FOUNDRY 42: UK



SHIP TEAM

Work is progressing smoothly on the Eclipse with current focus on the moving areas of the ship, specifically the torpedo bay, entry ladder, cockpit canopy and flight mode variations. The cockpit was finished and the surrounding area is in the process of being resolved. Attention has been given to the torpedo bay due to the size and space it occupies within the ship.

On the concept side this month, we finished the first buggy, the Tumbril Cyclone, and the Origin 600i. For the 600i, the exterior has been fleshed out with the correct proportions. The interior was designed in conjunction with the exterior work. In building these areas, they looked at the best way to model and light the interior to establish aesthetics and methods that will be used throughout the Origin fleet.

This month, the team also made significant progress on some Vanduul ships. The Void bomber greybox has been finalized and is now onto material work, where most of the surface details of the ship will be defined. There are still a few smaller areas to resolve, but the ship can be now seen in its full glory. A big part of the task was to resolve how the smaller boarding ships are stored within it and keeping the main forms from the old concept recognizable while adopting the new Vanduul style. The Blade is also coming along well. Most of the basic shapes on the exterior have been blocked in and are currently being refined.

In Reclaimer news, work was wrapped up on the salvage room, bridge area and lifts. The team did a polish pass throughout the ship, concentrating on lighting and consistency, so the ship is now art complete and the team have moved into an optimization and LOD pass. While this is happening, tech design will start working on their setup pass for the ship.

The Hull C exterior nearly completed its detail pass, and will soon move on to the final stages of having its proxies, LODs and damage setup. The interior is also well on its way to completion; all that’s left is the final room in the back of the ship, which is nearly complete, while the collapsible tunnel section is up next.

We also started two new ships and a personal transport vehicle. We also worked on Squadron 42 mission areas, Hurston shop interiors and landscape development. For Orison, we did initial development on landing zone gameplay areas. Plus, we spent time on all visual targets for surface outpost wear and tear, moons and Shubin’s exterior.

GRAPHICS

This month the graphics team worked on four different features. The first is the continuing work on the secondary viewport and render-to-texture technology that was recently featured on Around the Verse, with the primary focus of improving the performance of video comms for things like air-traffic-control. The sun shadow system is being improved to better cope with the extreme shadow ranges on our planets and moons to ensure that we get the best possible lighting results, especially at sunset when shadows can stretch 10km or more. Our work on volumetric rendering continued as well, with a move towards creating a fully hierarchical system. This will open the door to model gas clouds of any scale, but also allow the team to stream and LOD the gas clouds so that this great tech can be incorporated into the PU. It also allows artists to import volumetric data from external art packages, which should help achieve some really impressive results. Finally, our GPU particle system has been making quick progress with several new features added every week, with the latest addition being a looping ‘dust’ effect for both space and interiors that can achieve 50x the density of our older CPU effect.

AUDIO

The Audio team was focused on Gamescom and 3.0 related feature work and bugfixing. The ship computers needed to be converted to the new Item 2.0 system, so the team took the chance to refactor and improve the ship computers in general. New assets were created for foley and footsteps using a better system to give our players a much more realistic experience. All of the locations for the upcoming release are now in a polished audio state, giving the players a great visual and audible experience when they are exploring.

As usual, all audio team members are involved in a lot of different sprints. In cooperation with other departments, they worked to improve the cockpit experience and quantum travel, brought 3.0 mission givers to life by delivering dialogue assets and attaching sound effects to them, and polished derelict ships and outposts for the release as well.

FACIAL ANIMATION

The Derby Studio has been busy as ever. The Facial Team finished off all the animations needed for the 3.0 Mission Givers while continuing SQ42 work. Eckhart alone has over 47,000 frames (26 minutes) of bespoke facial animation and is one of over 13+ mission givers currently in production for the PU.

After the recent 3-day Audio/Headcam shoot in London, all data has been tracked in Faceware and retargeted onto our face rigs in Maya. This is a great achievement for the team as there were over 125,000 frames or almost 70 minutes of footage shot.

The team recently welcomed 3 Teesside University Interns to the studio. They’re currently on their Summer break after their second year studying on the Computer Games Animation BaHons Degree and have been helping with Facial Tracking and Retargeting, and also attended a 3.0 mission giver mocap shoot

Construction work started on the new Derby Studio and is expected to take 6 weeks. This will be a great relief to the team as they are currently spread over two sites, and are eager to be back together under one roof. The new office will also have space for the motion capture system to be erected, enabling easy pick up shoots and any other new capture sessions needed. The face scanner is also going to be rebuilt with the plan of extending our library of head scans by capturing a greater age range and ethnic groups.

We also hired another Facial Animator, bringing the headcount to nineteen, and we’re looking forward to welcoming her to the team

ENVIRONMENT ART

This month, the final polish on the huge range of locations featured in the imminent 3.0 release has been underway. This includes final passes on branding and corporate colour theming across the outposts on the moons of Yela, Daymar and Cellin. Particular focus has been paid to making sure they integrate to the planetary surface with all the wear and accumulated dust expected of something that’s spent a lot of time on a moon’s surface. We have also improved how our large scale ‘spacescaping’ dust clouds look and feel, particularly around Delamar which now features its own compliment of asteroid clusters and a discreet atmospheric flavor.

Bug fixing and optimization has been another major part of getting things ready for 3.0. Things such as reducing texture memory usage by optimizing materials, decreasing unnecessary entity counts, optimizing LODs and physics proxies, and consolidating asset usage across various locations all help boost performance and are an essential part of the process before a release.

In Squadron 42, the Shubin layout is being wrapped up. Both design and art are happy with the space and can start final implementations. There’s been specific scrutiny on making the whole facility a believable and functional location, with its own transit systems, worker routes, refineries, security and medical facilities, and hangars connected in a logical way. This helps convince the player they are in a working, active environment with its own set of logic and rules. We also worked to get a section of the exterior to a final visual target. This will help solve questions of scale read and material definition. Besides Shubin, a lot of work has gone into the Gainey map. Recent tweaks to the layout and focus on final visual targets have considerably improved the flow and art direction of the space.

WEAPON TEAM

The Weapon Art team were hard at work building the Apocalypse Arms Scattergun, Klaus & Werner Laser Repeaters and MaxOx Neutron Repeaters. They also worked on the Gemini Pistol, Gemini H29, NVTAC and Gemini optics, and some additional work to the Kastak SMG.

In an effort to constantly push the boundaries on new ideas for ship weapons, the team continued to work out VFX styles for each energy type and make improvements to Gallenson Tactical Systems S1-S3.

ANIMATION

The animation team completed the implementation pass for Miles Eckhart and has moved on to refining the hand gestures. We started a pass on the AI combat cover assets to improve the mocap implementation, and did further refinements to the knife takedown animation set.

The team also worked on weapon bug fixes for the 3.0 release, alongside very early previs animation for the Custodian SMG and R97 shotgun. Work continues on both the code and animation for the jump system. Plus, new mocap assets are being readied to replace the player placeholder locomotion animation stop assets.

TECH ANIMATION

The Tech Animation team worked on a new source control application for Maya. This tool intelligently grabs assets that animators are missing in the currently open scene, so they’ll never be without their textures, audio, rigs and pipeline. The nicest part of this feature is that the silent syncing will not interrupt the user’s workflow.

The team worked with the Props team to deliver a great looking glass tumbler asset with a cheap and robust physics solution. There was no way to drive or afford a true liquid simulation in engine, so this turned out to be a good, cost efficient solution.

There are many, many assets that require the correct setup (the initial batch of wildline anims for Old Man alone came to over 200 assets), so the team developed batchable code solutions for the setup. With this new tool, one person can finish this off in less than a day.

There has been a consistent issue from the tech department where object animations were created in the objects folder, rather the animations folder. This means that the build needed to pull these assets from the objects folder into the animations pak at build time, which conflicted with the pipelines in place for all other animations. To rectify this, the team moved all the animations, as well as make chrparams for all affected assets and dba entries, while re-factoring the current build code to not pool anims from the objects folder.

The team began an R&D exploration of why the animation rig in Maya has had a negative effect on the playback framerate. This system drives many additional joints that we use for deformation in engine, so the team is looking for ways to negate this slowdown and bring us back up to 30fps.

The old cryTools installer is very out-of-date (there have been many other pipelines built since its last iteration and each of them has its own installation procedure) and the team is hoping to create a new installer that will do all the heavy lifting for the user, one which will install every relevant pipeline and be updated in every build. The R&D is promising, watch this space!

The Mocap team updated the Motion Builder reviewer tool to have better functionality and a generic script runner which allows you to run selected Python scripts on a batch of requested files.

Along with all of this, the team continued to track and solve 1500+ motion capture files, which included: gameplay, Old Man, Eckhart, and some others.

This month, they also welcomed Oli Cooke, a new Motion Editor, which brings the Motion Capture team up to four.

PROGRAMMING

This month, the team worked on the jumping mechanic in cooperation with the animation department. This covered the look and feel of jumping when idle, walking, running, and included jumping and landing from different heights. The landing presented an interesting challenge as it can change depending on what state the player wants to go into next. Does the player want to land and stop? Land and continue running? Then we have to consider what foot you’ve landed on, and so forth.

More work went into the usables tech for the AI to determine all the different scenarios where an AI might use something and in what way. One situation that was solved this month has been making the operator seats, which have very specific functionality, but also work as a usable. That gives operator seats a much wider range of things the AI can do with them, such as turning around to the player and having a conversation.

Speaking of usables, there was locomotion sprint to make AI entering a usable as seamless as possible. Since most usables will have one or more entry animations, in order for an NPC to look right when either walking or running up to use it, we need to ensure it hits not only the right point for the start of the animation, but also the right speed, direction, with the correct foot placement. Getting all those factors to line up on approach, without making the walk/run animation look odd, has been a challenge.

The team also started a wildlines sprint. As mentioned earlier, these could be simple greetings as the player walks down a corridor or taunts when in a FPS battle. While this may sound simple, they are more complicated than just playing a line with some facial animation. If a NPC greets the player, you’d expect them to briefly glance at them whilst saying the line, so the NPC needs to utilize the head look tech. Also, most of the lines are captured with full body animation, but we don’t always want to play back all of it. For example, if the NPC is standing idle, then you would want to play the animation back on the full body. However, if the NPC is seated, then the rig should only play back the upper body. If they’re running, just the neck upwards. This is where our feather blending tech comes into play, but it still requires each situation to know which type of blending it needs to use.

Other than that, the team proceeded on a number of ongoing sprints supporting both Squadron 42 and 3.0 which include player persistence, cockpit experience, missions support, ATC and communications, and personal inner thought refinements.

PU LIVE DESIGN

The Live team entered its final mission sprint and hopes to receive the final pieces of code to finish the remaining missions. Code recently delivered a much needed boon to mission entity placement. An example of how we would use this would be to easily place corpses in hundreds of possible locations and poses throughout a derelict ship; perfect for creating the gruesome aftermath of a crash landing. Finally, the player vs player version of Bounty Hunter missions was completed with a proper code system that expands the previously Flowgraphed version found in 2.6.