Building Beauclair in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Blood and Wine

[Music] okay hi uh for uh please uh turn the silent mode on on your phones please okay and after the talk please feel the uh feedback forums wherever I hope it's going to get positive okay um hi um I'm super happy for being here I'm even more happy seeing someone here and even extremely happy to see so much you know Talent here um thank you for doing that because this is my first time GDC ever and of course first time doing speech here so um the stress level is high but excitement I think is even higher so thank you so much for doing this and thank you for being here with me um my name is Casper and I do environment art at T project red and probably some of you are thinking right now that dude just missos his Studio name right there but I did not oh sorry I did not uh that's how you pronounced and spell project project in Polish and

I'm just saying that because we have tons and tons of questions about that that's not you know it's not an issue it's like it's polish company name so that's why it's said the project red of course you can call it C the project red also but um it's GDC right so we are here to sh knowledge so right now just learn you how to speak Polish right you know one of the hardest language in the world but the ultimate test for you guys is if someone's going to pronounce my last name correctly I will buy you a beer so seriously keep that in mind okay um okay um so without further Ado we're going to talk about how we managed to build mclair but before we going to start I will ask you a few few questions first of all who played uh the witch wild Hunt okay nice thank you guys who played hearts of stone okay I'm blown wine okay that's actually good that uh not every single want play the game so

um to give you kind of the background about the things we're going to talk today uh I would just you know play the teaser for you [Music] guys toan the land of love and wine exactly how I remembered [Music] it [Music] so whoever played the game just do it the game itself for us was a huge challenge uh the things I'm going to talk today about um was a team work effort so I just going to say that I'm super proud of being the part of the

best team in the world both in kco and waro I love you guys and hope to see you soon but you know clap the hands for those really cool guys um back in our office thank you so much thank you okay so um it was a huge challenge for us because as you know blood and wine is an expansion pack but content Wise It's Triple A game so we had like a very short time for doing this but lots and lots of things to do content wise and also uh it has a new setting so for those of you who haven't played the game the Bas the Bas game wild Hunt um wild Hunt is kind of a game that is not the place you would like to go for vacation I can guarantee you that and even I because was afraid of doing that sometimes uh so it was kind of dark gamish dangerous gory um and art had to support this uh feeling of kind of dangerous right

but on the other hand as you saw in the teaser uh to S is very vibrant very colorful we use very saturated colors just to give the feel of um happiness because it's actually a land of Happiness people are drunk there all the time drinking wine that's why they happy um I would go there so this is the place for you guys to go to visit for a vacation it was inspired of course we we we got the basic idea from the books but we got inspired by France and Italy um you know they like lot lots of wineries there super sunny days it's awesome but on the other hand it is The Witcher game so we had to create this second bottom this kind of darkish bottom because again Witcher geralt uh is Monster Slayer so he has to do somewhere there right so um it was a challenge for us also we had to create another city which was different than novr from um from the base game and uh we had some kind of art goals for us and those art goes for

instance where we again we have to go with different things that we did in novr with different architecture different color different you know overall feel and also we we're trying to um make some improvements like put more content there put more crowds in the streets and make the city feel even more alive that it was done in novigrad but you know content more content packed content we're doing games right and we got our Tech goals also unfortunately so um we have to figure out how we can those two goals that the te goals on one side and the artart uh art goals on the other side how we can find like a balance between those and figure out what we can do because those goals they kind of didn't didn't like each other they were going each separate way and didn't want to cross somewhere so uh this talk basically is how we managed to marry our art goals with tech goals around having around 700 megab

for usage so I will cover uh how we design the city uh what was our artistic vision for it what kind of challenges we had and how we solved those um what kind of performance goals uh we had because we were trying to put the game on every available Hardware that time uh and we also did few improvements to our pipeline at the end I hope I'm pretty sure you're going to have some uh time to answer your questions but we got a lot of things to cover so without further Ado guys um let's go as probably know uh because you should know that every single project should start with pre-production and planning and it's safer like that basically uh so our city because I would talk M monly of about the city itself uh the basic idea was taken from the books and having the experience from wild Hunt we knew how extremely important is to create very uh friendly for the player navigation uh within the uh Urban

environments because he has to have fun there not be frustrated because he don't know he doesn't know where he's at uh so we knew that that is something we need to figure and this is our key goal at this point so we started with things that are in the books and in the books we have of course the city itself which also worked uh as the um as the navigation point for the city itself from different uh districts uh we took the Gorgon Mountain which is the biggest mountain uh in nov sorry not nov to H it serves the purpose of uh Landmark with for the whole world but also for the city itself because it's very very tall so player can uh navigate seeing the gargon mountain and Palace which was um is kind of above the city which helps us also to create this another uh navigation point for the player to keep an eye on going to this kind of North part part of the town so having those

three fillers uh pillars kind of we start building the the first layout we also knew that the town is on a slope um so we figure out how we're going to have it uh set up at the first draft this is our first draft for the uh layout uh we divided in into four four districts the reason for that was to make the structure more logically and easy to not to kind of and support and also uh it was easier for us to delegate the work for different artists throughout the different districts and here you got the same layout with those things that were uh for us at that point very important uh we had those those green part green parts are the locations that the story team and qu provide us like the number one it's Market score number two in cemeter Temple uh number four those are tables in number three and five those are some

kind of parks at that point in the town and number six is by the lake really cool place you can hang out with your wine in Blair uh we also have the streets or the paths that player could take at that point and those yellow dots those were the gates so we started to you know test the layout the blockout and and uh this is how it looked at that point we of course used gray meshes we also had some kind of more high quality meshes at that point because some artists were doing that but we did everything we could to support that Landmark uh navigation part in the in here you can see the gargo mountain in the back uh here we by the lake and we still can see the gargo mountain but also uh you can see the palace over there so going that you know you're going to the north part of the town or to the Palace one of the most important locations in our game

different location different spot in the town still Palace is Super Spot super easy spot uh for the player so he got he's got this different um you know signs basically where he want to go and which way he should uh go the other thing that helped us a lot was the thing that the town itself was on a slope so basically the player could learn very easily and very fast that the higher he goes the more Rich part of the towns he's going going to explore and and this in our case the elen palace uh is is got different architecture type because it's elen Palace right so um the the higher the player goes the different uh districts he will explore and the the the elephant p on the top kind of lower we got the rich part of the Town even lower we got the poor part of the town and on the bottom of the slope we got the harbor and also those different districts had different architecture type so also it supported the different feel and you uness to the uh to every

District so we had it done basically we're you know we're happy about that we have it probably thinking about okay it's done but was it how do you think not really we had some spots very hard for the player to figure out where he's at because it was hard for him to see um the landmarks uh also at that point we were trying to figure out how we can create uh very long distances for the very long views basically we're kind of thinking that that do might be kind of you know um expensive but still we were figur okay let's do it why not and here is the uh example of That You Don't See gargon Mountain the the small Mountain over there it's not garon and you don't see the palace so just a tree is kind of not enough for the player to figure out where he's at so we have spots like that and also like here very long Street which I can imtion that that would look awesome in a

game but still it might get expensive and if you're going to see on the left we're going to have the parts of Market Square there which also we we knew at that point that going to get very dense with crowds and different uh decorations so we found those spots and we figured okay that might be actually too risky to to live it like that we need to do something with it so we grabbed our shovels and start to play with the Lo blockout again uh with gray boxing bed but also what we did we introduced in City landmarks itself we use the palace again but still we use it even more we want to play it to be actually uh kind of you know seeing the palace all the time also we uh we went with City Hall at the beginning we knew we going to have City Hall in our town but still we make it kind of bigger taller so it's actually going to serve as a landmark and we got Temple uh in the um South part of the town which also serves the purpose of getting the player to the

different cemetry parts of the booker uh this is the concept art by the way we have again great Co cooporation concept artist in our company um so this uh on the left is like the first iteration of this Temple the one on the right is the more in-game finish model but then again it really worked I know it looks like a rocket right now uh but still it worked uh we knew that even from the distance the player can see something that that will grab him and tell him go there if you want to go to the South Port or the cemeter part and this is the same location as saw before but with the temple in a back you can see the rocket to top tip of it in a back again next Lake Palace gar mountain and the temple so here is like a junction you know when you want to go because you see all those landmarks

so the palace we again we at the beginning we use it as a landmark but here we kind of even more uh we kind of even more use it uh for the purpose of doing that we bent even the streets in the town just to make it push the player towards the palace because it was super important for us to to to to be able to go there very easily next was the City Hall which it was in the center of Blair here and that Landmark grab the player and tell him how to get to the center of the Blair or to the main square and here you can see going from the main gate you are going straight to the mine Square through the town Town Hall City Hall Town Hall different location different spot in the town still we can see the tip of the building there that can guide you to the Market

Square so yeah so we had again the another PA of iteration things to to cover to fix basically and but then we got you know information about how things going to get restricted by technical goals uh and yes we actually got you know accepted that the long views within the city might get too expensive so we need to figure something out with those really long views uh and long streets so again we grabbed our shovels I went back to block outting the things and here is our famous Long Street but at the end you can see we put some arches there to create this visual blocker for the player to to to break down the long line of sight and on the left we also use this kind of eye catch distractions so the player probably going to miss some things that will stream or pop or the load is going to switch so basically just want to figure

out how we can make cool things with shorter shorter um line of sides and we did a lot like even here it's not like 100% blocker but enough for you to catch your distraction distract your eye to figure out what's in front of you not trying to pay attention what's behind you and the reason for that was that we just want try to uh hide the poppings swapping smashes and you know streaming meses into the memory that was the whole thing and a really cool example here was the main square and the main Square was actually the most uh demanding location throughout the whole game and why this is the top down view of the main square and is right now the m is in a state with wine festival going on within the story of the game and the wine festival itself it's packed with decoration location we've got tents there filled with tables with food you got many NPCs

there uh two stages people are having fun it's really cool nice to play to place to go there basically to have some fun but we also had 1 2 3 4 five six we had this and seven houses and those houses were with Interiors later on I will explain you why that is crucial information for us at this point but still we got seven houses with Interiors full decoration interiors and the uh green spot basically it's uh City hole I'm sorry clo Hole uh this is actually the solution we used for for this yellow area here which was super super demanding and clo hole is this visual blocker that we create to cut off uh the main Square from the other part of the town just to make it possible for the engine stream all those different things into the memory because it's a lot of things and it actually worked because we figured we end ended up with

really cool location really cool place but still you cannot see anything one before uh going to the m main Square so the engine get the time to stream all those things into the memory and once you're going to go around the small wall you're in the Market Square which is you know ready to go ready to play and we did this a lot this is again our famous street long one uh as you can see we kind of pushed a little bit further that kind of visual blocker the visual wall but still we have those uh distractions on the left so it's hard to figure out if the things are changing and popping in front of you of course we had to put restaurant there because why not and behind the restaurant we got the actual uh you know wall just to cut off the part Lake Park with the center part and of course we ended up with really cool structures to for the player

to explore also B is very different in verticality so that help us a lot also so here it's hard for you to see what's above you but once you're going to get there you're going to see everything is in the memory Streed in so like here you got the spats by the bank but you're going to see it right in front uh you're going to get there basically uh similar situation here but the other way around it's hard for you to see what's beneath you one until you're going to get basically to the spot uh by the barrier so those things beneath you you cannot see right now that probably going to be streamed in the memory and all it's working good uh we also the things you saw before we kind of mix it up the visual kind of distraction plus this different uh height variation so also you you probably don't want to see things that going to be

popping there because of that structure and the last thing we did all the time we did bend the the streets first of all it looked very natural and other of and second of all it actually breaks the line of sight pretty well and looks really nice so it's not like a straight line need to take at least two turns to see the end of the streets so um in natur for this part uh we knew how we need to control our our line of sight our visibility uh that on the blockout itself we had tons of different teams working like story Team Quest team audio team different uh machion design designers team and they provide us with tons and SS on feedback and that feedback for us was like a gold because we always trying to figure out how we can imp prove the things we are doing here and we were trying to get the

results which was the higher quality blockout at that stage right so I have really cool examples for the feedback like here we are going from point B to a and they just move those houses away to create this small path here which is kind of basic idea right but we didn't see that before we we were going all around from you know Point 8 to be with those red lines and those guys tell us it's going to get boring it's going to get was training do something with that we did super easy spot super easy fix but worked similar here from A to B it's super short right now but think about going from the b b to a all around those different you know streets it might be cool one two or three times but 20 15 times probably not that much so we we're trying to figure out how we can give the player more options and more choices and more exploration within our bular town and the last one is kind of more

hardcore because it was done just before the launch of the game we're going from a to c right now so basically we're going from the top part of the city to the harbor part and before you had to go all around with the red line but right now you got really cool View and you got highway to Harbor and it was kind of you know it was risky decision because it kind of lost um cost us some time to do that but still it was totally worth it because right now it's much easier to get to the different parts of town and faster so all those things we did led us uh for this blockout I mean sorry for this layout basically this is this is the final layout in uh in the game we're going to see you're going to play so the old one versus the new one on your left you're going to see the old one which was very simple probably not that exciting but the one on the right probably going to get some much much more fun there more options but

still if you're going to figure out the number one and two so cemetry and Main Square they that the locations are in the same spot that was before the same goes with number five number six and number three those are the same locations but still we figured out how we can make the player have more fun more choices more you know optionals ways to go there so that's why will led us to this kind of more open uh structure so we knew again how um important for us was the navigation and that that is the key for us because okay we can do very nice pretty things but still we're doing games and the games need to be fun so we had to create the fun and navigation is part of the fun uh also for the tech part we knew how controlling visibility for us is important so we did a lot of things uh to be sure that it's going to get optimized well uh we never ever drop

the feedback down we always try to incorporate as much things from the feedback as we can and try to improve the things we're working on right now and we were trying to find as much problems and solutions for the problems as early as possible even on a blockout stage on prototyping stage so that led us to the final blockout we're happy about that we were thinking okay let's do next steps and the next step was to actually build the city actually populate the city with cool cool art First Step was to for us to divide the whole city into four districts again the yellow one the yellow part is elen Palace the red is upper City the purple it's poort Town basically and harbor is the green one the reason for that was that those different um those different districts uh had different assets different characteristic and different uniqueness to it so so it was hard for uh easier for us to uh pug the

different assets into one group and separate those on different districts and also was easier for us to uh separate the work for different artists on different uh on different districts budgets everyone love budgets especially us artists um so we had the basic numbers from our great team at Tech art uh those were the numbers numers we are working U you know with because this presentation of course is from environment artist perspective so we had 200 megabytes for meshes alt together we had 500 megabytes for textures from which 200 megabytes was it called residential resident textures which like for instance were Proxes because we're doing open world games so we have a lot of content like far away Village or farway architecture or all those different Woods forests uh terrain all those things has to be visible for the player all the time so

that cost us a lot also and we had the 300 megabytes for the things we were actually creating for the content for the city chunks itself uh those are material material instances we used and we had half a million triangle budget for only environment art those numbers right now are the things that were kind of for us like environment artists I'm pretty sure te art did tremendous job kind of doing whatever they had to do with those numbers but those were the things those limits we were kind of keeping our eye on so the next question was how we can actually navigate the how far we went or how far we can go or where we're at at this point with textures with memory with measures and we figured that we're going to find some locations that are very uh demanding and if those locations going to get under the limits we we were thinking okay so probably all those different parts of the game also going to get optimized enough so we uh picked

six the first one was Harbor it's demanding because we got Market Square there we have all those different decorations there and uh was packed of content with NPCs and content the same here lower City different assets different Interiors many NPCs very dense content on the streets upper City the same but different architecture right now different assets main Square as I said before very demanding location Temple because on the top we got cemetery on the bottom we have catacombs it's all surrounded with houses with Interiors stuff is really dense over there and the the last one was mandora which was this kind of rich people party place with view for uh you know to open to the whole to S so we had this kind of plan how we can see how far we went or how far we can go uh but still we had to be very careful with how we can manage that we still

wanted to have sharp textures we wanted to you know create things very efficiently and we still wanted to create a lots and lots of visual variety and customization and uniqueness so we get reports like that every week sometimes even even twice a week from our art QA guys and it look like that this is one of the reports from the early process of populating our uh our game so we had like this and that and that was over limits so right now we know why we call Red because everything is red in our limits I will give an example why it was so because this is just one house we used in the upper town of Blair of course on left you can see the concept art in the middle it's a simple MCH Maya and on the right you can see the house in the game and that house look like that just the exterior part it covers over 12,000 triangles uh it had 51 chanks mesh covered over 3 megab and texture was

over 1 mbes that house had interior two floors bedroom and living room and only decoration I mean only the beds only the chairs only the Furnitures only those carpets all those things only cost us only 155 times triangles over 44 45 almost megabytes of texture memory almost 27 megab of mesh data and chunks it was 157 but on that we also had walls because we had to have walls right the only the walls those cool walls wooden walls cost us over 41,000 triangles texture data was almost 14 megab and over over 12 megabytes for mesh data so just to put the perspective for you guys just one house with two you know floors for the interior looks like that I figured it's going to be get hard to

create booket with just only two and a half houses why not let's do it right so as you can see I I think that doesn't need an explanation more so what to do this was the question what to do right now uh but we were we again we were very super shorted with the time so was hard for us to revent the wheel we just trying to make the perfect wheel so we use the techniques we use from The Witcher and kind of TW to make it for us at that point better and more perfect and the solutions for that was basic stuff was streaming was lots and few technical let's call this tricks uh the basic setup we did for the meshes in the town was that uh when you're over 50 m away from the house we're going to only use the proxy in the memory when you're between 15 20 megab met sorry uh you going to have in your our memory the proxy and L1 but when you're closer than 20 M you're going to

have the base mesh so the most demanding mesh plus the Interiors this is the basic setup we of course customized setup because the streets were shorter and longer so we tweaked that but this is more or less the basic one our same house just different paint drop but you can see how costy was those house uh low D zero so this most uh detailed one was almost uh 30,000 triangles uh LOD was kind of half and the proxy itself was kind of less than 5,000 triangles uh I will cover texture later on but just to keep in mind that the proxy itself has the baked Uh custom texture only for the proxy and it cost uh half megabytes for the interior we had two lots uh so the one that's detailed uh the detailed wall and the other one the L one was just plain uh plain walls because if you could go away from the house and some NPC is going to figure okay I want to go to that house we just

didn't want to see you to see like pure space emptiness so they will discover that and the decoration itself was uh also getting stream out very very fast so to uh not to show those different things popping and switching into in Interiors we had to create some kind of you know illusion that the interior is still there but it's not and we used uh this par Shader so this like Simple Plan there's nothing inside the house right now but it gives you the illusion that the interior is there so you think that okay there's a room there I'm probably might go inside and you might but right now it's nothing there bless you uh so we had those tricks we had those Solutions we had those tools so are we clear of risks are we just going for the vacations right now not really we also need to hit smooth uh you know frame rate for all the hardware

reporting the game out we still have we still had and still have big long views all around the too packed with meshes and the SC were seriously heavy like this one here you can see we got the town we got the all the different districts below us we got the different locations in the back on the terrain on the foliage of the water is heavy but we use the same Technique we used in The Witcher and that was the support from Umbra we use it and it helps us a lot to get this rendering time lower and from uh our point of view how we prepared the message from umra was that if you're going to go and see the house like that our famous Blue House let's just say you're going to see only the top part of the house so the umra will see only two meshes right now and the umra will render only almost three and a half thousand triangles but if you're going to see the middle level and the top level we're going to get more meses surrender and

the overall triangle count we're going to get close to 10,000 right now and of course you're going to see uh the whole mesh is going to get over 13,000 triangles Al together but still it help us a lot and the other cool thing uh here is that we ended up with cool Lego blocks of different pieces for the house that we could build different variations from the same spots the same clock blocks Parts puzzles and that gave us the uh tools to create much more variety for our houses having the same meshes was win-win situation right now so we had that uh we had the feeling that knowing our limits gave us enough feedback to figure out how we can approach and what kind of things we can do to fit into the limits uh we again use the techniques we used before we've kind of twist to fit our needs at this point even more we had tremendous support from our Tech

Team uh we used umbre to improve the rendering time and with that we got even more customizable assets for us so we had the meshes done right but right now we need to figure how we going to paint all those meshes and those big flat surfaces we still wanted to go with twice as dense as dense texo as it was in The Witcher we still wanted to have very unique look to every single house and we had lots and lots of big uh surfaces to cover just to put it in perspective this is the same house just back of it one um one wall all those different floors in our engine uh 1K texture cover texture not Material texture covers6 megabytes and and we wanted to go with 1K texture on every four square meters so if I I would like to create one custom texture for the wall I should go with five or sixk Texture just for one wall so four sides of the same house would cost me around 72 megab of the texture memory so then

again it's kind of like that it's impossible for us to get four houses for and build the H the whole town with four houses so we figured that's impossible for us we cannot go with custom textures we to figure out a way of doing those differently uh and again we just couldn't afford that but still we will not sacrifice our art vision and uniqueness and customized look to for every single asset so again we drove to our friends a techart you know and uh we were talk about our needs and our uh things what want to do and we came up basically they came up with really cool solution um we call this blend Shader it's of course verx Trader this is a setup for uh this upper rown houses it's going through the uh clean plaster throughout the bricks to the kind of clean plaster bricks whatever but it worked perfectly uh those textures were

mixed in between with those black and white masks on top of that we could um put the tint over on any color that's why those textures are so mon monochromatic because it was easier for us to put the color over it and on top of that we could put uh we call this pattern it was kind of a deco of having this Final Touch of uniqueness to every single surface and it worked it was really nice it worked over the bigger assets and small assets of course with different set of textures so the first step was of course in Max we had to paint the mesh as as we wanted to to make it look cool unique and uh just to be happy with it so it's the things probably know how it works but it's enough for the first step and after the paint jop was done in Max uh we had to grab it into the engine this is the example I'm going to use because this house super cool it use all the layers for the material all the different tricks it looking cool kind of damage wether but it looks very

characteristic very unique to the other houses and um again here after the you know the basic paint is U painting is done in Max we had to jump into the engine so here we could overlay uh any surface with any color it could go 100% color without textures and it would worked of course it wouldn't look good but still it was possible and uh here it's very cool to give it like a very stle tint to overall color just to give a base for for further tweaking here we got this kind of yellowish weather and color uh for the whole house and then okay um and then we can go of the of the overlay with dirt we could overlay the dirt on every single different layer of the texture so and of course we could kind of change the UV for it uh so you could make it unique and custom to every every single surface with that uh with overlay this this

dirt it has to be sub of course it's not like this so we going to go probably with point two it gives that very cool unique look to it uh and then we could go and give a tint color tint color tint to the different layers of the of the materials so for instance like here we just want to go with um this yellowish color only on the plaster not the bricks so we can figure out which uh layers are the are the uh plaster layer and don't give a tint to those things beneath it those um bricks basically and of course you could go wherever color you want to go so it was actually really fun to to paint the the model itself in Max and then in our engine it was super cool fun to make it look very unique so here we're going to tweak and uh just paint the plaster and don't paint the bricks like this and then also we could uh play

around with contrast of the Mask so the blending between water is going to be more or less seamless or give it more natural actual you know scratchy feel and the last thing we could do from this basic setup was that we could uh give it hold on yes we could give it a over AO overlay uh what was kind of Faking it but it GES the it gave us this kind of extra depth to any object we worked on so was really nice to to give it some subtle AO uh for those things that were standing standing out so this was this very basic setup uh from the max part to the uh in engine uh meshes and as you can see those houses here they share the same materials but they look very differently they got different uh Deco different patterns different colors but that is all in the Shader those the de are put

on top of it but still you can get we could get different variations different unique uh look and custom look using the seven textures for us there was you know the time saer and uh basically project product saver so again knowing our limits gave us the tools and things that we need to figure out how we want to do things from the artistic point of view and being between the limits uh and that's the solution was this blend Shader uh we got from Tech art we didn't want did not and didn't want to sacrifice the art Vision we had and also we have even more customized look for the assets within uh this pipeline of ours so we had the meshes done we had the layout done we had the texture work done and now we had to figure out how we can do in a very F fast uh time the open world parts of our game and this time the not not the tech was our enemy but the time uh in our studio we are 100% handmade

feel ready we're doing everything to make it feel unique custom and handmade uh and we did it with the Witcher and we didn't want to sacrifice that but still we knew how hard this and how time consuming is to do everything by hand and everything unique so uh we wanted to have this golden pipeline very fast and handmade and uh we need to figure out how we can speed our Pine plate we had with the Witcher and the basic uh solution was the entity system we had in our engine so the entities are like a set of groups of different assets that some artist is doing uh and that is very easy to customize change Swap and do whatever you want to do with it for instance here uh I hope you're going to see something it's very dark those Green Tinted things are the parts of of the decoration that set for this house here you're going to see it

even better so some artists spent like probably some times probably a few days doing that but the The Deco team we call that Deco team was were super uh super cool team they did tremendous job with it very cool job so they decorate this house they made an entity so it was easy for to make this grab this and change it like here for instance we have the table with food so if someone going to want to to have different variation of the table with food you don't need to grab the same and you don't need to grab it from scratch you can take it copy it and just make some tweaks change it to make it look unique and different but in a much much faster time like for instance here again we get the merchant uh stands for hardware part I hope you can see how dense it is with detail how detail it is someone actually spend a quad of time doing that but like me someone who needs to actually uh later on decorate the whole environment with different decoration

things it would take me like probably months doing a Market Square and putting all the different fishes you know rolls on vegetables in the basket so that gave us the opportunity that different team Deco team that did a great job with it provide us with those Deco sets and I could just drop and drop those onto the level and just figure out how I can create the environment the layout and things that the player is going to explore I didn't need to spent days weeks on putting the fishes on a table which is cool job but I don't have time for that so uh that gave us this couple kind of upper hand for DEC creation of the whole environments here I actually spent like 3 minutes doing the Market Square here so it looked like that so for the player you can see it's very dense in content very dense in detailed and really looking cool hand made quality but for me it was actually 3 minutes to finish this

out I don't know how long it would take me to you know play with those different small details so yes we did it we made it faster it was a very smart decision because we made it faster but we still kept this handmade quality to it and uh it was kind of this automatic solution but still we didn't want to sacrifice uh the uniqueness to it and it actually helped us to decorate the locations much much faster than it would to create every single spot by hand from the scratch so just to sum this up uh we started with prer production and that gave us the important of navigation we knew how important it is to to get a layout done properly to support the navigation for the player just to give him fun rather than frustr and we the blockout and we tweaked the blockout as long as we figured that the

blockout is going to work pretty nicely uh at the beginning we were able to identify identify and solve technical problems even on the prototyping stage and uh we were iterating as long as we you know figured that the things we did right now are good enough uh thanks to knowing our limits we knew that we need to figure out a way to do art as as we wanted to do so we didn't want to sacrifice the art Vision but still we had to maintain within the limits we were having we used the things that we knew like streaming like LS like the two Umbra and on upon that we improve those things to fit our needs even more and we had our blend Shader which was the direct solution to the texture needs for book and uh we also were able to very easily improve our decoration Pipeline with the entities and decco sets we achieved actually

still long visas over to S either we close the streets in town still we have a lot a lot of open spaces and lots lots of views throughout the whole toone uh we have the unique character of assets every District look different and yet it was optimized enough to hit the limits we had so also improve the texal density it's actually uh twice as dense and it was in the Wier 3 uh we actually have much more dense crowd system in our game that there was in novigrad and uh there is tons and tons of content throughout the streets and also we were able to make it the fast education pipeline throughout the whole world so uh the takeaways from you guys from this talk I would say I hope that some of those techniques or the things I talked about will also improve uh your pipelines or your techniques or things that you're going to do but uh my

personal take takeaway would be that don't be afraid of iterating I know how much it sometimes get frustrating to be doing the same those things the same and same all over again but in our case every iteration pass took us further to the better quality we did actually we you know we never think that the first kind of uh trial error is going to be the best one some be afraid of that and also to put out the game so fast we had to have really good communication between the the teams and uh I cannot stress enough how teamwork and communication between teams is important to get the things done efficiently uh efficiently and fast so if there are any questions this is the time right now thank you thank you so

much hi could you give any more details on your L creation pipeline in this or um okay so the question was what was our Lo L creation pipeline right uh okay so um it was mixed there are uh situations where we had to go with p with doing the lods by hand because it has to look really cool but but we also use simplygon and simplygon helped us to also make the LOD faster but there were cases where we had to go with handmade work with the lods just to make it really look nice is it okay for the answer thank you hi uh hi I'm new to uh environment modeling and uh earlier you had mentioned you were from Poland yes I am with a a Polish last name yes correct okay okay got yeah go ahead go ahead go ahead

kaspar it's close enough but not there yet but thank you for trying okay thank you hi so hi um obviously we working through this you found a lot of different workarounds for the problems you guys encountered but I'm sure no vision is always 100% complete at the end and and especially um with the time crunch at the end I imagine there were still plenty of sacrifices that you made so I was curious um what are the big tips you have um on dealing with that as a team and keeping morale High when clearly everyone's doing the best that they can both with the technology and the art vision and there are some things that no matter how much you would like to hold on to you can never quite get across uh well first of all I think that as an every artist there's always not enough time to do the things you want to

do it's always I want to just make it better and better and better the on the first reason is to uh the first kind of things is to say stop it's good enough I know it's super hard but it has to be like done like that it's never going to be for you good enough um as far as it goes as as you asked about the Morales in our team you know um we got the Hypes high after the wiy was released we knew how the game is good and how you guys love it thank you so much for that so we knew that it has to be you know the quality game so I think that most of us had it in the head that we have to deliver so I think that we're trying to keep each other you know in a friend friendly hug with not getting down but still it was hard work but we knew that it's going to pay off basically so um I don't know if that answer the question actually but it does okay thank you so much jenya jenya go ahead oh um hi hi um I I'm a huge fan

so I thought I would say that um I'm a Sho fan very first one so I thought I would say that also I work at [ __ ] and I'm a l designer and I was wondering during the blockout phase do you is it the artist driven only or do you work with level designer or and that's my first question and also how do you keep level designers from busting the budget as well by adding their stuff do you have have any process for that because I know I did but okay uh okay so the first question was uh did the level design was done by artists or designers right or is it a collaboration or does the level designer have an impact a big impact on the layout and the landmarks and basically the the look of the city or is it or is driven mostly or a collaboration like uh during this project uh level design team was um part of we call this localization team so uh location team sorry so uh it was like artist and designers sit in one room doing the environment so some of the work was done by artists and kind of

Guided by level designers some look like that but we all understood how important it is to get the layout done and and the navigation to work so what's kind of Cooper cooperation and between the teams uh of designers and level designers and um basically also environment artists of course and the tips um how to not break things down um I don't know I think it's just common sense or just you know uh the experience of the things you do I know we had tons of situation that someone was something was broke down because someone something this it's normal but still we're trying to figure out how not to do it even more or not to repeat the situation like that but I don't have like a golden rule for for doing that I know that they sometimes in my studio they wanted to prevent level designers from adding art stuff but it was never done because it's too hard but we had n PCS too n PCS can be yes yes also I have a I have a couple of Polish friends at my studio so maybe I can

pronounce your name right sure I'm not sure I have a Casper at my studio actually but it's is easy this is hard new called chki close close oh thank you thank you for trying thank you so much thank you for talking thank you hi I actually didn't have a question just wanted to say the game came out amazing so thank you oh thank you so much thank you again guys thank you so much for having my first DDC this much fun and I hope you enjoyed the talk thank you so [Applause] much