Hello Stalkers!
We come to you with another portion of the news about what is squeaking in the grass! But not only...
We noticed that in the previous report you liked the story of Joanna from the Exclusion Zone very much. So we're continuing our little series of behind-the-scenes stories, bringing you tons of unpublished photos from your zone along the way. We hope you will like it this time as well.
Enjoy reading!
We won the CEEGA award!
At the beginning we need to show off: Chernobylite was nominated for the CEEGA 2020 awards in the Technology and Visual Art categories And it was revealed just this week that we’ve won in the Technology category!
We don’t know exactly what particular aspects of the game draw the jury’s attention, but we’re definitely happy about it. Congratulations to the other nominees and winners! More awards are ahead of us (hopefully) :)
Armor, hair and woods
And now something for the eyes. In the pictures below you will see the step-by-step process of applying textures to a super heavy soldier.
Below - a comparison of Tatiana's hair before and after changing the hair material. As you can see, before the changes, Tatiana's hair was more… straw. Light corrections made the hair structure and appearance more natural and closer to reality.
Oh, and don't pay attention to what's going on behind Tatiana in the background. We don't know ourselves. :D
Here in the form of a little curiosity - how we work with the vegetation in the world of Chernobylite. As you can see, we try to reproduce the real trees and shrubs as much as possible, not only in terms of appearance and variety. You can see in the photo that we take care to maintain the proportions of the height of trees and shrubs compared to an adult person.
The atmosphere inside Chernobyl
Once again, we want to unveil a little behind the scenes of work on Chernobylite. Because you liked the story of our graphic model Joasia, we asked Michał Mierzejewski, our 3D artist and photogrammetry specialist, to tell you what it is like to take pictures of the environment.
Michał has been to Chernobyl more than ten times. The first trip took place in 2015 - back then Michał was in the team behind the Chernobyl VR Project. - The first trip happened in November. It probably lasted around five days, but we didn't visit too much. I spent the most time in School no. 3 doing scans. We were in a group of six people, travelling in our own car, and we could be in the zone from dawn till dusk. The school, which we lit up with our lamps (we had our own generator), looked amazing. Then the "tourist" traffic was completely different - he recalls.
Michał is a bit interested in urban exploration (exploration of the usually invisible or inaccessible parts of human civilization) and he has a lot of fun taking pictures of such places. The Zone once was his Holy Grail - At first, this place was overwhelming with the number of stimuli, frames in the context of photography. Everything was interesting and the neck hurt from constantly looking around - he says.
The biggest breakthrough was the 5th or 6th trip when he got to know this place better and could slow down for a moment. Thanks to this, he was able to closely experience places he only looked at from a distance so far. - Maybe I didn’t see the whole Zone, but I’ve tried more than once, so it's hard to say what I liked the most. Our trips are always organized in small groups, sometimes 2-3 people, which additionally helps, because you are not accompanied by 20 tourists. I explored all the iconic places as well as the less known ones. But I was most impressed by the silence near Caffe Pripyat. It was overwhelming, you could literally hear the grass growing. Nowhere else have I "heard" such silence - says Michał.
The best thing about this job is that the team visited places that are usually very difficult to access. The photo below was taken from the side of the power plant, which is not normally available for “tourists”.
And another photo from the zone, this time after dark.
There are also unforgettable, even historical moments. - We got permission once to fly over the Power Plant, moments before the Ark covered the old sarcophagus. A walk around the entire site was also something extraordinary - recalls Michał.
So the important question is how to transfer a place that you actually saw with your own eyes to the game. The easiest way to answer it is that: during a photo session, thousands of photos of an object or room are taken. Imagine taking a few thousand photos of only one chair! Michał says directly and with disarming frankness: - My job is not exciting. I can spend hours in a given place and take photos. Of course, I also visit interesting places and that’s pretty cool. Thanks to this, my work isn’t limited to just sitting in the office and that’s good because those trips are always an adventure in a way.
He found out himself that trips can be an adventure in themselves many times. He had some scary experience in the hospital, wandering around with a small team in the underground corridors. - We were there completely alone. We’ve reached a cellar where irradiated clothes were thrown into (some of them gathered from the fireman that were dispatched to the Power Plant shortly after the explosion). Suddenly, madness happened - dosimeters and their alarms screamed... It was really something - recalls Michał.
This, of course, doesn’t mean that everything has to be smooth and successful - exploring the underground is sometimes dangerous. While exploring one of the buildings in search of a good cellar to scan, Michał had a small… accident. - I saw a spot where I could move down through the metal staircase. I moved slowly: 1... 2... 3... 4… 5 steps. Suddenly it felt the next stair was bending like it was made of rubber. In a split second, I grabbed the railing. It crumbled and the rest of it was left in my hands. I don’t know how, but I’ve managed to turn and started to run back. Every step bent, crumbled, and in the end, all of them fell into a black hole where I wanted to go.
Another extremely important element of the journey is meeting people. As Michał says, visiting the same abandoned buildings 100 times does not make such an impression then. - Suddenly people and their stories come to the fore. For example, that guy Ivan talked about the boar he kept in his shed. But there are also guides, all that atmosphere and animals - all those stray dogs, cats, a car-sized moose you encountered, or a fox that thinks it's a dog.
- The kindness of these people, their openness is indescribable. During one of our trips, we recorded one babushka and when she started to tell her story, the memories came back and she cried. It really moved us - adds Michał.
The end of the tour always means a lot of control. After all, you come back from the area irradiated to a greater or lesser extent. When leaving the zone, you must pass the dosimetry control twice through special gates. Even then, it's hard not to run into problems. - Once some guy in front was passing through the gate and it just “screamed”.
The guards stopped him, of course. They told him to clean his shoes with special doormats, as they were the source of the problem. He wiped them, walked through the gate... and it yelled again. So he didn’t have much choice and had to leave these shoes. From that point he had to walk just in his socks - describes Michał.
It's all for today!
Take care, stalkers!