"Taming The Dragon: Next-Generation Asset Creation for PS3" (Some Lair info)

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Titanio

Legend
Interesting feature up on Gamasutra:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20051007/waugh_01.shtml

Matthias Worch, designer and technical art director for Factor 5, was the speaker of the evening. He was armed with an updated version of his technical lecture from the Game Developers Conference this past March, one that now discusses art creation for Factor 5's still somewhat mysterious PlayStation 3 title Lair.

Fundamentally, this was another opportunity to explain the value of digital maquettes and to demonstrate the rendering software Worch is most fond of. This seemed to go over fairly well, as Worch's tools are powerful (and indeed elicited constant gasps of admiration from the audience) and he has a number of sound arguments for at least considering maquettes as an alternative modeling technique.
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The thing most people probably came for, though, was the dragons. Worch had little to say about the actual game he has been working on – now titled Lair – though he used the models all throughout the lecture. One of the key models was a maquette (built by Peter Konig at Massive Black, the man behind the Dragonheart models); another, a digital render. The final version used in the game, Worch said, was a blend of the best parts from each: a practical body and limbs, and a digital head, tail, and wings.

He played a recent extremely high-resolution trailer in real-time, occasionally pausing to swing the camera around or turn on or off various effects. To be fair, the scene in question was clearly a cut-scene, calculated to show off just how many polygons the PS3 can throw around; it's still a lot of polygons, though.

Each model, Worch claimed, contained somewhere between 100,000 and 170,000 triangles. Each had a bunch of other special maps and lighting applied, and the main character was built up with "over ten textures". He compared this to an estimated 10,000 for characters in Gears of War and other recent high-res games. The high-res models, meanwhile, that got dithered down to produce the in-game models, ran up around 5,000,000 triangles.
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Impressive stuff!
 
ihamoitc2005 said:
No doubt there is extensive CELL use atleast for cut-scene shown. I would have liked to know frame-rate and quality of animation. I am happy to sacrifice some polygons for really good real-time animation and physics.
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thats what I was thinking. the CPU plays a major part in cutscenes unlike gameplay scenes. We already have seen that each car in PGR3 in gameplay has 80,000 polys, times that with 12 more cars and a city the size of NY city and 3d crowd is what next gen is. The amazing thing is in Gears of war each character is between 5-7,000 polys per character and Most of the polys are reserved for the environment, thats why when you see a GOW video i have noticed that I concentrate on the environment more than the character.
 
Polygons

pakpassion said:
thats what I was thinking. the CPU plays a major part in cutscenes unlike gameplay scenes. We already have seen that each car in PGR3 in gameplay has 80,000 polys, times that with 12 more cars and a city the size of NY city and 3d crowd is what next gen is. The amazing thing is in Gears of war each character is between 5-7,000 polys per character and Most of the polys are reserved for the environment, thats why when you see a GOW video i have noticed that I concentrate on the environment more than the character.
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You might want to check on PGR3 numbers. Its interior view is modeled from 40k and exterior view is modeled from 40k. And theres LOD as well which reduces polygon count a lot. For example, there is current gen game which claims to have 22 cars with up to 20k each. If I just multiplied 20k by 22, I have 440k @ 60fps for just cars, far beyond what has been done on current hardware so you see it is not possible to use that method of calculation.

Gears of War I thought was 10k for certain characters no? I think 1st gen xbox360 games wont be so impressive in terms of polygons. Next gen will be more impressive because of better developer familiarity with hardware and opportunity to develop better engine. For now they will emphasize programmable pixel-shader based effects.

As for CELL, I agree, that during cut-scenes more of CELL can be dedicated for graphics although 170k transform is no problem for 1 SPE. But unlikely too many 170k models can be supported except for just cut-scenes since only 7 SPEs maximum. In game model almost certainly less than 170k due to large quantity of dragons in close proximity of camera as shown in trailer but ability to handle such large and complex model is amazing even if just cut-scene.
 
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That XYZ RGB scanner (is that what its called?) seems to be an amazing piece of technology. Its going to be interesting to see what something like this and CELL can do together. Also, the figure in the amount of polys for the Lair "dragons" is also crazy. It was said to be around 100,000+?
 
BlueTsunami said:
Also, the figure in the amount of polys for the Lair "dragons" is also crazy. It was said to be around 100,000+?
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It's in the new article on Gamasutra, the models he showed at least are from 100k to 170k. I guess they're using some really good LOD in the scenes with lots of them :)
 
ihamoitc2005 said:
You might want to check on PGR3 numbers. Its interior view is modeled from 40k and exterior view is modeled from 40k. And theres LOD as well which reduces polygon count a lot. For example, there is current gen game which claims to have 22 cars with up to 20k each. If I just multiplied 20k by 22, I have 440k @ 60fps for just cars, far beyond what has been done on current hardware so you see it is not possible to use that method of calculation.

Gears of War I thought was 10k for certain characters no? I think 1st gen xbox360 games wont be so impressive in terms of polygons. Next gen will be more impressive because of better developer familiarity with hardware and opportunity to develop better engine. For now they will emphasize programmable pixel-shader based effects.

As for CELL, I agree, that during cut-scenes more of CELL can be dedicated for graphics although 170k transform is no problem for 1 SPE. But unlikely too many 170k models can be supported except for just cut-scenes since only 7 SPEs maximum. In game model almost certainly less than 170k due to large quantity of dragons in close proximity of camera as shown in trailer but ability to handle such large and complex model is amazing even if just cut-scene.
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well the interior and exterior are running at the same time, its not as if when we go into the cockpit of the car the exterior models reduce and viceversa. times that with the number of cars. Looking at the gameplay HD movies from Xboxyde its evident its just below the CG trailer that Bizarre creations released at E3. yes there might be current gen cars 22 x 20k models but do you honestly believe they have cities the size of a full size NY city? including a fully modelled to specific detail brooklynn bridge. Its worth noting PGR3 is an arcade while Forza is a simulation, simulations have higher details when you take that into consideration. I think its true 1st gen xbox games will be similiar to 1st gen Xbox games which were not much higher than gamecube geko GPU capabilities but as the years went by there was a marked difference between GC and Xbox qualities even though they were released at the same time with Xbox graphics looking more pristine because no graphics card full potential is fullfilled and it dies before its time. Hell we see Vodoo 5s which are more than 6-7 years old having games looking better than Geforce 2 and 3s once you used it to the max
 
interesting, but anytime I see some quote from factor 5 I tend to take it with a grain of salt. The ruby demo on PC/xbox also had very high poly chracters. There's a point where you simply won't notice polygons that small. they could probably cut out 50k of polys without anyone noticing a big difference.
 
Ruby

Qroach said:
interesting, but anytime I see some quote from factor 5 I tend to take it with a grain of salt. The ruby demo on PC/xbox also had very high poly chracters. There's a point where you simply won't notice polygons that small. they could probably cut out 50k of polys without anyone noticing a big difference.
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IIRC Ruby was 75,000 polygons. Still very good by any standard no?
 
Titanio said:
It's in the new article on Gamasutra, the models he showed at least are from 100k to 170k. I guess they're using some really good LOD in the scenes with lots of them :)
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Yep. The article implies that all dragons shown were in the 100k to 170k range, but that would be a testament to F5's stupidity more than to the RSX's capability. F5 is smart enough to put geometric LOD in there, and with DOF you really won't see the difference.
 
Inane_Dork said:
Yep. The article implies that all dragons shown were in the 100k to 170k range, but that would be a testament to F5's stupidity more than to the RSX's capability. F5 is smart enough to put geometric LOD in there, and with DOF you really won't see the difference.
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It's hard to know what scene they were talking about, it could easily have been one of the parts with only two dragons or whatever. It seems to be fairly standard anyway to talk about the "full" model figures even in scenes subject to LOD, though, since you probably wouldn't be able to pinpoint an exact figure at any given moment (if it's dynamic LOD).
 
Qroach said:
interesting, but anytime I see some quote from factor 5 I tend to take it with a grain of salt. The ruby demo on PC/xbox also had very high poly chracters. There's a point where you simply won't notice polygons that small. they could probably cut out 50k of polys without anyone noticing a big difference.
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Is there any reason why you are not believing the guys making the game?
 
I wonder if this XYZ scanner thing is similar to those machines they use to digitize actors and faces and such for game and CG video in movies. I remember something about Sony pictures building this really advanced setup that sounds similar.

Also, do you think that the 100-170k range is high-to low LOD? 100k on high LOD seems pretty crazy though...

By the way, am I the only whose hoping this plays like a panzer dragoon knock off?

Also, is there SSS on those dragon wing or is it my imagination?
 
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Is there any reason why you are not believing the guys making the game?
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Factor 5 has a habit of exagerating thier claims. that's why i said I'd take it with a grain of salt.
 
Mefisutoferesu said:
I wonder if this XYZ scanner thing is similar to those machines they use to digitize actors and faces and such for game and CG video in movies. I remember something about Sony pictures building this really advanced setup that sounds similar.
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The article has a image of the Morpheus character`s head scanned for the Matrix, so it`s the same thing.
I wonder if game devs will have to buy these or if they can be rented in a special FX studio ?
In movies the CG stuff is mostly scanned from real models/sculptures, so using this method could bring more great artists from the movie industry to the games industry.
 
Oh, that's true!! The sculpture part (stop motion and miniatures and so on) of the movie industry is dieing a very painful death with the advent of CG. Maybe we can see a return and more importantly WORK for these guys in the videogame industry.
 
Movies and games will come closer together anyhow. The King Kong movie has some scenes in the script just because of the game.
That`s propably good for the atmosphere of the game, on the other side it could make the movie worse...
 
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