Bluepoint Games has built a reputation for creating some of the best remastered games. With critically acclaimed titles such as Shadow of the Colossus the studio is a household name in the industry. Read up on how InstaLOD is helping the studio to create more assets while achieving massive cost-savings.
Today's games demand a larger number of assets to help add to an increased level of detail. In order to face the challenge the studio needed to find a solution that helps them to fundamentally change their workflows to lower cost while creating more assets than ever before. With the help of InstaLOD, Bluepoint is able to create a large number of assets much more efficiently.
In order to help increase productivity, as well as consistency, Bluepoint developed a library of smaller pre-modeled parts for assembling larger assets. These fully modeled building blocks are "jammed" together to quickly create new assets which still need to be tuned for game-side efficiency. This workflow is time-consuming as each new asset requires hours of cleaning. The studio started looking for a solution that could solve this pain-point and put their production process into overdrive.
Enabling game developers to build richer entertainment experiences while achieving massive time and cost-savings.
Shortly after integrating InstaLOD into their production process, the studio started to rely on the technology for many parts of their asset creation process. InstaLOD's remeshing and occlusion culling features are now used to automatically convert raw kit-bashed assets into realtime-ready assets saving hours of manual labor in the process. This workflow enables the developer to produce more assets at heavily reduced time and cost per game asset.
Bluepoint has automated the creation of LODs in their own 3D engine pipeline by integrating the InstaLOD C++ SDK. The inline nature of their pipeline allows the artists to simply export their highest level model and an automated system will generate the necessary assets on a set of servers. Not only did Bluepoint integrate InstaLOD's optimization features into this process, but they also allow for a pass of per polygon Occlusion Culling as well.
The image above shows Bluepoint's integration of InstaLOD into their in-house 3D engine technology.
In order to reduce the number of draw calls per scene, Bluepoint has developed an automated method for combining multiple assets into one. The automated LOD system picks up these new "combo" models and leverages InstaLOD to produce a highly optimized asset. This provides artists with another method of kit-bashing larger models into different configurations, which helps to further improve efficiency and productivity.
Chris Voellmann
Technical Art Director Bluepoint Games
First published: 7th Mar 2019