking, which gave the buildings the impression of more depth from a longer distance. The remaining lighting setup was done in real-time using Leadwerks deferred-rendering techniques. About 20 smaller 3D models were placed as details of the shopping street. We also needed a lot of wires along the buildings and street crossings but there was no corresponding function in Leadwerks Editor 2.4, which was easily programmed in a short time because of our strong network of contacts with professional staff.
Throughout the development period of three weeks it was important for us to have close contact with our clients although it was not possible for us to travel in the U.S for meetings. As a little "extra" we added some animated 3D animals in the simulations, as well as the mountains which are located around the city of Kabul. For the necessary vision behind the streets or our own technique of creating photorealistic landscapes are used, which gave the project the final touch-up.
A short fly-through movie is also available on our YouTube Channel.
