Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/19812
n n n n Gaming Bizarre Creations, with help from the mocap team at Audiomotion, generated the game’s brutal hand-to-hand combat moves. scenes—the parachute jump , the landing on the yacht, the boat chase across the harbor, the fight through the yacht club, and the final car chase—all in the space of 15 minutes. ” Artists used Autodesk’s Maya to create the majority of assets and scenes, relying on Pixologic’s ZBrush for high-poly props and environmental detail- ing. ZBrush’s power is on full display inside the yacht club, particularly with the distr essed walls and old buildings adorned with period details. “Without ZBrush, we could never have achieved the level of fidelity we required,” says Tompson. For the yacht, however, artists wanted more of a hard-surface feel: cold and pr ecise, to re- flect the villainous owner, Greco. Terefore, they employed subdivision sur face modeling for the high-resolution models and added lots of cube maps, giving the ship a high-gloss, high-end feel that echoes Quantum of Solace’s MI6 set. “Tis approach, however, had rami- fications on the lighting, making it difficult to balance it with the cube maps, and r equiring a lot of tw eaking of diffuse color, cube-map brightness, and lighting intensity and posi - tioning,” says Tompson. Te Athens scenes also r equired a sophisti- cated water shader that captur ed the feel and deep-blue palette of the A egean—the ev er- shifting shades of cobalt, tur quoise, and jade green. “In most games, they would just use a cube- and normal-map combination; w e ini- tially tried that but found it looked off, and the multitude of moored yachts and boats in the harbor didn’t look gr ounded,” says technical effects artist Nigel Middleman. “Rather, our central tech team had dev eloped a r eal-time reflection road shader for Blur, which we were able to adapt for real-time water reflection.” Because A thens and the other locales in - volve two types of gameplay—thir d-person 20 November 2010 combat and driving—they r equired two dif - ferent ar t sets to accommodate the v arying speeds at which the play er trav els. K eeping those switches in art seamless was a big techni- cal challenge. “In Athens, originally all of the five locations w ere part of a seamless whole, but it soon became apparent we couldn’t store or process the amount of geometry, shaders, and light maps required,” says Nightingale, “so we broke the environment into three separate loads hidden by cut-scenes.” Tis solved the majority of the pr oblems, but the group was still left with a lighting is - sue for the first area, where Bond lands on the super-yacht. I t’s thir d-person and, ther efore, required high-density light maps. Te ensuing chase in the speedboat takes place in the same scene, which is appr oximately two squar e miles, and memory constraints meant the ar t- ists couldn’t have high-density light maps. As a result, central tech devised a solution that al- lowed the art team to vary light-map densities on a per-poly basis. S o, in conjunction with a global setting for each envir onment, the team could increase the light-map detail on the yacht set to be strong enough for a third-person cam- era without adv ersely impacting the memor y budget. (See “Wake Effects” on CGW.com for details about the creation of the water and the ensuing wakes.) Worldly Sets In I stanbul, the most graphically complex scenes unfold in the B asilica Cistern, a complex of sixth centur y underground chambers sup - ported by a maze of columns. Featured promi- nently in From Russia with Love, artists had to make the cisterns a lot larger to squee ze more gameplay out of them. Using Maya, the team built a few column assets that could be placed around the set without looking too repetitive. ZBrush was then used to cr eate the intricate touches, such as the structure’s ornate, Byzan- tine details and visage of Medusa. “ZBrush en- abled us to get the fine details needed to show things like cracks and crumbling in the stone,” says senior artist Derek Chapman. Because the area was underground, the col- umns and the rooms had to have a damp feel. To achieve this, the gr oup used basic specular maps and cr eated two shaders specifically for the task: Te first was a flow shader, which simulated water flowing do wn the sides of the walls; the second was a caustic shader . Te rooms still had water in them, and the ar tists wanted the water to cast the ripples onto the walls and ceilings. Te final challenge proved to be the lighting of the cisterns: Tey were com- pletely underground, so the lighting ar tist had to provide enough illumination for the play er to see, but also retain enough shadow to suffuse the chamber with an ominous, murky feel. After Athens and I stanbul, the adv enture whisks Bond to the polar desert of Siberia. Its frigid ice-water lakes are the setting for a chase between a ho vercraft and an ekranoplan: a swift surface-skimming, ground effect vehicle. “It took a long time to get the scener y scroll- ing properly and with the sense of speed w e wanted. We were basically faking [the scenery] to work within the tight streaming restrictions of the lev el. Some assets, like icebergs crash - ing against the v ehicles, had to be sacrificed in order to maintain the speed of the lev el,” explains senior designer Matt Cavanaugh. For the hovercrafts and the ekranoplan, art- ists built shaders from scratch in Maya, painting textures for shrapnel damage, scratches, bullet holes, and scor ching details in ZB rush. Te team also used Maya, along with two in-house Maya-based tools—Actor Studio and D ebug Viewer—to perfect the gameplay in the Sibe- rian tundra. Developed for editing game data within lev els, A ctor S tudio allowed B izarre’s artists to set up all the gameplay elements with- in a lev el using a 3D vie w. Debug Viewer is a tweaking tool that exposes all the debugging elements in the game—including wir eframe mode, test code for ne w featur es, tools for overriding the sun dir ection, disabling the AI, and so forth—and lets the artists control them from a Windows application, whether running console or PC versions of the game. Bizarre wr estled with two difficult maps in Bangkok: one for the r ooftop scenes and another for a section titled B angkok Escape. “Te most challenging thing about Bangkok Escape was the sheer size of the map, and the complexity and visual richness of the assets that made it feel believ able,” says Cavanaugh.