How InstaLOD helped Polyphony Digital race ahead with their production pipeline for GRAN TURISMO®7
Polyphony Digital is the acclaimed video game developer behind the GRAN TURISMO® franchise. Since their inception as a subsidiary of Sony Interactive Entertainment, the studio has sold more than 80 million copies of their video games worldwide, making them one of the most successful companies in the industry.
Gran Turismo 7 is the latest release in the iconic series. The flagship motorsport title for the Sony PlayStation® 5 boasts thrilling racing action and close to photorealistic graphics, striking a perfect balance between performance and visual fidelity. And that's where InstaLOD proved to be an invaluable help.
Enabling game developers to build richer entertainment experiences while achieving massive time and cost-savings.
¶ The Challenge Of The Car Interior
In their development process, the studio converts vehicle interior geometry from subdivision surface models to regular 3D meshes for use in their rendering engine. However, while a beautiful topology, this conversion resulted in densely tessellated meshes with far too many polygons.
Lighting was another challenge as rendering day and night cycles as well as dynamic weather effects drastically altered the illumination of a race. Whether at dusk or dawn, through fog or rain, light always had to reflect beautifully from the interior surfaces. So the team needed to both reduce polygon counts significantly and pay close attention to accurate light reflections.
¶ A Unified Optimization Process
It turned out that InstaLOD's polygon optimization was everything the developer needed. Polyphony Digital immediately understood the potential of InstaLOD to significantly reduce their production time by scaling automated processes over thousands of assets. Next, the pack-leading studio committed to integrate InstaLOD's powerful technology into their in-house asset pipeline.
The InstaLOD C++ SDK provided everything for a quick and painless integration, such as features to support the input and output stream of geometry attributes the studio required for their proprietary data formats.
The resulting pipeline automatically unified all optimization parameters to achieve a beautiful result at minimal data size with optional features for artist intervention such as modifying the target number of triangles.
With its stellar performance, incredible quality, and full automation, the integration of InstaLOD streamlined Polyphony Digital's pipeline and proved to be a game changer for efficient automotive asset production.
First published: 3rd Aug 2022