InstaLOD streamlined the production of Rainbow Studio's MX vs ATV All Out by introducing painless LOD creation.
MX vs ATV All Out is the latest edition to the off-road racing franchise created by Rainbow Studios.
From its onset, the team at Rainbow Studio knew they had a problem. Given the number and complexity of their in-game assets, which needed to be pre-approved by OEM manufacturers, the studio had a tight deadline with little room for deviation. With a small art team tasked with applying quality LOD on a massive amount of assets with swappable parts, the challenge was daunting.
The developers needed to optimize the visuals of the game in an automated manner. They looked for a fast and nondestructive solution that could enable their art team to spend less time on manual processes, and more time on generating creative value.
Enabling game developers to build richer entertainment experiences while achieving massive time and cost-savings.
¶ Unreal Setbacks
When development began in early 2016, the process of creating LOD models for the title was a rampant consumption of resources and time – every edition to the franchise would face the same problem. The developers needed to create optimized versions of the geometry for static assets as well as their characters. Human error is one of the hardest hurdles to overcome in production. Having an automated solution to mitigate this process such as InstaLOD helped Rainbow Studios considerably. To meet their deadline, they needed InstaLOD to scope out manual input from their workflows.
¶ Unrivaled Flexibility
Importing each individual LOD into the game engine happened within seconds. All this allowed for more creativity on LOD meshes and game performance adjustments on the fly. Needless to say, the in-house and outsourced artists no longer had to do LOD for skeletal meshes and this alone saved hundreds of man-hours on production costs. On top of this, ensuring proper skinning for each LOD of their skeletal meshes became a thing of the past with InstaLOD.
InstaLOD for Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max provided the developers with additional flexibility and cost-savings. With these integrations, the team was able to quickly generate low poly versions of high poly assets and CAD models with little-to-no cleanup and optimization. This included the ability to automatically create UV’s and bake supporting maps to quickly texturize. In conclusion, InstaLOD helped the team save hours of production time and cost by making tasks more streamlined and error proof.
For future productions, the team is already committed to taking better advantage of InstaLOD's cost-saving opportunities by deeply embedding it in their asset pipeline and heavily relying on the DCC integrations as well as the standalone solution InstaLOD Studio XL.
"In conclusion, InstaLOD helped us quickly move through our production process by making tasks more streamlined and error proof. It also saved us hours of production time by giving the artists more time to spend on creative iteration while still being flexible for a small team with a tight production schedule." - Reinhard Police, Executive Producer THQ Nordic
First published: 14th Feb 2019