{What I Love}
Hello! I'm Scruffy and today, I'm back in the Pikmin-studying business. This time I'm talking
3D models. As gaming technology evolves, platforms can handle more and more complex models and more
accurate lighting engines. This allows more freedom for game asset details. In this video,
I'm going to demonstrate some of those details in the context of Pikmin by anatomizing some
of the models and textures from the Wii U game Pikmin 3. These models are quite detailed and
the effort put into them really deserves a closer look. Along the way I'll explain a few concepts
about game lighting and texturing, and you'll get to see Blender in action! So without further ado,
let's deconstruct some polygons! Number 1
Let's start with the Koppaites' iconic spaceship, the S.S. Drake. Even without textures and in-game
shading, this is still quite an intricate sight to see. The details really convey that each
little part on this ship has a function, which is perfect for spaceship design. How many triangles
do you think are present here? Would you guess, 1,000? Maybe 3,000? Try 12,434. This is a very
hi-poly model, and even still it's optimized for the distance at which you view it. And most models
in the game is on poly-count par with this. But what's even crazier is how it compares to the
previous Pikmin games on the Nintendo GameCube. The entire terrain model of the Perplexing Pool,
including the background and the rectangles for shafts of light,
comprises 11,663 polygons. This vast area of Pikmin 2 now almost rivals one very small area in
Pikmin 3 for complexity. Not that the Perplexing Pool is inferior for being a lower-polygon model:
the artists who made the terrain did a great job of economically creating a believable space. But
the S.S. Drake certainly indicates we're dealing with a more recent, more powerful console.
Now, there's actually something hidden in the Drake because the windows are opaque. If we take a
look inside, we can see this box connected to one of the windows. Pretty neat that they conceived a
little bit of compartmentalized space in the Drake model, but why is it there? My hunch is it’s the
interior background that lights up to illuminate whichever Koppaite explorer is writing the log
entry on any given day. They just stand in this little box and it lights up. I find it pretty cool
that this box is part of the all-purpose Drake model, which I suppose means the Drake has the
ability to light this window any time it wants. That window is also considered more important
than the other ones: it and the interior box are unique objects, while all the other windows are
labeled under one object name. Just remember, it’s the window right beside this Koppaite message.
Number 2 Okay, enough about literal windows,
let’s talk about windows of the soul. I still can’t get over how beautiful the Bulborb’s
eyes are in Pikmin 3. I mean the purple spots for pupils in the last games were adorable,
but these are just stunning. And, might I add, the Bulborb’s eye models are biologically sound, or
at least patterned after real mammal eye anatomy. Let’s play ophthalmologist for a moment. The eyes
of the Bulborb are composed of three objects, one of which can be further split to make this
easier to understand. Here we have the sclera, the white outer layer that cradles the other
objects. Next is the iris, which fits neatly into the sclera. Usually irises aren’t this concave,
but that’s okay, I think that’s to simulate how a real iris uniquely reflects and internally
scatters light. Anyway, the next two objects are the inner and outer edges of the cornea,
which shelters the iris and which would normally extend to the sclera as well. When all these
parts come together, the textures and shaders make the eye look seamless, and those blue and purple
radial contraction muscles just… captivate. Good thing too, that helps players understand
where to focus their attack. Well now that we see eye to eye,
this Bulborb is also: Number 3
Yep, two numbers! You’re quite a special Bulborb! Now,
if you could please turn around. Thank you. You may notice that this Bulborb’s abdomen doesn’t
have its characteristic spots. Instead, the spots are achieved by a clever texturing trick
that has become a norm in HD video game assets. I’ll run you through the textures it uses.
First we have the diffuse texture. Diffuse light is light that bounces off a rough surface in all
directions, so this is the main color a surface reflects and hence the main one you see. Next is
a texture with a strange color, that certainly doesn’t look right as a diffuse color. This is
instead a specular texture. Specular light is where reflected light rays are concentrated,
giving surfaces a glossy look. If the Bulborb had just all white specularity, it wouldn’t look like
a natural animal surface. So this texture gives its reflections some organic color. Now here’s
the important one: this psychedelic texture has the illusion of popping out at you with
real depth. Well that’s exactly its function. This is a normal texture, which means objects use the
colors here to determine a surface’s perpendicular vector. Basically, this tells the geometry which
way is up, without changing the geometry itself. Thus this texture is all you need to create the
illusion of depth in these spots. Combine these three textures and you have a very advanced and
realistic looking model indeed. Every model in the game has some form of this texture trio,
to define the main color, the highlight color, and the normal calculation. Some even have extra
textures for special visual features, I’ll get to a specific example a little later.
But first, let’s look at the stars of the game themselves!
Number 4
The Pikmin and leader models are all contained in one file.
Wait a second, is that a Bulbmin? It is! What’s
a Bulbmin doing here? I guess they included it in this model file on the off-chance they decided to
add it into the game! But they must have decided against that early on in Wii U development, the
model hasn’t been updated to the hi-poly standard of the other Pikmin. But guess what is updated,
on the other hand: Pikpik carrots! Yeah, they don’t appear in the final game but these carrots
are more developed than the Bulbmin. You can even see their double root! It still shows
signs of early scrapping though, since it only has a small color texture and no specular or
normal texture like the finalized Pikmin. Maybe it was going to be part of some type of updated
Piklopedia? I really hope that feature comes back in future installments. Anyway, I ought to
mention a few other neat details here, such as the cracks and rough edges on the Rock Pikmin,
and the dirt on all the leader’s boots when their diffuse textures are applied. Plus—this is true of
almost all transparent objects in the game—the leader’s helmets have two spherical layers,
to depict them as thick material rather than an infinitely thin bubble. Little details like this
help the game feel less sterilely produced by a computer and more natural. And Pikmin is all
about nature, right? Number 5
So how about that mysterious nature between the Pikmin and Candypop Buds then? In my last
trivia video about sound effects in Pikmin 2, I noted that Candypop Buds wilting make a slightly
modified sound of Pikmin losing their flowers. Well now in Pikmin 3 we can see more prominent
leaves jutting out from the blossoms of Candypop Buds, which just so happen to use the same leaf
texture as the Pikmin themselves use. Coincidence? Obviously not. But does this evidence that
Candypop Buds are somehow a similar variety of flower to Pikmin flowers? Or an entirely
similar species to Pikmin? Well, at least we can confirm the added detail that Candypop Buds have
extended stems in this game, a clever failsafe in case one needed to appear in a precarious
location. And with the stem and blossom all told, it is a nice flower. If it is a flower at all!
While we’re wondering about that, I’d like to pause for a moment to inform you that the next
four model explorations are of bosses in Pikmin 3. If you haven’t beaten the game, I wouldn’t want to
spoil them for you, so feel free to stop here, and thanks for watching this far! If you have beaten
the game, then prepare to revisit some amazing and deadly creatures and the interesting modeling
tricks that make them tick. Number 6
We’ll begin with my favorite enemy in Pikmin 3, the illustrious Vehemoth Phosbat. Not only
is it an intimidating design and an interesting strategic boss to battle, it also makes too many
silly faces for me not to call it my favorite. Now its model is pretty complex, including all
the purple bioluminescent hairs on its back. But what about all the short black fur it has?
With most other models in Pikmin 3, fuzzy fluffy fur like this is handled with a mesh of extruded
planes that surround the whole shape. Each of these planes has a hair texture applied, so no
matter from which angle you view the object, you see fuzzy edges. Not so with Mama Phosbat though,
it has a different hair system. Looking through its textures, it has the regular trio of textures
for its body and specifically for its eyelids. But it also has an extra texture, an “exture,” with
the label “fur_length.” This leads me to believe the boss uses a particle hair system controlled
by these colors. Lighter colors represent full fur length, and darker colors represent no hair.
I tried applying a simple Blender hair system and then mapping this texture to hair length,
and the result is exactly the distribution of hair we see in-game. So all those little hairs on the
boss are presumably particles controlled by this texture, which is a very complex system. But it
creates much more realistic fur. Number 7
There’s something small I wanted to show you about the Scornet Maestro. The strings in its mouth have
little bones in the armature that control their vibration. I know that’s self-evident in the game,
but it’s a pretty fun detail. Now, on from the smallest boss in the game to:
Number 8 The largest,
the Quaggled Mireclops. What an incredible model. There are the huge branch-like legs and bulbous
feet with pads and toes, the soil torso with roots embedded and rootlets hanging from it, topped with
a grass layer and several types of foliage. Even these flowers are extremely developed. And then
of course the center of attention, the bulbous head, with its individual spikes and leafy hairdo,
and a total of three eyes on plant stems. I didn’t even realize there were three eyes until
I saw this model. And wouldn’t you know, they have the same structure as the Bulborb’s eyes.
A couple of peculiarities arise inspecting this model. There appear to be quite a few identical
shapes or pieces of identical shapes that compose the Mireclops, but they’re all still labeled as
separate objects with unique names. I’m unsure about the reason for this, but it might be that
these are material layers. One shape could have the wet muddy texture and the other could be a
drier cracked texture, and thus one layer might be partially transparent to reveal the other. But we
don’t have all the textures for the Quaggled Mireclops, so I can’t know for sure. Anyway,
you may have noticed that the dreaded tongue the Quaggled Mireclops that suddenly springs on your
Pikmin is underneath the whole creature here. At first I thought this was a glitch of importing the
model, but now I’m thinking it might be that the tongue is kept out of sight underground until it’s
time for the boss to use it. However these shapes are animated, imagining that the developers got
this whole gigantic creature to move so believably and menacingly is just mind-blowing to me. But
this isn’t even the final boss, that boss has an even crazier trick to its animation.
Number 9 The Plasm Wraith. Its shape may be one
of the smoothest in the game, but something about its humanoid form is just unsettling. This guy is
only one object composed of 10,614 polygons, and this is the object as it appears in T-pose form,
or default position before being animated. So the droopy lopsided version you see in-game
is a special pose. Also I should point out that, while most of the triangles on this guy are pretty
evenly distributed, the extremities resembling arms and feet have extra concentrations of
triangles that end in a single vertex. Why? So it can do this. Eugh, it gives me the creeps. Not to
mention its color textures are all solid colors. Only its normal texture has depth to it, to give
it the plasmic molten-gold look it carries in game. Now that’s the spooky Plasm Wraith I know,
Euugh. But, this is just its final, fightable boss form. The real juicy detail comes with:
Number 10 The Mysterious Life-form, that giant gelatinous
translucent blob that chases you through the Formidable Oak. I don’t have the model for this,
but there’s barely a traditional model to have. The central golden cube would be it. The rest of
it actually isn’t made using regular vertices, or, they are not explicit surfaces. Instead the
blob is constructed of two metaballs. Conceived for computer graphics by Jim Blinn in the 1980s,
metaballs are implicit surfaces; they are 3-dimensional mathematical functions created
in real-time by the game engine. Think of it this way: there’s one invisible point that creates a 3D
static field around it. A given value of distance from that point is where the surface is defined.
For instance, if the value were 1 meter, all points of the surface would be 1 meter from
the center. But, when two metaballs come together, the two formulas perform AND and OR operations on
each other such that the implicit surfaces attract each other. This creates the blobby shape, and a
threshold value determines how much influence the metaballs have on each other. Influence can also
be negative rather than positive. So yeah, the Mysterious Life form is a series of 3D functions
that just happens to be able to chase you around, collide with other objects like Pikmin,
and follow physics. Honestly, the Wii U handles it super well using a finite limit on the smoothness
of the surfaces, and the end result is amazing. The same metaball function comes back when you
have to destroy bits of plasm off the Plasm Wraith, or when a pile of plasm transforms into
an elemental hazard. Those aren’t just regular old polygons anymore, they’re meta-surfaces.
And they just made Pikmin 3 even cooler. That goes for all of these little details,
it really makes you appreciate the game more when you know how much work went into modeling it,
texturing it, and experimenting with geometry-producing technology. And it’s
super exciting to think that Nintendo could accomplish metaball-based gaming
here, it makes me wonder what they’ll be able to do next, as game platforms get beefier and
more efficient. Well that wraps up my video, I’m Scruffy, and thank you very much for watching!