Since writing about Dreams, the upcoming sandbox platform game for PS4, this scene by freelance artist Martin Nebelong is among the most amazing early access content I've seen so far. Also notable: he built all this with PlayStation Move motion montrollers. (Watch him building in the video below.)
"Another example of how spoiled we are as artists today, with such great tools available to us," he just enthused on Twitter. "Making art in VR, making art on a console and being able to tell stories in new ways!"
Most of this scene is made by him, but, he tells me, he can also draw from the user community to incorporate other assets:
"I sculpt 99% of the stuff in my scenes myself but now and then I use something from other creators," as he puts it to me. "You can choose to share assets with the community by making them remixable. There's a lot of stuff shared already. If I were to make a larger experiment experience I would use more from the 'Dreamiverse'."
We were just talking about the importance of optimization in user-generated virtual worlds, and Dreams' platform creators have added an important feature there -- a "thermometer" game mechanic:
"It's a way of letting you know which areas of your scene you should optimize… [and] keeps an eye on the overall performance of your scene," Nebelong explains. "Many unique, detailed objects can quickly fill your thermometer, while instances of an object are virtually forgotten free."
For this particular scene, he cleverly repeated some assets to keep things relatively resource light:
"It's crazy how well optimized Dreams is. Most of the spaceship is made from just one panel with two distinct sides. Cloning takes almost no graphics thermo, so 90% of the spaceship was just around 7%. You can watch some process [above]."
Martin as I said is a professional artist, and his fond hope is to make Dreams part of his toolchest:
"Been working with freelance art for 16 years or so," he says, "doing paintings and 3D work for a lot of different clients. So I would love to use Dreams to make illustrations for books, make music videos and so on. If I have the time I would like to do some interactive experiences too, for the Dreamers."
As you would expect for a Sony product, the company claims a universe-wide license on any user-generated content created in Dreams. But far as I (or he) can tell, there's nothing in the agreement preventing those dreams in Dreams.
Much more about Dreams on his Twitter.
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