Sony London is a game developer based in Soho; the creative heart of the city. As an important part of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios, its teams are pioneering emerging technologies and pushing the boundaries of what is possible on PlayStation VR.
Blood & Truth is an explosive action thriller game developed exclusively for Play Station VR, where you can become an action hero set against the glamour and grit of modern day London. It is the highly anticipated spiritual successor to "The London Heist" segment of PlayStation® VR Worlds, developed by Sony London Studio.
Creating an ambitious realistic world that can run at 60 frames per second, in two eyes, with a wide field of view, at greater than HD resolutions is one of the key challenges that London Studio faced on the project. The varied and detailed environments required a huge leap in the number of assets that need to be developed for the project, so finding the right optimization solution was critical.
Enabling game developers to build richer entertainment experiences while achieving massive time and cost-savings.
¶ InstaLOD – a development partner.
InstaLOD impressed with its comprehensive feature set and speed. The well designed Autodesk Maya integration and command line tools meant that initial tests of InstaLOD were easy to produce. Despite using an early access release initially, London Studio was impressed with the robust toolset and how InstaLOD quickly resolved any issues and took on board feedback.
¶ Performance at all times
For a VR title, performance is critical at all stages of the project. The ease of integrating InstaLOD into their Autodesk Maya pipeline meant that Sony London Studio could quickly get a one-click process to produce a series of LODs for any given asset, and easily distribute the tools to their outsource partners, meaning that optimal assets could be produced at any point, easily. InstaLOD's speed meant that LODs could be generated in a number of seconds without having to maintain a distributed build system, which greatly helped with iteration times, and meant that performance could be maintained throughout. Objects needed to have a flexible enough level of detail that they can stand up to the player being able to inspect them close up, but also work to populate richly detailed and populated areas with low cost versions at distance.
This meant that it was vital to switch between polygon topologies and shader complexity depending on distance, which worked perfectly with the remeshing and texture baking functionality provided by InstaLOD.
¶ Scalable and Flexible
Meshes could be collapsed from a number of materials down to one, and could bake down complex blended materials into simple textures and vertex colors. The high quality of the generated meshes also meant that the poly count could be reduced more quickly - vital for any game where high frame rates are critical. Skinned and animated meshes also benefitted from InstaLOD's ability to preserve deformations, which made it possible to adjust skinning on NPCs and let InstaLOD worry about regenerating the new LODs. This helped to maintain the silhouette of enemies at a distance with much lower cost meshes, whilst still allowing high amounts of clothing accessories and detail for close combat.
"Producing LODs for all the assets in the game manually would take many months on a job that no-one wants to do. InstaLOD removed this cost and effort, and made it possible to validate the team's performance budgets throughout." - James Answer, Lead Technical Artist Sony London Studio
First published: 9th Mar 2019