Planetrism - VR Project

Planetrism is a science fiction role-playing video game where you experience the life of a colonist on an exoplanet light years away from Solar system. It is very harsh frontier life full of hard work, dangers of unknown territories, but there are also adventures filled with wonders and mysteries of universe. Planetrism combines personal experience of adventurous colonist life with leadership and management of whole colony.

We started development in March 2017 and our team of two devs are still working hard and full time with this project. What you are seeing in this thread is going to be work in progress content that might change during the development process.

For more reqular updates you can join to our Discord server Planetrism or visit the website http://planetrism.com/

Here are some of the latest content:


Our first location is a planet called “New Skylake”. Here are some shots from it. Our primary goal is to have solid 90fps so lighting is pre-baked and we try to optimize as much as possible to have room for characters and different FX. So far everything is textured 100% with Substance Designer. Planets are also fully procedural and you can read more of our system here: Procedural Planets for Epic Skies

We are using a lot of tileable textures and fastest way for us is to make them in Substance Designer.

We also made a trailer for this location that you can find in our twitter. Here are few stills from that. Note that some aspects are already changes from that. It was just a simple Sequencer camera fly-through.

This looks quite amazing, I am a huge fan of substance painter just picked it up a while ago well worth it.

Art for this looks fantastic :slight_smile:

[MENTION=13568]Invader Studios[/MENTION] Thanks! I actually need to start using Painter more. I have a huge library of different substance graphs so it would be interesting to use them with Painter.
@evilmrfrank Thanks!

I finished this rail gun that will be the main weapon. Player will be able to change different scopes and accessories. I came up with this concept few years ago so now I had a perfect opportunity to finish it :slight_smile: You can look the Marmoset Viewer version in ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/z4BED

I made this little guy that will be one of the enemies. There will be few different types of these. It was pretty fun to rig and animate this even though I´m bad at it :slight_smile: More shots and marmoset viewer can be found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/kK9lx

These guys look awesome, way too friendly looking to be enemies :slight_smile:

@Ironbelly Thanks! Yeah, you don´t want to mess around with these bots :slight_smile:

I´ve been very busy with this project. It feels like making VR games is 20% art and 80 optimizing :slight_smile: I´ve been jumping between props, environment, lighting, blueprints… Even made our terrain material to use tesselation because parallax mapping just don´t work with VR. Finally manage to finish the hands. It took a lot of iterating, testing and crying to get them work in game. So now we have hands, gun to shoot with and enemy to shoot at so it´s a good start :slight_smile:

Very nice visuals! Will definitely keep an eye on this project!

After a small break we are back developing this project. I changed the whole lighting from static to fully dynamic because the level is now 4km x 4km and player need to be able to build outposts so dynamic was a way to go. It was a pretty huge optimizing task to keep things still running smooth in VR.

A lot of people are saying that you don´t want to use dynamic lighting with VR because it cost too much but with some trade offs you can do it at least on hi-end VR. Sure static lighting looks good with a nice indirect lighting and so on but dynamic gives much more freedom with basically everything. With dynamic lighting we also now have a choice to run dynamic day and night cycle that really looks mesmorazing in VR with volumetric fog. I´m planning to write more detailed guide for lighting in vR.

Here are few shots from the new level and 360 shots can be found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/l8AeO

Awesome !!

@andyxor Thanks!

Small update again. I manage to finish the buggy. Our levels are pretty huge so its important to have transportation available. I already rigged it and its somehow driveable now but we need to make the VR controls next. Marmoset viewer file can be found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xyQ1X

Managed to finish this portable hydroponic gardening unit. Marmoset viewer version here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/LWDdK It is capable of growing up to five different vegetation types at the same time. Built in liquid nutrition heating/cooling system with quad electric pump system makes it reliable solution for any situation. Filtering system makes it possible to re-use same water up to 10 times and leftover can be converted to drinkable water.

We have been working really hard to get more things done. Some gameplay core and robot AI work. Now we have 25km2 playable area where foliage, rocks etc… are spawning procedurally. Player is also now able to build different buildings in VR to maintain colony and keep food and energy running although we still need to implement more functions there. I will post more of this feature later when we have more things done in that field. This is very demanding project for two of us. A lot of multitasking, optimizing, thinking, creating and so on. More and more I feel that this project is my life mission and it means a lot to me that you like to follow the progress as we go :slight_smile:

What I want to share today is the space scene that I managed to finish. The core of this scene is the planets that are all using a master material that I made. That master material is using textures that I generate in Substance Designer where I build a system that is able to generate fully procedural planets. Changing seed number there will result different continent and ocean setups and forms. Master material allows me to animate lights, toggle if there is civilization or not, clouds, atmosphere status and so on. Space is itself is using four different star textures that I also made in Substance Designer. Some of them are tiling more and some less. This way it creates a pretty good results.

More shots and substance graphs can be found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qBawN

I just managed to get the base done for our modular cave system. I built a pretty simple model kit that works with the UE grid. I´m also planning to figure out a faster way to generate cave systems, maybe with splines or procedural tools. Then I made a master material for rocks so they blend two different rock textures, a sand texture to blend better with the ground, water leaks draining down and a macro normal map to add vertical details. I also made one material for the cave ground too. Its blending three different textures and I can also vertex paint water puddles there too. All of these blendings uses vertex paints. All of the textures are made with Substance Designer and ZBrush. I also found out a pretty cool trick to use procedural foliage spawner system for the cave rocks, scifi fungus and bigger rocks. It gives a pretty good base to start with and then I can continue with the foliage paint tool.

Here is a video of the space and cave environments: Planetrism - The Cave - YouTube

You can now also find us on Cartdge https://cartrdge.com/magus/projects/planetrism And like always, more shots can be found on our ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qwd3L

Absolutely beautiful art. Incredible really.

looks amazing can’t wait to see the finished product.

@Osok Thanks! This is a fun project to work with @crumbaker Thanks! We are working hard to get core and more gameplay done. Then hopefully we can share something playable :slight_smile: