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Crytek created visual highlights for the Xbox One exclusive title “Ryse: Son of Rome” using the new Cryengine without a version number. by Mirja Fürst
Bloody gladiator battles with realistic brutality: severed body parts, shattered heads and severed necks are the order of the day in the ancient Rome setting of “Ryse: Son of Rome”. As a result, the title centred around the main character Marius Titus was given a USK 18 rating.
Visually, “Ryse: Son of Rome” is characterised by rich colours, great lighting, high-resolution textures and interesting shaders made possible by the new Cryengine. The entire game was realised with Performance Capture. According to Crytek, the face animation of the characters in particular was better than ever before, with the faces of the game actors distorting very realistically during combat. The performance capture filming took place at “The Imaginarium”(www.theimaginariumstudios.com) in London. Crytek only does pre-vis shoots and the like in its own studio in Frankfurt.
like all titles for the Xbox One, “Ryse” has Smartglass integration. This means that the game can be expanded using a Windows 8 tablet, on which additional tips and achievement
Hints are displayed. According to “Chief of Staff for Devices and Studios Group at Microsoft” Aaron Greenberg, Crytek has created the title in a resolution of 1,600 x 900 pixels and scaled it for HD display (1,920 x 1,080) on the Xbox One. Although this reduces the visual quality somewhat, the developers accepted this in favour of more computing time for better effects.
The game was in development for around two years, with around 200 developers working on it at its peak. Due to the enormous size of the project, Crytek changed a lot in the workflow: For the first time, characters and destructions were given to vendors, Crytek also expanded its hardware and set up a new cache-based pipeline, the Geomcache Pipeline. With the pipeline cache export, Crytek saved models and animations from 3D software packages as Alembic files. As Alembic supports the geometry of models including polygon meshes, subdivision surfaces, parametric curves, nurbs patches and particles as well as materials and lights, the 3D work could be fed directly into the engine without major losses.
In addition, Alembic made it possible for team units working on the same shot to exchange geometries. This huge time saving allowed the team to focus on the creative work instead of wasting time bringing models into the engine. In order to achieve a more realistic impression of the characters than ever before, the main character Marius, for example, consisted of more than 770 joints, including over 500 deforming joints and 260 facial joints. There were also 230 Corrective Facial Blendshapes and eight Skin Influences. Before his career in games, Technical Art Director Chris Evans was involved in the film industry on projects such as “Avatar” and “Transformers II”. For “Ryse: Son of Rome”, he helped build the new pipeline, among other things. He told us more about the development process, the new pipeline and the use of Alembic at Crytek.
We spoke to Technical Art Director Chris Evans for DP issue 02 : 2014 about the Crytek pipeline, for which the Alembic interchange format was a great support.
DP: Why did you do your performance capture filming in The Imaginarium?
Chris Evans: It was very important for us to find people in Europe to work with us on the performance capture. Until now, we always had to go to the USA for performance capture filming. European studios particularly like to outsource facial work there. We were the first game project at Imaginarium and shot our first test scenes the day after they had set up their studio.
DP: What tools do you use for what?
Chris Evans: For environments we use 3ds Max, for characters and their animation we use Maya. In some cases we use MotionBuilder to reduce a huge number of keyframes, for example for large performance capture data.
DP: How did you animate the facial expressions of the characters?
Chris Evans: We used a facial scan process for this. We made about 200 scans of one actor, which took about five hours. The faces were marked with special lines so that we could track the facial expressions. But we didn’t use any textures or transfer the actor’s entire face to the characters. The performance capture data was used for rigging the models and
as a reference for the artists.
DP: How did the character pipeline work with the vendors?
Chris Evans: The outsource companies for the character pipeline were Cubic Motion (www.cubicmotion.com) and 3Lateral(www.3lateral.com). 3Lateral worked with us for four months on a facial rig that we used for all the characters and customised for the different faces. We then sent all the headcam data from the performance capture shoot to Cubic, who converted it into a facial animation using one of their developments. Cubic integrated these results into the scenes and sent them back to us. The collaboration on this project was excellent with the outsource companies, normally you always have to be very careful that you get the quality you want from vendors. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case at all with “Ryse”.
DP: So one actor played all the characters in Ryse?
Chris Evans: It’s impossible to find one actor for everything. In cinematics and cutscenes, everything can be played by one actor. But in stunt and fight scenes, the body shots of a stuntman are filmed separately with the facial capture of an actor and then combined afterwards.
DP: How many joints did a character consist of?
Chris Evans: The number of joints doesn’t change in the game, but the level of detail of a character changes – as the character moves further away, the polgon count decreases.
DP: How many polygons did your 3D models have on average?
Chris Evans: The characters had around 80,000 polygons. You can’t say the exact number for the environment, it depended on what was happening in the scene.
DP: Were there outsourcing companies for other areas?
Chris Evans: Yes, for example for the environment. But this outsourcing pipeline has been around for a long time, since the first Crysis game in 2005, so it was just a new version of that.
DP: Was Alembic one of the reasons why large scenes and destructions could be released to vendors?
Chris Evans: Large scenes where elements are destroyed – when castles collapse, for example – we couldn’t release them before Alembic if we wanted them in film quality. Film studios don’t want to work with a game engine because it’s such a complex process to get the models with the destructions from 3D software into the engine.
DP: Which company did you commission to do this for “Ryse”?
Chris Evans: Through Alembic we were able to work with Important Looking Pirates (ILP) who did two huge VFX scenes for us. They created everything in a normal film pipeline, exported Alembic cache, pressed a button and the scene was automatically loaded into the engine with all the presets. This was also very liberating for ILP, because previously they often had to turn down game work because the process,
the finished scenes into the engine was too time-consuming.
DP: What path did the pipeline take before the Alembic solution?
Chris Evans: Before that, it was a very lengthy process. For example, we modelled a falling rock in Maya, then a script went through every vertex and frame of the rock to
frame of the rock to see exactly how the rocks move. The team then created joints with the same animations, where you have to think of the rocks as characters that fall like a character and need to be animated. It was always hard to have to tell a VFX studio that it takes longer to get their beautiful animation that they created in Maya into the engine than it did to work on it. The only way you can move a mesh in an engine is with joints. Now it’s possible with the click of a button.
DP: How long would the development have taken without Alembic?
Chris Evans: There’s no way we could have delivered as many scenes in this production timeframe without the new pipeline. It also wouldn’t have looked as good as it does now. Before we had to fake a lot of things like wind movements etc., now everything looks more realistic.
DP: What format was Alembic converted to in the engine?
Chris Evans: A file format developed by Crytek called Geomcache. Before it is loaded into the engine, a small dialogue appears because the Alembic format is not yet fully integrated into Maya, so the loader still asks a few questions – for example about compression and some options. After loading, it is automatically converted into the Geomcache format. The engine also does not recognise
does not recognise whether the Alembic format comes from Maya or 3ds Max – it therefore does not matter which tool it is exported from.
DP: What characterises the Geomcache format?
Chris Evans: Thanks to its compression, the Geomcache file is much smaller than Alembic, but the quality is still retained. This means that the game can be buffered faster in the Xbox One’s current memory. Our programmer Axel Gneiting has written an
Algorithm that automatically optimises the file size in the engine. Alembic was originally developed for the film industry. However, a game has to fit on a small Xbox One disc, and the working memory is much more limited than in a film production. So we had to make a lot of adjustments in the pipeline so that the game could run in such high quality on the Xbox One, whose hardware performance is much more restrictive compared to the Playstation 4.
DP: Is that one of the reasons why you opted for a lower resolution than HD during development?
Chris Evans: We did a lot of testing in terms of resolution versus interactivity in relation to the average consumer’s screen to see what was the best ratio for gameplay. And for the pixel count of an average home device and the normal distance a player has from the screen, this resolution is perfectly adequate. The advantage of the lower resolution is that the game runs more smoothly. After playing the game, people were convinced by the chosen resolution.
DP: Was it your first Xbox One title?
Chris Evans: Yes , and we had a tight production window and had to create a huge number of characters. With all these factors in mind, including the hardware limitations, the Crytek team did a sensational job and created a game with a fantastic look and everything looks consistent. For upcoming Crytek titles, we want to build on the pipeline we created for Ryse, making the development process more relaxed and adding more elements to the game world. With our experience from “Ryse”, future Xbox One titles from us will also be much better.
All further information about Crytek here.
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