How InstaLOD super charged a AAA game studio's asset pipeline and brought one of their blockbuster titles to multiple platforms with zero headaches.
Since World of Tanks launched on consoles in 2014, Wargaming has added over 900 tanks to their popular game. Generating such an amount of content is no small feat and optimizing it to run on the 10+ year old hardware of the Xbox 360 is its own challenge. Although World of Tanks Console is its own product it is heavily influenced by the original PC title and therefore shares a large amount of content with the PC version. In addition, the developer has created additional content exclusive to the console versions. Therefore, the title's art content is a combination of assets from different versions of the game for multiple platforms.
Keeping their players happy with new content while maintaining the same player experience across multiple generations of hardware was going to be a challenge.
Enabling game developers to build richer entertainment experiences while achieving massive time and cost-savings.
¶ Before InstaLOD.
Achieved 600x in cost-savings
Another big issue for their artists was redoing UV layouts to fit all components on a single UV sheet. This step took days because artists had to figure out a UV layout that would produce satisfying results. Wargaming concluded that they needed a highly scalable solution that could solve these issues while maintaining a high level of visual fidelity. However, every automation solution the studio evaluated would fail to meet their high quality standards.
¶ Their search ended with InstaLOD.
Initially the developer assumed it would be a challenge to integrate InstaLOD this far into their game's development. However, due to the excellent training material the team was up and running within a week. Much of the heavy lifting was taken care of by InstaLOD's remeshing and optimization features.
¶ The power of automation.
After integrating InstaLOD deep into their pipeline to make full use of automation, the studio was able to cut the time spent to a mere 4 hours.
"InstaLOD allows us to spend more time on making the art look the best that it can and less time optimizing. It has become an important facet to our tank production pipeline." - TJ Wagner, Executive Producer Wargaming.net
First published: 11th Jan 2019