LUMBERYARD

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Contracted engineering and technical art support work assisting with the development of ‘Lost’, the Amazon Lumberyard Advanced Rendering tech demo.

KEY OBJECTIVES

• Initial investigation into lighting capabilities of Lumberyard.
• Initial investigation into alembic animation support in Lumberyard.
• Best practices for terrain generation.
• Initial investigation into rigid body skeletal animation.
• Best practices for exporting assets and animation from 3ds Max into Lumberyard.
• Providing the forest scene for proof of concept for RealTimeUK.

Programming:

This was an engineering and technical art support project and the role d3t played differed from our usual remit.

Initially, d3t led an investigation into the lighting and alembic animation support within Lumberyard. We also investigated the best practices for terrain generation, asset exporting and skeletal animation. This phase was concluded with a proof of concept forest scene that Matt Green, d3t Head of Art, produced.

When we received the project files from RealtimeUK, we were tasked with producing a set of build scripts that can be used to create a standalone release package and speed up the packaging step.

As the project progressed, we were then asked to identify performance issues/errors to deliver a smoother running demo. This meant a significant amount of profiling and debugging.

SUCCESS ASSESSMENT

The initial art tests proved the capabilities of Lumberyard for producing a real-time demo that could meet the visual expectations of RealtimeUK.

A limited time frame meant looking for accessible solutions to the most significant problems. We identified  some key challenges and formulated a strategy to overcome them; we continued to work right up to the deadline and our contributions made it into the final demo.

The final demo was ready for GDC 2017 and released on schedule with the other demos. d3t provided an on-call engineering support service during show hours in case there were any technical issues, but no interventions were required.

VIEW THE LUMBERYARD GDC 2017 DEMO