Neo Cab

In Neo Cab, the world of Los Ojos is seen from a car. One of our design pillars is to make a world that feels cinematic, and so we looked for ways to make this constraint enhance that goal rather than limit it.

We also had the constraint of wanting to leverage cinematic lighting and Unity’s powerful new post-processing stack to try and evoke the rich and moody visuals of our concept art and reference, yet still build a game that was playable on mobile devices.

And finally, we wanted a solution that was not realistic but rather hyper-real, where the lighting felt right but didn’t need to be physically correct, and offered plenty of opportunity for the artist to fine tune the visuals.

We gathered reference from films with car interior shots that we liked. These included shots where the city the character was driving through was important to the shot and set up the mood and feelings of the scene, but also scenes where it was just background and the characters and their conversation was the focus.

The Night Of

A Night on Earth

Taxicab Confessions

We also began experimenting with Unity post-processing. I set up a test scene with the car and some placeholder geometry and lights and got some promising results, but had serious framerate issues on mid-range mobile devices from heavy use of the bloom and DOF. We also had some problems with the post-effects interacting in strange ways with our Pax sprites, which are sprite based and used completely different rendering setup. Also, our art director wanted to be able to color-correct and post-process the car interior and the outside scene differently.

Looking at classic film techniques, we realized a lot of these used a “rear-projection” technique, where actors are filmed in a stationary car on a soundstage, with a screen projecting footage from a car-mounted camera elsewhere behind them. Modern films did essentially the same thing with green screen. Often a setup called a “chaser rig” is used where lights on set are moved mechanically or simply waved around by a grip to simulate passing headlights and streetlamps.

We apply this approach to our car cameras. Our car rig is stationary, which helps keep it simpler and also has the advantage of not having to worry about the whole rig moving around under one root. We have a separate camera that is constrained to point in the same direction as the car camera, but follows the car path through the city. On mobile devices and PC on low settings, these renders can be set at a lower resolution than the main screen which allows use to use fragment-heavy effects like bloom and DOF even on these targets, while the car interiors and character art remain at full resolution so we can keep the character art crisp and detailed. On a higher end PC we can render the exterior camera at full res and still make use of cinematic post effects. A nice side benefit of this is being able to apply different post processing to the interior and exterior scenes.

Making the lighting feel in sync between the interior and exterior is a challenge. I initially set up some experiments that looked for lights in the scene near the car EXT camera and used those to drive the color and brightness of the “chaser” lights but it was difficult to control, and just adjusting the speed of these chaser lights proportionally to the car speed gave the impression of driving, and left the artist more in control of the color and movement of the light. Another problem is making the lighting feel right when Lina is turning. At the moment we’re not doing anything to handle this, and though it’s not distracting it’s noticeable if you’re looking for it. It’s also a missed opportunity to reinforce the feeling of motion – the light sliding across the passenger and backseat is a strong visual cue that we’re not taking advantage of yet. We plan to make more adjustments to this system as we expand our virtual Los Ojos and add more variety between the distinct neighborhoods of if the city but it feels like the overall approach is solid.