Integrating InstaLOD into Limbic Entertainment's Memories of Mars art asset pipeline.
Right from the beginning we knew we wanted Memories of Mars (MOM) to be an open world survival game without any in-game loading times which would break the immersion. Surviving on Mars should be a continuous experience. However the already high amount of assets needed to dress a believable open world was increased even further by players' possibility to add their own creations. Ultimately, high quality Level of Detail models (LODs) for assets as well as level proxy meshes (Level LODs) became a crucial requirement for us.
With a relatively small development team and even smaller art team, investing time into polishing, let alone creating LODs was simply not possible. There was a need for a reliable and preferably fast solution and InstaLOD proved to be the right option.
I was quite amazed by the little time needed to reduce a rather high-poly asset and the clean result you get. Quite often the differences between the first few LODs are hardly visible.
Enabling pioneers in CG and motion pictures to push the envelope of the digital sales experience while saving countless hours of work, time and money.
¶ Empowering the team.
As a plus it empowers everyone on the team to create or update a level LOD themselves. This way our level designers can keep changing the structure of a level and generate the LOD directly afterwards without additional support from the art team.
¶ Throughout the production pipeline.
We started to use the powerful polygon optimization for other areas of the asset pipeline as well. During the production of MOM we worked with several outsourcing partners from across the world. InstaLOD allowed us to be less restrictive in terms of polygon count requirements in the briefings and instead, let our outsourcing partners focus on the artistic side of asset creation.
The same was true for in-house asset production. InstaLOD made it easy for us to merge several textures into one.
This way we could create new assets out of already pre-existing assets or fully textured asset-kits without ending up with multiple material draw calls per newly created objects.
In the end, using InstaLOD proved to be the right decision for us. It became a central tool in our Art pipeline and will be in future game productions for sure.
¶ About Limbic Entertainment
Limbic Entertainment develops and sells game software on both a national and an international level.
Since Limbic's foundation in 2002 we have released over 60 product versions which have been published in more than a dozen countries.
¶ Contact
Mariusz Adam Zelmanski
Art director
First published: 6th Aug 2018