How InstaLOD helped Soleil automate the LOD generation process and build a massive world under intense deadlines.
VALKYRIE ELYSIUM is a fast-paced action RPG developed by Soleil Ltd. and the latest installment in the hit series from Square Enix. Stepping into the role of the Valkyrie, the story takes the players across the human world to stop the looming End Times. The team put in an enormous effort to create a vast world, drawing inspiration from Medieval Europe and Norse Mythology to populate it with different cultures and countries.
However, only very limited time was available for the game's development. Soleil needed to create hundreds of environment assets and characters that maintained the high-quality design Square Enix is known for. Right from the start of the project, the developers began mass producing models, only considering their optimization and the generation of LODs at a later stage. To meet their deadlines, they would later need to automate the LOD generation process on a large scale. And that's when they turned to InstaLOD.
Enabling game developers to build richer entertainment experiences while achieving massive time and cost-savings.
¶ Simple Presets for Static Assets
After the initial production phase, the studio was left with a staggering amount of environment assets. A manual reduction process was out of question, so the team set up presets in Unreal Engine's LOD Group system, that were then processed by InstaLOD. What helped Soleil was the fact that most static assets in the game shared certain characteristics. Assets were quite similar, oftentimes even modular and their apparent size on screen was somewhat constant. They were mostly abandoned city assets after all.
Ultimately, the team managed to batch process most static assets according to just three basic presets that reduced the asset to a certain triangle percentage based on the amount of screen space used.
¶ In Search of the Right Balance
VALKYRIE ELYSIUM also features about a dozen major characters and more than 70 enemy and NPC types. It was vital that each main character rendered flawlessly when close to the camera, especially the heroine. Balancing the processing load and preserving the look and feel of the character was initially quite a challenge.
The automation of the LOD creation process with InstaLOD opened up new possibilities. Due to the sheer processing speed, the team could simply trial and error which optimization approach would work best. Soleil settled on processing distant enemy LODs more aggressively to keep visual fidelity of the main characters and attain great performance levels.
In the end, Soleil was able to fully take advantage of features provided by the InstaLOD SDK. With an excellent level of support, the team was able to entirely automate of the LOD generation process and achieve a great quality result without human intervention.
First published: 1st Aug 2023