Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/57248
Special Gaming Section would feel familiar to the player, and then they bring their own sensibilities to it to make it feel like it belongs in Gears of War. For the ships, they took a field trip to see the struc- tures in the real world. Then they took those inspirations and mapped them to the game's aesthetic to find a middle ground so that the object still feels familiar but is stylized appro- priately for the game. Another difficult environment was the charred setting near the end of the game. It's dreary and overbearing, with ash swirl- ing through the air and shafts of light cutting through destroyed buildings. "It was an artis- tic challenge to elicit the right mood of hope and despair," he adds. A large part of the team's research focused on new lighting technology, using real-world references, white papers on how lighting behaves, as well as how a person's eyes respond to light. They also drew on the group's own experiences with photography. "We used a lot of references from the real- world and compared that to our results inside the game, to be more representative of what happens in the real world. We did a lot of reference and source gathering to figure out how that all works so we could reproduce it faithfully inside the game technology," ex- plains Johnson. Of course, a game like Gears 3 contains physics simulations to make objects collide, handled through Nvidia's PhysX solver and created at the core of UE3. This technol- ogy was used to generate the character ragdoll dynamics. It also enabled the artists to add fracture effects to static meshes to simulate destructible environments. In addition, the game contains VFX simulations—collid- For the human characters' skin, the artists used subsurface scattering that was blended inside the node-based material system of the Unreal Engine 3, where the artists were able to manipulate the surfaces to achieve the desired results. The skin has custom falloff properties, making it look more realistic. ing particles, Maya fluid sims that are baked to animated textures to generate explosions. "We use a lot of technology—high-end film- style effects—that run well on the Xbox 360," Johnson says. For a broad surface of water, the team would use vertex shaders to create macro animations of the surface of an ocean that is program- mable and controllable on the art side. They would also do large-scale motion through the vertex shaders, but for high-frequency detail, they would use interacting normal maps in combination with real-time or pre-baked re- flections for realistic kinds of objects. They did not, however, do fluid simulation directly in Max or Maya, except for occasional water splashes—and that would be baked to an animated texture that they could then use for Seeing in Stereo Gears of War 3 includes a stereoscopic mode for 3DTVs, made possible through TriOviz for Games Technology, which enables smooth stereoscopic 3D conversion of video games and requires glasses with complex color filters and dedicated image processing that allow natural color perception. The technology was integrated into the Unreal Engine 3 in 2010; the SDK works with the Xbox 360, as well as the PS3 and PCs. All the gameplay and cinematics contain the stereo 3D support, as does the split-screen play. (The player can opt for non-stereo mode.) "Fortunately, we didn't have to do a lot of additional work other than make sure we had custom code to properly handle things like the user interface and other small things," says Wyeth Johnson, lead artist. "The system is very robust, and we could take advantage of it without too much development, so that let us focus on the core gameplay experience, while the underlying tech- nology was able to do its splitting and stereoscopic results without us having to go in and hand-create too many of those stereo experiences." 22 February/March 2012 splash effects within the particle system. "The visual effects in the game look better than anything we've ever done. We put a big emphasis on them this time around," Johnson says. "We have lots of post-process aspects to the effects that we didn't have in the past— like radial blurs on explosions, integrated camera shakes, lens flares, and effects—that all contributed to the feel, the visceral nature of our particle effects. We focused on high-res- olution, animated simulations for things like smoke and fluid simulations that we brought in as high-res, animated textures. And then we have vertex particle lighting in UE3 that we utilized heavily. When a particle system like an explosion happens in direct sunlight, it feels like it is illuminated by that lighting, and if it happens in shadow, it darkens down and does the right thing to make it feel more grounded. Our visual effects have taken a huge leap for- ward in Gears of War 3 for that reason." Gears of War 3 is the spectacular conclusion to one of the most memorable and celebrated video game sagas. The series began its journey on the Unreal Engine 3, one of the most pop- ular game engines licensed by outside develop- ers as well as those outside the gaming indus- try. Yet, when UE3 is utilized by developers within the same company who are intimately familiar with its technology and capabilities, the results take a quantum leap forward. As a result, this last iteration has taken the Gears saga well beyond the previous releases with its intensive gameplay, compelling story, and its fine graphics style, making it a fitting end to such a cutting-edge series. n Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of Computer Graphics W orld.