Fox Engine: The Core of MGS: Ground Zeroes

dtschultz

I haven't seen anyone post this yet, and should definitely be shared. This is a great presentation of the tech processes behind the Fox Engine. Their presentations begin about 15 mins or so in (it's an 1:20 long). It's interesting to see how much of the process they describe mirror what we have seen in film, at least in terms of scanning source material and working in a Linear space workflow. I know a lot of studios already work this way to some extent, but they seem to be pushing it a bit further than I have seen.

http://www.gamespot.com/shows/gamespot-live/?event=the-core-of-mgs-ground-zeroes-20130327&tag=Topslot;TheCoreOfMgsGroundZeroes;ComingSoonTheCoreOf;StreamStarts32711AmPt

/anty/

There are some really nice moments was shown, look like they first succeed with physical shading so far. Not meaning they first who made it, but probably first where textures and shaders were tweaked right to use with this tech.
But there some really interesting uncanny valley effect appears with the environments..

CrazyMatt

My god I want to play with fox so bad!

MM

lighting looks good, but how is it that with all these advancements they still have the shitty 1-bit alpha on the hair ?

ZacD

Linear space and gamma corrected workflow, so much new stuff to learn. I wonder how intensive the engine is, and if anything is baked.

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xvampire

Nice! the engine seems softimage friendly i wish im able to try it

btw no realtime reflection yet ... , at least they should put cube map on it
*edit ( apparently it appears in game demo)

also y showing agisoft photoscan too long? its not even their tech >_>

CrazyMatt

ZacD wrote: »

Linear space and gamma corrected workflow, so much new stuff to learn. I wonder how intensive the engine is, and if anything is baked.

If "Deferred Rendering" is their primary then yes, its all in being done in real-time. On the side note, the demonstration of them showing the editor was all operated in real-time, even as they put themselves ingame as snake w/ the material office demonstrated portion.

ZacD

CrazyMatt wrote: »

If "Deferred Rendering" is their primary then yes, its all in being done in real-time. On the side note, the demonstration of them showing the editor was all operated in real-time, even as they put themselves ingame as snake w/ the material office demonstrated portion.

But what about the cube maps and ambient light probes, are those dynamically rendered, or hand placed, do they take any time to rebuild?

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Hazardous

MM wrote: »

lighting looks good, but how is it that with all these advancements they still have the shitty 1-bit alpha on the hair ?

Haha! I agree man, its always one of the first things I look for as well!

Lamont

Awesome bit of software. A lot of places use this.

http://www.cvalley.co.jp/cg/clo/marvelous_designer/

CrazyMatt

Lamont wrote: »

Awesome bit of software. A lot of places use this.

http://www.cvalley.co.jp/cg/clo/marvelous_designer/

Yeah its awesome alright I've replaced most of my sculpting pipeline with it. It's a time saver and an app worth purchasing if you've got a couple hundred lying about collecting dust. As today's direction into realism advances, who has time to productively create hand sculpted cloth anyway for an entire character pipeline?

I do in fact see 3d scanning becoming a norm for character artists as time progress's into this new "next-gen". Because at the end of the day its toy sculptors who will stick by the hand techniques. Where production studios will recognize the cut backs in money spending as does 3d scanning cut the production by a good % in costs. Which could lead to a possibility that studios can acquire a larger team of character artists on par to that of environment ones. Which is something I can see happening for starters on studios who make open world games like those of Rockstar Norths Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Kwramm

agreed. Time and money are becoming more pressing concerns while qame prices are expected to stay the same for even better quality. There are already some games who rely on scanning, but I also met some artists who didn't like that - quote "we just do retopo, there's no art in this".

Marvellous designer is great, but it really needs an "entertainment industry edition" next to the default fashion designer one.

(unrelated, but the first that came into my mind was Chuck Norris when I saw that picture)

dtschultz

CrazyMatt wrote: »

Yeah its awesome alright I've replaced most of my sculpting pipeline with it. It's a time saver and an app worth purchasing if you've got a couple hundred lying about collecting dust. As today's direction into realism advances, who has time to productively create hand sculpted cloth anyway for an entire character pipeline?

I do in fact see 3d scanning becoming a norm for character artists as time progress's into this new "next-gen". Because at the end of the day its toy sculptors who will stick by the hand techniques. Where production studios will recognize the cut backs in money spending as does 3d scanning cut the production by a good % in costs. Which could lead to a possibility that studios can acquire a larger team of character artists on par to that of environment ones. Which is something I can see happening for starters on studios who make open world games like those of Rockstar Norths Grand Theft Auto franchise.

Yep. This is partly what I was thinking as well. The only thing I find a little bit sad is the idea of generating everything from scans and the like. I mean, I know whatever is the most cost-efficient and most effective wins, but I will be sad to see some of the do-it-yourself side of things go. Of course, I admit that could be an oversimplification on my part, because I don't think things are less artistic now that everything isn't strictly handpainted. I just hope everything doesn't become just a matter of cleaning up scan data and re-assembling scanned textures.

CrazyMatt

Well on some level I feel there may be a catch 22, or a double edge sword to this matter. I agree the do it yourself process will seem less fond of a task to undertake from that of the norm where we like pushing geometry ourselves. BUT the opposite of where I see this isn't a bad thing, and in particular for games in general. As an example I'll list the +'s and -'s of them.

Pro's +'s
- Less frequent software crashes from the "I do everything from scratch process". Where everything I made was lost in a jiffy from a wonderful "you've ran out ram" scenario.
- Less energy driven into photo-real asset creation. More of a time for study and possible expansion of artists moving into the kojima pipeline of molding a cast of characters and traditionally sculpting them then scanning. Which is a closer approach to film for game developers. (character artists primarily...)
- I can have more time at home to create my own personal art, study technical stuff, scripting, etc. and not find reasons to crunch in a studio over an asset that could have been created for this realistic style game I've been working on for the last many months.

Cons -'s
- Less opportunity to "create it myself" as we have right now.
- Could put artists out of work quickly if another project is not lined up in contract or in the studios vision. (which could also mean character artists become more of contractors by the norm, and less employed)
- Not all artists are familiar with traditional backgrounds, so if traditional methods were introduced. This could bring large spending for a studio to educate those not fully knowledge in different mediums other than digital.

This is all I can think up for now, but yeah. I think evolving techniques and pipeline methods will expand and contract as time moves forward.

fatihG_

Marvelous designer looks like it would save so much time.. Is there an English webpage for it somewhere?

ZacD

http://www.marvelousdesigner.com/Marvelous/Default.aspx

crazyfool

Looks stunning!!! Scan data and marvellous designer need to stop trying to steal my job though

fatihG_

Well.. Artists will be doing more designing vs producing I think. So more art, less tech. Instead of spending days on a sculpt you spend a few hours. You will still be needing to author the textures(maybe less diffuses), make the low poly unwrap and what not manually. So there are still definitely production stuff left to do I think.
And lets not forget about stylized or cartoony stuff.

Also.. ZacD, thanks for the link. I should have just googled. But I figured since their main site is posted here on an English speaking board and there being no English button/link/version on the site.. that there was no English site altogether.

Kwramm

I think artists will have to worry more about tech, the more "real" things get. Example: physically based shaders (we see them in UE4 and PS4 launch titles). In the past you could just tweak stuff until the little artist inside you was happy, without having to understand anything about real world lighting physics. Now if you have a physically based shader it really helps if you have some idea how lighting works in the real world. This means for the lighting solution to be correct your shaders and materials need to be correct, and this requires a very thorough workflow without guesstimations.
The technical checklists we get from our clients for current gen and next assets are getting longer, not shorter.

There might be less technical work as such in future workflows, but the technical specs will be tighter and more precise. Just like the QA specs we get for our movie assets are just more complex.

ZacD

Every time new tech comes out, people worry they are going to lose jobs. But games keep getting bigger and the art requires more and more work. As long as you keep up with technology, you shouldn't worry about your job being eliminated.

eld

Also, the amount of stylistic and non-photorealistic games released each year vastly outnumber the realistic ones.

I think photorealisitic rendering is a lovely feat and very interesting, but it's not going to replace anything.

thomasp

this lighting/scanning stuff has been done in several titles in the PS3/360 era already. the problem with it in my opinion is simply that it requires all the bells and whistles to be turned on and finely tuned to look any good.

in my experience these are the very same features and rendering accuracy that are being thrown out or downscaled first when the game hits performance bottlenecks (which it will do inevitably), exposing your flat textures and straight up photosourced scan heads in not the kindest of ways.

don't get me wrong - i'm generally not opposed to doing things this way but i think there's a huge difference between showing off some carefully tuned demo on some fantasy PC and a shipped product with mass-produced content where the emphasis is on getting it to run at all on the target hardware.

Torch

Did he undergo some plastic surgery or hideous burning beforehand? Just wondered what was up with the face bandages

dtschultz

Yeah, I'm not worried about the number of jobs contracting. Everything I've seen about the next gen work forces is suggesting that team sizes will go up for AAA games. It's more just a question of how the artistic part of our jobs will change. I have no doubt that there will be new and interesting avenues that this kind of work would open up. My initial overreaction is to be worried that all that fun sculpting and high poly modeling is going to be replaced with cleaning up scan data and retopologizing meshes.

As for fantasy games, even these will more than likely change as well (outside of super stylized stuff like League of Legends, etc.). They will have more complex spec, normal, displacement shaders, and lighting models.

Part of what I love in this industry is that is constantly changing and we have to keep adapting to the flow, so I'm not trying to be a harbinger of doom. I'm just curious how our jobs will change in the next generation of platforms.