The Helghast’s home planet (Helghan) is hanging by a thread after the war between the Interplanetary Strategic Alliance (ISA) and the Helghast factions. Just for the fun of it, although I’m sure it will be a useful tool for someone.Killzone: Shadow Fall comes right after the events of Killzone 3. “The future is exciting and I personally can’t wait to see a Houdini Engine plugin running in Photoshop. “The Houdini Engine enables us to keep an independent workflow and we finally get to make assets out of the content we already knew was better suited for Houdini” says Ben.
For both parties, this is a better solution compared to handing over baked results because that would mean a break in the workflow and challenges when trying to fit ad-hoc jobs into the schedule. Now instead of handing over complex jobs to the Houdini artists, a digital asset can be used right inside Maya. Their Environment Artists work mainly with Maya but they recognize the power of Houdini. Lots of procedurally generated content will be needed which is straightforward enough to wrap into a Houdini Digital Asset (HDA). Guerilla Games is already prepping Houdini Engine for Maya for their new IP game that is currently in production. Currently we are using the plugin for Maya, but we can already see how, in the future, this could also work in any of our proprietary tools.” “Its speed is impressive because it skips the need to write to a file. “The Houdini Engine has a high usability because Houdini assets can be loaded into a host application, such as Maya, with adjustable parameters,” says Ben. Houdini has well established its place in the Guerrilla Games pipeline, however early tests with the new Houdini Engine have uncovered new ways Houdini can be used for future projects. “The environments had a lot of metal grating walkways or stairs and using this setting for rendering the depth map meant that it would still rain below these structures.” “A benefit of using Mantra was that we could set the pixel filter to farthest pixel sampling” says Ben. Having existing in place tools that were developed for use with RBD simulations made it easier for Guerrilla Games to deal with the instances and complete level sections could be loaded into Houdini and the height map rendered with Mantra. Rather than using a hard on/off method of testing, variance shadow maps were used to enable a soft mask without blurring the actual height. For the rain, they needed to generate a height map for the level sections that would be used by a shader to test if a surface would be wet or not. In Chapters 1, 5, and 6 where falling rain is seen, the mask for where the environment is wet or sheltered was created using Houdini. Textures throughout the game that were deemed as slightly more technical typically ended up on the plate of a Houdini artist. Good examples of water flowmaps in the game include the river found in the forest in Chapter 2 and the water sections around the VSA headquarter in Chapter 4. The primary flow of the water was directed by manually creating curves. Interaction with static objects in the water, foam trails and slope base flow were all calculated procedurally. Multiple cases of flowing water were generated using flowmaps created in Houdini using a custom toolset. Most of these are sprite animations containing flowmaps were rendered in Houdini to recreate motion in-game. The use of Houdini to generate in-game effects textures is widespread in Killzone: Shadow Fall because of secondary effects such as smoke or dust. This technique retained some level of connectivity within the crumbling pieces creating a more realistic effect when compared to buildings collapsing into a heap of blocks. To bring a greater level of realism to this sequence, an internal construction was used inside the geometry, much like the rebar that is found in real world concrete buildings. The animations of these buildings are at the scale of real-world buildings and their destruction is in no way influenced by the player, therefore the best course of action was to bake out these set piece events directly from Houdini instead of running in-game simulations. In Chapter 8 of Killzone: Shadow Fall, the player must navigate their way through an environment that is erupting with collapsing concrete buildings. Therefore, it was important to choose wisely which effects to pre-compile and which ones to leave to the console. The highly ambitious art direction team wanted to use as many as possible but heavy processing on the hardware can slow the game down. Although the new console’s speed bump enabled Guerrilla Games to perform a lot more real-time Rigid Body Dynamics (RBD) simulations, decisions needed to be made about when to consume this processing power in-game.
0 kommentar(er)
