I’ve done a few investigations back then, and still have the following in notes…
The title… the Artists… the people who crafted… are ineffably magnificent…
At Eidos-Montreal, the art team is passionate about architecture and it shows in our
games. Deus: Ex: Mankind Divided features some of the richest environments ever built in a
video game. In this talk, you are invited to take a peek behind the curtain…
There are many processes in parallel here, and many possible points of failures…
There are more environments than Prague in Mankind Divided, but by far the most complicated environment is Prague. The density and the size of our virtual Prague makes it a significant technical challenge to achieve on today’s hardware. So, we’ll keep with that example along the way…
But if we are doing a large enough environment, we cannot simply save every single building as individual, custom meshes that have been generated with offline algorithm.
We need to figure something out…
Then we push this a bit further, like I said, it’s a bit like the references in max. It’s not quite like an instance. In our engine, Dawn, we can output any single parameters of pretty much any kind of resource to be modified at runtime, at any point in the game. We use this to modify each instance. So, we do keep the same set of data, then we simply modify one parameter to change something. Anything. The color of the diffuse, the actual texture diffuses inside a material, the way it reacts to light depending on if it’s wet or dry outside…
In the case of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, we have a significant number of parallel features, a lot of choice offered to the player, which the player can enact when he wants, and a mostly non-linear structure. We are stretched very thin on most resources and need to use some workarounds.
Other games may not have to do as many sacrifices to achieve the same visual quality as what we are achieving…
Source (Behind The Scene – Building The World of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided…)
The technologies and effort are so indescribably marvelous…
Just want to clarify that they’re not made on the same engine. Our game is made by the team that previously worked on Deus Ex and uses the Dawn Engine.
Mankind Divided runs on the Dawn Engine, a game engine designed for eighth-generation gaming hardware. It was built on Glacier 2, an in-house engine created by IO Interactive. The team had several choices of engine technology… The team introduced physics-based rendering (a new animation system) as part of the redesign, and the engine was optimized for the game’s narrative base… The characters’ hair, designed to appear as lifelike as possible, was animated with in-house technology based on TressFX…
…Julien Bouvrais, director of technology…
That graphics engine rewrite introduced the increasingly ubiquitous physically-based rendering, and debuted a fresh animation system that especially considers Deus Ex’s character needs, while more broadly the team were able to cater for more polygons.
But what of that optimisation in the favour of narratives? While engines certainly need to serve as a platform for games that tell stories, the idea of storytelling tools in a game engine brings technology and narrative a little closer to one another than is often seen.
“We put particular emphasis around adding a few tools and pipelines to cope with our demanding narrative needs, such as an improved conversation system, and better fidelity in our cut scenes,” Bouvrais offers.
The Dawn Engine, based on a heavily modified version of IO Interactive’s Glacier™ 2 engine, features new technology that allows for improved rendering capabilities, real-time physics, and advanced artificial intelligence programming, among other things.
Character artist Frederic Daoust gave us some details on his work with hard surface augemtations and organic parts and discussed his approach to designing mechanical details…
Most of the augmentations were different from each other with different mechanisms, so it was a new challenge with each model…
I’ve done a few investigations back then, and still have the following in notes… The title… the Artists… the people who crafted… are ineffably magnificent…
The technologies and effort are so indescribably marvelous…
Related:
- https://artstation.com/fredericdaoust23 (Frederic Daoust… Senior Character Artist at Imagendary…)
- https://quixel.com/megascans/home
- https://80.lv/articles/embracer-group-to-acquire-eidos-crystal-dynamics-square-enix-montreal
- https://youtu.be/1TiG0Adh-fM?t=507 (Embracer Group enters into an agreement to acquire Eidos, Crystal Dynamics, and Square Enix Montréal…)
…versus Gen AI: Too much spend, too little benefit?
No… sorry… never…
Some of personal screenshot backups of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided:
- https://imgur.com/a/rIG7W4Z