GDC 2007 Wrap-up Part Two

One of the more technically informative talks of the show came from Alexandre Amancio (Art Director, Ubisoft Montreal) entitled Re-thinking the Visual Pipeline for Next-Gen Games. The top takeaway dealt with texture usage as Alexandre warned that many art teams were making the mistake of incorrectly gauging next gen texture budgets. While this round of consoles generally allow for considerably more polys, video memory constraints remain a tricky hurdle and require the use of creative, multi-use textures in order to maintain crisp visual fidelity. He went on to warn that failure to heed texture budgets would inevitably lead to a painful collision course with harsh reality in the final months of a game's production. During this time he's seen stellar looking titles lose a great deal of their sparkle as teams scramble to bring their texture usage within budget.

A few other random session takeaways:

• Distant Shots: diffuse is king, drop all other texture usage
• Mid Distance: normal map is the primary driver of detail
• Up Close Micro Level: specular map is the key to generating believable texture and grain detail
• To enhance most any normal map create a render clouds photoshop image, run that image through the NVidia photoshop normal plugin, then overlay the resulting normal over your initial normal map to give it more variation.
• The same specular map can be used for most all characters
• Baking in ambient occlusion to vertex info gives credibility to an object (we used this technique in our building pipeline for Rise of Legends and were quite pleased with the results)

And finally to round out this report, the show demo that created the most buzz with the Big Huge art team was Crytek's CryEngine2. While I'm generally not all that jazzed over games that aim for a strict photographic visual approach I couldn't help but be drawn into their world and ogle the tech. Here's a video that highlights a number of their engine features including examples of dynamic soft shadows, real-time ambient maps, parallax occlusion mapping, and their signature breakable vegetation system...