How did they do the rocks in Shadow of the Colossus Remake?

Blond

https://youtu.be/TQg9lp8Q0gY?t=1m46s

Ok, guys, I'm gonna need some insight here. There's a freaking lots of detail on those rocks, even for a Ps4 level title. By the sheer amount of details they have, I can suspect they were sculpted with Zbursh but I just can't get how they rocky surfaces of the wall have so many diversity, I really can't sense or see any sign of repetiveness or tiling here.

Even when the grassland when seen from far above the ground, you start seeing the titling and repetitions but the walls, dammit, the whole thing looks as it was sculpted in one go...

Also, honestly, how did they manage to put somuch grass/foliage and green on the ground withtout losing performance?

https://youtu.be/chSbDJNS76g?t=1m51s

Now that silky smooth fur; I know how they did it with multiple layered geo on the PS2 game but here???? This is better looking than Turf/Hairworks Nvidia ever proposed for their gameworks futilities,  and here this is running at silky smooth 60 frame on Ps4 pro.

How did BluePoint did it?

JordanN

My junior environment artist intuition™ tells me it's a clever use of using a lot of modular assets with either hand painted or a material shader that randomizes and blends several texture detail together. 

As for why it doesn't cost so much performance, I think ever since the PS3 gen, you can reasonably get away with a lot sculpted detail that has been retopologized/optimized.  Even more so when those assets are instanced. 

You can look at this Uncharted 4 artdump and see the rocks came from a decimated source (or where manually edited to reduce the polycount for run time).

Clark Coots

Not exactly informative how they do all the rocks, but Mak Malovic worked on some rocks and is the Lead Env Artist https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Pwnn4
 
Might be worth asking the question to him on Artstation. I thought about doing that myself several weeks ago, they are very gorgeous rocks/cliffs

PixelMasher

my guess would be, 2048 or 1024 unique normal map done on second uv channel, with tiling rock textures and normals on channel 1. the unique normal probably powers all the big shapes and then the tiling materials keep it looking crisp up close.

as for foliage, if done efficiently, you can usually get a way with quite a lot if you are smart about it. Look at the latest uncharted games, or when i was working on farcry there were literally hundreds of thousands of polys of grass on screen at once. polygons are the least of performance issues in most cases these days. Drawcalls usually tend to make a bigger hit in performance.

CrackRockSteady

PixelMasher said:

my guess would be, 2048 or 1024 unique normal map done on second uv channel, with tiling rock textures and normals on channel 1. the unique normal probably powers all the big shapes and then the tiling materials keep it looking crisp up close.

as for foliage, if done efficiently, you can usually get a way with quite a lot if you are smart about it. Look at the latest uncharted games, or when i was working on farcry there were literally hundreds of thousands of polys of grass on screen at once. polygons are the least of performance issues in most cases these days. Drawcalls usually tend to make a bigger hit in performance.

^^ This technique works really well for making large rock formations while maintaining detail level.  I'm doing something similar at work right now.  You can get a lot of mileage out of only a handful of meshes and a few material instances with different tiling detail textures to change up the look a bit.

R3D

modular rocks, detail normal maps.

walter

A lot of informations here,
https://80.lv/articles/shadow-of-the-colossus-remaking-the-legend/

Clark Coots

More examples and info from Matthew Via artstation https://www.artstation.com/artwork/V62lR "We used a total of 88 rocks to build the world. "

Mark Dygert

"Our rocks walls are made of many singular rock instances, each sculpted in ZBrush, macro maps transferred through Substance Designer, materials assembled in our own material editor, and objects assembled in our script editor with projected materials to further tie them together."

Yep, so modular rocks with projected materials/decals to unify several objects, cover repetition, add age and wear across several instances.

If you haven't already you should check out Decals and Mesh Decals, in Unreal, it explains the concept well and if you're adventurous enough you can play around with it

Mesh Decals:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/HowTo/MeshDecals/
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/MeshDecals/

Decals:
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/ContentExamples/Decals/1_1/
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Actors/DecalActor/