Sony Entertainment day

Hey all

just got back from Autodesk and Sony Entertainments presentation of the making of Heavenly Sword.

It was a great day just sitting and chilling watching the demos of the new Max 2009 and a level tools plugin for maya which is available from the Autodesk/Area site.

Watching the new Spline UV tools in max was amazing, the uv'ed a set of steps in an awkward shape in no time and the options to stop stretching etc was just incredible and a real time saver. I do hope they integrate this into Maya at some point I think alot of us will find use for it.

Now the Level tools for Maya were pretty damn cool making the most tedious tasks enjoyable and fun to do. The sample shown were rock placements. Basically you select your faces where you want to distribute your Rock object, in this case a hillside, then hit the command on the Level tools interface and basically the rock gets distributed onto the faces and the option to contrain them to the surface is also available so they fit flush to the adjoining surface. it was also used in a similar way for plants and also fencing that was contrained to a curve. Also stuff like object placement was quite cool. by selecting some verts on a corner of a bridge platform object then selecting the bridge support verts the platform could then be snapped exactly to the right position without any farting about adjusting the centre pivots and all that.

Also the there were new features in motion builder for rigging the characters with full human IK was pretty amazing too especially when the IK on arms are at the limit the body follows automatically. For example if you were stretching to reach up high for something and your arm reach stops but then you automatically step up to get higher on your toes, this does that and was cool to watch.

Autodesk have done a damn good job on the whole with getting the integration between Maya, Max, Motion Builder and even Mudbox going really well so all the packages can talk to each other better, basically as one of the guys said doing the demo not one package is better than the other, they just do different stuff, so by making them talk to each other better makes for a better workflow, and he was right, I actually wanted a copy of max after coming out of there. The Direct X shaders were bloody amazing for the realtime stuff and they were straight out of the box!

Also the main event was a presentation by Ninja Theory for their work on Heavenly Sword for the PS3. Some nice insight to game development, and after having trouble getting into the games industry I feel there is still hope for me. The poly counts were pretty average for some of the more detailed environments, and as ever the normal map was present as was the ambient occlusion pass baked in for the extra sexy shadowing. The characters were a joy to see especially with the mocap attributed to them to bring them to life. It may not be the best game on the market but its one of the most beautiful, and the concept are was really amazing.

Autodesk have aquired another company called Kinaps or something along those lines (dont quote me on it though) but anyway its now part ofthe company and its basically software for articial intelligence for background characters in games. they now have character collision detection built in for crowd scenes so they can also bump into or avoid each other. Plus a demo was shown with a game character or player, for an army game being protected by the AI characters every time you moved around there guns would cover things like windows or doorways where an enemy could be lurking to shoot you but the AI characters would have you covered and protect you. Clever stuff!!

anyways I cant remember all of it but keep an eye out for the shows I think they stiil have a few left to do in other countries

cheers
Jay

/thread [highjack] /thread

Ice Ice baby

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