Building Machines for a Better Future in 'Horizon'

[Music] thank you good afternoon really nice to see so many of you here this is my first GDC and it's been really great so far I'm Maxim Fleury asset art lead for the machine and weapons team at gorilla and this is not just my first GDC Horizon forbidden West it's also the first game I ever worked on before starting at gorilla I worked in visual effects as an asset supervisor making assets for movies this year is my colleague Leonard Franken who's a senior artist on the team he's been with Gorilla for over 15 years where he worked on most of the games in the Killzone franchise Horizon forbidden Horizon zero Dawn and of course Horizon forbidden West to give you the most complete look at the process of making these machines we'll divide this talk between us let's go to the 18th of February 2042

release date of horizon forbidden West well it could have been so today we'll talk about how we avoided spending over 24 years on this game and hopefully this will give you some insight into how to schedule and set up your pipeline to create some of your own complicated assets I'll begin with a quick introduction to Horizon and machines that populate the world followed by a look at what it means to schedule a large amount of assets while finishing somewhere before 2042. then Leonard worked on both games in the Horizon franchise will take you on a quick Journey back in time to explain how the unique look of the machines evolved he will then go deeper into each step of our workflow and how it evolved for Horizon forbidden West so we could meet our deadlines and when we understand the pipeline and the process I'll go over team management and what it takes to keep a team happy and productive during a long production

and last but not least we'll have a look at how we work with Outsource without whom we couldn't have done this project at all so how many of you played the game that's great I hope you enjoyed your encounters with our machines we certainly enjoyed building them for the people that didn't play any of the Horizon games let me tell you briefly what they are about the game takes place in the future we take the role of Eloy who tries to save the world with bow and arrow while giant robot dinosaurs try to kill her but these machines are not just there to make ehlers life difficult in fact most of them don't really care about her unless she gets too close or disturbs them otherwise you see their primary function is to regenerate the planet after cataclysmic events destroyed almost all life on Earth and to do that there are different types of machines you have the acquisition class machines

like the fangers here that gather resources and canisters and travel in hertz they are usually accompanied by Recon class machines like the borough pretty good cute right who are constantly on the lookout for danger if they spot it they call in larger combat class machines like the ravager or even Defender jaw to protect the herd if machines do get destroyed there are scavenger class machines that strip their parts and resources to be used elsewhere and Armored Transport machines carry these resources across the land towering over all our majestic tall necks walking the Earth while Gathering data to help the other machines complete their tasks Horizon zero Dawn is well received and especially the machines got a lot of Praise so matiz dioma our game director wanted to make sure that the machines of forbidden West would be a worthy addition one of his regrets from the first game was only two of the 25 machines the fender jaw and the stormbird with a really big robot dinosaurs he had originally envisions so for forbidden

West he wanted to extend the roster with more giant machines this is something that we as a team of course could get behind 100 and we added the slitterfang Tremor Tusk and Slaughter spine among others to make fighting and hunting them even more interesting matais also wanted the machines to have more complexity for which we gave them more interactive Parts attacks and different ways for the machines to move Eloy was able to override and mount some of the horse-like machines in the first game but Matthias wanted her to be able to write different machine varieties in the Forbidden West so we added machines like the cloth Strider and the bristleback to add variation to the way alloy travels throughout the world and where before only one person the only person who could do these overrides was Eloy this time Matthias wanted to give certain Yumi enemies the ability to override some machines as well and use

these against her for this we painted machines with regardless Clan colors and the Tremor Tusk even got spikes and a turret with archers on top and last but not least most machines got an Apec Apex or Elemental variation in the game the Apex machines are faster have more health and are a real pain in the butt to second place to the player they got a different color scheme and the elemental variations carry different canisters or fluids to allow the player to hunt for resources see how we made all of these let's first have a look at gorilla's machine pipeline it is divided into the following phases first the low level phase where game design writes a design document describing a machine's role functions and its attack in its attacks in quite a bit of detail when the document gets approved by the game director our team creates a 3D concept model in the static phase

there are regular stand-up meetings with the leads of all teams involved and the concept team the concept model is discussed to make sure it works for everybody and changes are made until it does which is when the model gets rigged and animation animation can start during the dynamic phase now while the other teams pick up the concept model yes a team works on a fully detailed Machine model next animation starts going back and forth with core Technical and artificial intelligence in the interactive phase to make the now animated machine working game and as soon as the detailed Machine model gets approved by Art Direction and game design will update the model in game with a better representation while Outsource works on the final game mesh when the final model is textured and integrated visual effects and sound effects can add their magic while game design balances the gameplay with artificial intelligence now that we've seen where the asset team it fits in in the overall pipeline let's take a closer look at the steps in our

workflow as I just explained we start with a 3D concept model where we figure out the general shape and size of a machine for this we have dedicated 3D concept artists on the team the concept model then gets detailed into something that could work around in the world of horizon which then gets picked up by our Outsourcing Partners who clean up our work and create the final game mesh which we then texture before finally integrating the finished asset in-game in between each of these phases there is a short review stage where we deliver an updated model with work in process work in progress textures to the other teams this allows them to see if the asset still works for them or if changes are needed before you proceed to the next stage that whole process takes about a year for one machine Essence from concept to fully finished textured asset in-game we started in 2018 24 machines one year

per machine that means we wouldn't be done until well you know 2042. management obviously had another release date in mind so how would it would fit these 24 years into a more realistic four-year plan we have multiple artists on the team allowing us to work on more machines at the same time reducing the overall production time in two or more manageable time frame Outsource has the most work but this could be assigned to multiple outsourced vendors reducing the problem by having more companies work on it by dividing the work between in-house and Outsource you can greatly increase the team size and add scalability to the process but to fully utilize the potential of our Outsourcing vendors it is important we send them the work that can help us with the most you see some of the tasks in our workflow like making a concept and detail model and doing the final texture pass are highly subjective and require a lot of input from our Direction and the other teams having outsourced duties tasks would lead to a

lot of feedbackgrounds caused by the subjective nature of the material and doing this tasks in-house means it can be done with short turnaround times speeding up the process other tasks like the creation of the game s UVS the load meshes and the baking of the mesh maps are objective tasks which are very suitable to be divided upon multiple artists with less feedback needed this makes these objective tasks perfect for our outsourced vendors to help us with Leonard will now take you deeper into the process of how we created these machines thanks azer Maxim just explained I've been with the company for more than 15 years now and after Killzone shadowfall I joined a team that now will be called the machine and weapon team now when you look at the machines of

horizon they look organic and fit the world they live in but it took a long time of exploration to get there and that explanation is what I will show in the look of the filming part you see when we started on the newly RP Horizon we got presented this concept image that had all of the key pillars there from the start it had the nature tribes alloy and of course the machines but what these machines would look like wasn't really defined at this moment so how did we get there well when the company moved to the new project before that we worked for a very long time on Killzone which had a totally different style it was more like a dark and gritty uh first person shooter so I went into designing the first concepts of the machines they were very tank-like and man-made a lot like what we're used to on Killzone we wanted to steer away from this look and started to look into biomomatic

design where examples from nature get used in designs and for example here on the Japanese bullet train it got its shape of the beak of a kingfisher they solved their problem of when the train was going with high-speed troop tunnels of not exploding which is kind of nice when you ride a train with the studio visit from Martin Luther a professor and biorobotics from the Technical University delft he showed us some Advanced robotic designs that used artificial muscles and 3D printed frames that had taken inspiration from nature so when we start to flesh out the machines they needed to be more organic and we started this by setting some rules uh first we start with a list that what we didn't want uh for instance no Pistons screws hard edges or actually anything man-made

with this list and the given information we got back to the drawing board and did a lot of exploration in 2 and 3D we really tried to get the way from the style that we were used to on Killzone and in some cases this turned out better than others but I think we got there with that explanation that we have been doing we also looked at the machine's colors and they mainly were a lighting color as they support the story of them being 3D printed and not hand-painted afterwards that would make it more human-made again but to support the designs of the machines the interactive components had to stand out and game design wanted us to have the interactive cover funds for instance the plating antennas weapons a lighter color and the base body more consists more out of dark materials to draw it a bit more to the background

so it would clearly read as separate components and shootable we started to apply these rules to machines and now that we were happy with the concept we took everything we learned and made a list of elements of the yeah that we did one on the machines and they should have run on biofuel have 3D printed frames muscles and plates on top with all of these features we got a more organic looking Horizon machine and but working on the first machine from the 3D concept we started to notice that it did not really have that organic feel we were looking for as the model got made with a hard surface poly modeling technique that we previously used on oh Killzone as this obviously worked for us before we continued working this way but this time around we wanted a more organic looking machine instead of

the more chunky machines that we had on Killzone so we're clear for us that we needed to head in a different direction with the workflow that would be less destructive and give us more freedom has iterations with this workflow caused a lot of rework and it wasn't flexible at all well exactly at that point our director was in and said this this is what I want and he showed us this image by Mike Nash an artist who had this amazing organic mechanical sculpting Style and it will perfectly fit our machines he was available for freelance work and helped us defining the machine style of horizon and on the left you can see the models that we've created a gorilla before the detailing and we sent this to him and on the right you can see the same modeling with all of the detail added this really

was that push that our 3D translation needed and this in the end set the machine look and now that you know a bit more about the history of the machine look I can show the process of making one of them and I will do this by example of the Tremor task that's now on screen and by showing the differences between the Horizon zero Dawn and forbidden West Pipeline at the start of the process is game design as machine showed before on his production overview a document gets made there where the animal is specified and it has some reference images of it and also what components weapons canisters and other interactive Parts it needs New York tax cut explained for uh and all of its specifications and this all together with some stunning game designer art

now that there's a design document we have a starting point for the machine and weapon team uh concept art shows a concept artist of our team starts to work on the machine as it's now moving into the concepting phase creating a concept in other companies but also ours usually starts with a 2d design but because of the complexity of these machines we directly start in 3D uh version gets kit Bash from previous made Parts setting the outline of the machine keeping in mind the movement and skeleton of the animal it's representing this way of working turned out to be really quick and even faster than when just creating simple volume shapes as the concepts getting made we had regular stand-up meetings this together with the game designers animators and Tech animators and in these standups we would check if everything was on track in terms of sizes and components for game design and

movement for animation And when everybody was happy with the final machines concept there would be a sign off and a first model gets generated from the concept to put in game Tech animation can now build a rig for the animators and we could continue with our next phase the high resolution detail model on the first game the Machine logo was set by a freelance artist and so Feud were made by him but the rest of the machines got dealt in-house by our team and this is where we made the switch to work with zbrush that was a lot more organic to work with and it gave us a lot more freedom and to create a consistent look across the machines we created a library of parts to detail them and now that we had the look down we continued this way of working for Horizon forbidden West From the Rough

concept mesh we started with the subjective detailing work and I will show this process on the upper leg of the Tremor tusk step by step we add Parks like the muscle and joint to block some volume creating a basic frame connecting the joint making the frame more organic by avoiding a 90 degree hard angles and make lots of connections throughout adding layers on top of that extrudent volume to get that 3D printed frame fuel inspired by nature and that we also have seen before with the visit from Professor whistle and to balance all of that detail we mask some parts of the muscle in the cover this then of course needs some details on pinch Falls display in the class tension and some buttons that you make a team attached to it and all of this is creating a readable and detailed model that supports the Horizon language and together with the

plates weapons and canisters this is helping us to set that iconic machine look for Horizon as artists of course we love this process of fleshing out a machine but unfortunately uh in the end we still have a schedule to keep so to speed up this process we use a selection of older machine parts which then get re-sculpted preserving some detail and adding new ones in the process and as you can see here we use the eyes of a ravager and the gun belt of the Thunder jaw and the leg of the tall neck as we completed the detailing we have another round of checks on the newly generated game model and so animation can now have another

check if movement still works with all of the detail added when the detailed model is signed off the art director makes a color block out this gets projected on the game model so we now have a latest version in game with the column material and now animation can continue their work and Ai and cortex can start their process as the model we've made it's making it move to Outsource on the first game we did try and outserve the subjective part of detailing uh one of these machines as this is custom in other asset Pipelines outsourced vendors have lots of artists and can provide the work among them as they say many hands make life work but what we started to notice with these complex machines is that it's very subjective work it was taking a long time going back and forth with feedback and lots of artists working on one machine created inconsistencies across

so many hands don't always make life work doing the detail pass in-house turned out to be a lot faster and working with a maximum of two artists on a machine also remove the inconsistency [Music] in the process we now take our model up to about 80 of completion doing most of that subjective work in-house leaving our Outsource Partners to do the last 20 of objective work of straightening the surfaces edges and details uh the work they do is very labor intensive so if we needed to do that extra work the extra 20 it would cost us to I think twice the amount of time in the detailing phase other objective tasks that get covered by Outsource are the game meshes that

get made from the high poly detail and this includes the first three lots UVS get laid out and big Maps get generated like the normal occlusion position and curvature but I think this is pretty common in most asset pipelines so I wouldn't really go further into detail here but what is different on the Forbidden West Pipeline we wanted to see what Outsource could do on the texturing side for us as example we took the detailing process where the last 20 percent of objective words gets done by Outsource and we now want to Outsource to do the first 20 of the texturing for us and like the art director created a color block out he now also created a blockout for the ID clown mask this mascot used for selling the materials in the texturing process like for instance with the green the muscle is set in the process and by creation of this ID print the

artist can now objectively follow this and we can then later take that map to add more details as that's a more subjective process [Music] then they also provide us with a muscle mask with this outline drawn of the muscle strands that we can use as an input to create a muscle glow mask in our texturing process where all of the Outsource Works done we get a nice package delivery and we can check this on all requirements but we still hold off to integration to the game as the model is still a gray mesh and the last steps of texturing are done in-house on the first game we started with texturing the machines we originally started doing this by hand-painted Textures in Photoshop again this was coming from our Killzone Legacy working this way the Albedo reflectance on roughness needs to be made separately and there was no way of directly

previewing the textures meaning an export the game was required every time you wanted to do so all of the machines seen in the 2015 E3 demo were still made this way there were only three machines in this trailer and it cost us months of work or like a month now months months sorry uh so how did we improve this after that A3 demo we went into production for the first game and made the switch to a 3D painter software in our case we used a substance painter here as they still had a familiar layer approach like Photoshop but meaning we still have to develop this works flow during production we ended up with just one simple template in the end texturing all of the machines and the basement materials got set in this in this template but when starting to use this template a separate Word file gets created this

word file then gets separated from that material template as it had no referencing so when creating loads of Word files for all of the different machines this meant a lot of Base materials got created and at the end of the project when we made a change in values of a material this meant we had to go over all of the machine texture files making these changes by hand creating room from human error and inconsistency on top of that it took us like a month of changing and we are exporting all of the files this was not the only Flawless worked for it it had basic inputs set in one place and the color input at the bottom of the layer stack and multiple third-party generated wear masks inside of the layer stack meaning this workflow had inputs coming from everywhere making it very unclear and confusing to work with when you need to update one of these Maps you had to reconnect it by hand

meaning searching to all of the layer Stacks to for your input and this with not even all Macs being created by the output you still have to need to create a mask for the tiling detail textures and the glow of the muscle by hand however we could now directly paint on the model and preview the textures in our viewport this all with the correct shading model of the game was a really bad a big step forward but it wasn't perfect as there were still some for you just missing uh in the viewport like the displaying of the muscle glow and the tiling detail textures all in all this workflow helped us ship Horizon zero Dawn but it was far from ideal at the end we needed some extra Freelancers to help finish this project so for Horizon forbidden West it was clear to us a change needed to be made

in the process but what was this change going to be well we started to look into procedural texturing with a node-based approach in our instance we moved to substance designer and one of our more technical artists on the machine and weapon team started to develop this process on the principles of the previous workflow this process starts with plugging in the delivered maps from Outsource this is all in one place now and the materials are set in a note that is reference so all adjustments automatically got rolled out on only an export is needed so changes can be easily made throughout the whole process the texture artist can then start with the subjective detailing of the ID mask and create a color map from the ID that's needed for the material colors with this the materials are now set and we can preview them but at this moment it still looks very still like a

car that just rolled from the factory line and these machines have been roaming the nature and encountered enemies so they would need some dirt and scratches to show that this is where I'm muscle now get generated by notes within the software you can set the generators and their presets can be saved to be later used in other machines while keeping the freedom of adjusting it all and remember that muscle mass created by our Outsource here in a muscle node a muscle glow mix gets generated from that where you can set the soft shape of the muscle islands and the variation of brightness of the muscle strands all creating the final muscle map for a glow in game just another layer of vehicles come on top and all of the maps get generated by the output so no more hand painting afterwards

the viewport now this displays all of its features including the title and detail textures and muscle glow so the vinyl result is really close to the game but during production we also needed to make some texture variants the Regala and Apex with this new flexible workflow this was all just possible we could now add this to our existing network with just the addition of two simple masks with their old workflow this would have meant starting all over again with a new template and all of its Word files adding customization however did require a bit more technical knowledge now as this required in a node-based solution like for example the heatsinks on the rotor back got uh some heat discoloring and a custom copper material on the big

snake-like Slater thing and this all can be added with any custom nodes that the artist wants to use so you got a lot of freedom there in the end uh texturing on Horizon forbidden West felt like a breeze compared to Horizon zero Dawn as everything was finished on time without the help of some additional freelance artists and so what did we learn from this well at the start of creating this process we had to worry it might feel generic as the textures would be generated but with the artist input and customizations it actually didn't feel generic at all we had created a balanced and standardized look across these machines with the procedural process and now that the final textures are done with all of its variants Moxie will take over again and show some more on the production side [Applause]

[Music] foreign making these machines was fun and taking a model from design documents to final textured model and to see it animated in game is amazing less sexy but also important was team structure and management as these are long projects it's important to keep everybody productive and morale High team composition had been different on the first game so let's first have a look at what we had before and what worked back then the team consisted of an art director who was also who also took on the role of lead artist we had 3D concept artists to do a first pass and for quick turnarounds as the artist to pick up the concept do the detailing and the texturing wanted to get back from Outsource and to manage

this there was an Outsource manager to review the work from Outsource get feedback and integrate asset and integrate the work back into the pipeline when it was done as Leonard explained texturing all machines using the old pipeline was more work than expected so freelance asset artists were hired to help with texture work at the end and with everybody busy on the machines there was nobody to model the weapons so we hired Freelancers to help with that as well having one Outsource manager seemed like a good idea he could talk to all the vendors make sure the work was consistent but he was also tasked with reviewing the work that came back from Outsourcing sent feedback where needed but as the amount of machines in azure's grew this caused an enormous bottleneck in the workflow with everything having to go through one person we obviously made the deadline we could have saved time with Outsource sometimes having to wait on feedback and not everything getting ingested back in the

system straight away we needed a different solution for this and at the end of this project the Freelancers fulfilled our contract leaving a very small team in place so now that the project was finished and forbidden West in early stages of development management wanted to expand in our very small machine and weapons team with the first game success plenty of people wanted to work at gorilla but it still wasn't an easy job to find the right people for the team though and it took almost three years and looking at hundreds of portfolios for them to find the right artist with halfway through the second year of production we had a full team it had some Horizon veterans for seniority and experience mixed with fresh talents to bring new ideas now the team consisted of three concept artists five modelers with two of them Horizon zero Dawn veterans and two weapon artists so no Freelancers would be needed with me joining them as lead artist the

art director was happy he didn't have to do double duty anymore as a lead artist clearing the way for him to go to get back to full-time art Direction he got me up to speed handing over the lead role and this helped me a lot in my first year at gorilla we didn't have an outsourced manager anymore but now the artists themselves did review and feedback on their own work so there wasn't any bottleneck where before there could be a separate artist doing the concept model Dido model Outsource review and texturing now one artist does the detail model sees it through Outsource and then picks it back up for texturing when it comes back they know their model and as a result do faster reviews and give more efficient feedback having the opportunity to text your own model at the end creates ownership and achievement for that artist and dividing up the work also made it varied for everybody and nobody got stuck with just doing one thing for the entire project

having the art director on the team to take care of the more visual tasks gave me more time to manage the team as a lead artist but lead artist is a bit of a misleading term you see Elite artist is more of a supporting managing artist they have to be all around so they can help at each stage of the workflow and offer support where needed an effective lead knows the artist on the team what they are good at what they enjoy working on which might be different than what they're good at and what they want in their career a good lead artist means finding a balance between being a manager a producer an HR assistant recruiter and finally a generalist and yes I won't lie part of the job is looking at lots and lots of spreadsheets to know what goes on in the team it's good to have regular one-on-ones with the artist and the art director there they can talk about any problems they might have where their passions lie and everything else really this allows

the work to be scheduled so people get mostly to do mostly get to do what they love and Excel at making them more productive it still work so sometimes artists end up with a less fun task there is just no avoiding that but knowing what people aspire to allows the work to be divided in a more meaningful way and gives artists opportunity to grow one of the artist's friends just enjoyed the sculpting of the machines but also wanted to develop the texture pipeline and there were people who got pushed in a more technical role where they really just wanted to be creative for others it was their first job and they just needed some more guidance in that department investing time and energy in the artist on the team made them more productive and happier as a result but that was only part of the team as the artist at our Outsource vendors do a lot of work and add scalability to the amount of work we can do we couldn't have made the same number of machines without them and they need managing as well we started the project with one

Outsource vendor but as the project progressed we added two more vendors to help us out as I said this added scalability to amount of work that could be done by assigning them the objective part of the process the vendors could split the work among many artists we have teams working with us of up to 12 people per vendor with a total of 35 people involved with machines at the height of production none of this would have been possible without producers managing the teams at the vendor sites they act as Gatekeepers gathering information and making sure everything gets translated and conveyed to their team properly will also make also checking there are no problems and their teams are happy the lead artist acts as the main point of access on our side taking the role of Outsource manager by making sure feedback is given on time by the artist keeping an eye on the amount of feedbackgrounds and answering any questions the Outsource vendor might have now

this is a lot of people to manage and keep busy and they are on other continents in different time zones and sometimes communication goes through a translator to help with this the team created an extensive 150 Page Long outros document going through the workflow pointing out potential problems and giving examples and support of solutions and every new vendor went through a trading period before they started production the document explains for example how to finish the last 20 of the detail model as Leonard talked about create game meshes to our specifications set up lots how to make specific maps and set up the first 20 of the texture paths by doing the ID maps and even how to do the first skating Pass based on inputs from our Tech animation team normally we would also visit their Studios give on-site training answer any questions they might have in person and really get to know the team to help build a relationship unfortunately that wasn't possible on

this project as the world shut down gorilla went from everybody in office to work from home within a week and the same went for our outsourced vendors but apart from not being able to visit the studios the outsourced workflow didn't fundamentally change it just became the world's way of working for a while as we all know it sounds obvious what turned out to be really important was communication problems either in scheduling or workflow are a part of any game's production and Outsource is no exception we just deal with them as they come up but if we don't know there's a problem on the vendor side or vice versa a team of 12 people might run out of work or spend time fixing issues we could help them with and this could mess up the schedule and cause other work to get delayed as well this is where the producers at e-fender come in they need to be aware of what's happening on their side spot any problems and let us know the same goes for us obviously if we go over and might deliver stuff later than was agreed we need to let the vendor

know as soon as possible as it is Paramount to know what these problems are so they can be solved either by getting tips on how to solve the issue adjusting the workflow or by redistributing the lights the work to lighten the loads now Outsource work on Horizon from West was mostly smooth but if you remember my earlier distribution of Warcraft the actual time spent on projects was slightly less neat as you can see this had multiple causes for one thing texture started when the pipeline was done so there is a gap between Outsource and texture but it doesn't mean there was a gap in production in fact we did start texturing before the last machine finished in Outsource and you can see that most of the other work took longer at the beginning of production fenders had to get up to speed on our workflow and what we expected of them and some machine took longer on our side as they were more complex than originally thought and then there are some machines that

took more than a year in Outsource because of the communication not being great from our side there were too many feedback rounds um focusing on lots of small details and on the vendor side producers changed and as a result production problems weren't always communicated properly towards the middle of the project you can see most stars sped up and completed much closer to what was originally scheduled with work often getting done faster than anticipated this was a direct result of communication getting better and both sides knowing what the others needed allowing for better synergy this allowed flexibility with vendors helping us out during spikes of work like the trimmer task that had to be finished for the first trailer over a very short period of time with a hard deadline and the vendor really stepped up rescheduled work on their side and made sure they delivered on time while at the same time we did extra review sessions to help them achieve this all part of the same team

so what did we achieve having the same artists take a model from detail model to final in-game asset credit ownership and gave the artists a sense of achievement it also meant they didn't do just one sort of task for the whole production variation keeps tasks from going still and morale High we tweaked the team composition adding more asset artists and spread the load of review work having 3D concept artists on the team had already worked on zero Dawn but having a separate art director and lead artist to split the load meant there was more time for internal feedback and Team Management as a direct result of ownership variation in work and team composition the artists on the team were happy and productive and the new texture workflow that Leonard described made it easier to make changes even later in the project and help us meet our deadlines because we shared the feedback work among the team there was more time for actual Outsource management our vendors also did amazing work we couldn't have

done it without them in fact together we built 24 new machines seven of which were extra large free extra amounts we updated 21 of the existing Horizon zero Dawn machines and created 33 Apex texture variations and an additional five Regatta variants and together with the elemental variations there are over 100 different machines in Horizon forbidden West it didn't take till 2042 to finish in fact the machines were all finished towards the second half of 2021 five months before the release date I'm really proud of the team of the work that the team did and it's great to see players experience these machines machines in ways even we couldn't imagine when we built them I would like to finish with a fan made video I found on Twitter that shows some of our machines in action [Music]

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I also like to thank the rest of the team who couldn't be here to for their amazing work and Sunni Legends who made most of the gameplay videos except for the last one for our talk and um I think we have some time for questions if there are any hey great talk great uh great work on the game too I'm really enjoying it uh so I'm curious and this is maybe more of a design question but I'm curious what motivated this decision to change the the base Scout class in the first game from a velociraptor type creature to one that was the borrower that was

more based on like a ferret or a badger um I think I think we had um in the first games we had a lot of um quad repairs and and Velociraptor T-Rex kind of um machine so we wanted to change to different ways of movement and stuff in fact there is a talk tomorrow by our animation supervisor Richard outs so uh he'll talk more about that okay thank you [Music] presentation great game good job um quick question when you were talking about the uh the ownership and the artists talking directly to the outsourced artists was that communication directly with the artist in Outsourcing or with the producers managing the artists and Outsourcing well usually um we work with Outsource vendors on different continents and they don't always speak English the the artists themselves so we usually talk to the uh producer with the team of the artists but then the producer 10 slates because

they can't always understand it but they still got that sense of ownership by and I can't understand them so it's not just them they don't speak English I don't speak their language so certain one more question uh did you the more Junior artists you hired were they also given that sense of ownership or was there a little bit more uh oversight on them no they they made machines as well yeah from the beginning to land cool thank you very much no worries hello oh I don't know if you want to go first okay sorry um with the art leads interfacing directly with the outsourced teams for those reviews I was wondering how often were the art leads reviewing work from Outsource and how did they balance that with working with the folks in-house sorry I couldn't hear it completely how often were the art leads interfacing with your outsourced houses like how many reviews per week was it sort of a constant stream or how did they balance that versus the reviews that they would need to do internally so it was sort of constant stream because at some point we had multiple

machines in Outsource and in production and whenever I had regular meetings with them so I was sort of the gatekeeper there and then the artist did all the feedback and if there was a specific question I would relegate it and made sure that they knew so I handled sort of the production side on my end on our end but uh yeah it was like a constant stream of Outsource and was that uh through like slack just a constant stream of messages or did you have some other external tools that you used to interface with the teams yeah when I joined today and we still do for this we used hands-offs which was yeah maybe you know I would like to progress through slack and have instant messages I set up um Skype with them so they could always send me messages so at least there was you know I could react straight away so not having to constantly update some programming all right cool thank you no worries

oh sorry uh uh uh uh thank you for the presentation um the game is uh uh great um I don't know the question stop topic but I was uh I noticed a lot of improvements in the animation with Eloy and um like everything like from walking climbing um I just want to know like what were the challenges in terms of like implementing the animation doing like the fight scene to the machines if um well you should really come to research talk tomorrow because he talks about exactly that he can answer that better than we we just we just built a model so he brings him to life or his team brings him to life okay thank you no worries hi um my question is similar to an earlier question how often did you have cross-disciplinary reviews about the machines being built you know how AI was implementing those behaviors and how those behaviors were being used by the gameplay designers so we have uh we have

the stand-ups like we talked about so we regularly have the teams directly involved with us like animation and Tech animation who does the rigging and builds the the rigs and game design and then as we progress there's there's also um two to four week me weekly meetings with all the leads from all the teams on the on the machine pipeline to discuss whatever is needed so sound effects is there really early and and visual effects and everything just so everybody knows what's going on because these these machines are they have a lot of moving Parts yeah yeah thank you no worries hi um I guess I do have a bit of a sound effects question and I was wondering do the sound effects does the sound effects team get started like as soon as the concept is agreed upon or do they start a little bit later depending on the machine design Dave do you want to answer it yeah well they indeed do start with the initial concept but if towards the end the final comes in so they do start to place their markers and

everything for that at the start cool thank you oh so big fan and uh this is the best the session for me at GDC so the question is about how to design this monster it's like a you said you designed the design document first and then do the model and then change the design uh right so I want to know is there some like a standard or criteria to measure this is a good design or not because it's like I design a machine and uh I don't know it is God good or not so you mean you mean the the visual design or the game design okay I'm design it's like how do you design a boss so they they spent a long time making those design documents and they're extensive they're like I don't know 80 Pages some some of them and there is a lot of information in there so my question is about how uh it's there is on the way to like uh say okay this is good we can

pass you next phase they keep iterating on them because they also you know they really integrate with other parts of the game so you know and there is a lot of fine-tuning there so they try to think what matches with the gameplay and and what matches with the story and then sort of go from there oh but yeah we don't we don't have any game design talks here today so thank you thank you no worries uh Hey I was curious if you could elaborate a little bit on the sign off process that you would have at each one of the distinct Eternal phases like uh was that a meeting who was involved in that who gave the sign off and then um you know uh was yeah like what was the frequency of that so yeah so um after each of the stations we finished the concept then we like Leonard was showing uh we look in-game uh and in engine to see uh of all those zones and if you can hit everything what

the sizes are and once game design and um animation they look at the model then as well to see if the anatomy works and if they in that states do a sign off then we can progress and it's really important that they do because then we know that later on we don't have to go back and you know as we progress more and more teams get involved with this sign-off because it gets more and more things get tacked on so how was the sign off managed did you have like did you denote that it was signed off at some given point um yeah yeah we yeah we we make sure that it goes round and then we do an email so we have it all and then we progress to make sure that later on uh you know we said like well we did look at it and it is signed off so cool all right thanks worse hey you guys have a fantastic game of course but uh when you went from substance painter to designer uh how did

it affect the workflow efficiency for the uh the artists and the force multiplying of productivity it's kind of a both question yeah as you could see in the process the texturing process was like really short so it it immensely affected that it it helped a lot and as we just now could set the generators and everything in there and it had presets so it was just and we had the basic uh input from uh outsourced for the ID mask already made so it was just editing of the Mask creating the color out of that and it was very very quick process thank you and I just want to add in fact towards the end of the project I think in the last month or something no not well pretty close to the end the art director didn't like the look of the metal and we update like the material got updated and then we just patched process all textures and it was

basically in a day it was all done where before it took a month to do all the machines so it was hugely beneficial to us wow awesome so you uh you mentioned you use cloud Maps uh with the concept art and stuff really early and you have 3D concept artists who are also giving you a workout mesh so are you also testing your texture Pipeline with the cloud mask early on the Prototype mesh getting a head start like generating because you already have the clown so are you using that to generate your ideas the cloud mask has created afterwards at the end you know in the Outsource process so not with the concept but the concept we don't have uh if you get the detailed model then the uh art director he doesn't paint on top of that and that we do with the side projection on top of the model to represent what it's going to look like but it and we do generate like a really dirty version in Houdini uh okay to project the normals on there

already so that's quite detailed for what we have at that point actually yeah I was just assuming because you had the the Prototype model that if you could already have a concept artist do a clown pass you could probably generate a little yeah that happens later in the process yeah no big deal okay also we don't have UVS yet at that point it's just generated UVS but the site projection looks so good we get like um tickets from QA gone like yeah but the colors are not correct it's like well it's not the finished model all right so um not only is it fun to like observe these awesome like machines but also the whole one of the points is to like take them down and blowing off like bits and pieces off them so how did you guys handle that process of or is uh where is that process I guess of I guess uh modeling the pieces that come flying off or after a machine's been destroyed so

there's different there's different parts like the canisters they're instanced so they get reused in all the machines and then uh some parts are like antennas and stuff we reuse them or re-sculpt them a little bit then the plates are up like Leonard shows get sculpted with the machine and really think about what it looks like with them on and without and things like uh weapons that you can you can shoot off and pick up they get handled by our weapons team which I didn't talk about at all which is a bit of shame because they do amazing work they made over 100 weapons as well for sure I think most of the parts also get specified in the design document at the start so how many plates wear and components everything all right awesome so great talk I have some technical questions about the machines so first of all uh could you do your grill recall what's the average poly count of the machine like I know it differs from machine to machine but what's the

average one watch the average polygram for lod0 I think the um if I remember correctly I think that the Tremor task was about the the highest lot was about 400 000 police triangles sorry okay and how many below this did you alter it depended uh on the machine some got fewer because they were smaller but like the biggest one cut about seven we had way more and then it just it was just too much okay and the last one uh the machines are quite huge so I'm curious about the resolution needed to have a like good quality uh textile density so what what were the what was the resolution that you like used detail Maps or how many textures that did you use yeah what was the memory budget for it it sort of varies obviously by machine but a large machine might have in total

say six or seven 4K Maps but then we split them up into lots of 2K maps and then those were baked into texture sets but we tried to um emphasize the parts that you saw the most like the eyes and the the plates and the um the the details that you know would be seen the most and they had like separate texture sets so we could always you know scale them up if needed to and then there is uh we have a large array of detail textures that can use on top and they create like details okay to really give you that scale and then we had we split up the uh for the different variations so every texture set actually had two uh was split in two and so for a different uh variation we would only have to swap out one of them so we loaded in the least amount of textures okay thank you no worries hey guys uh great talk great game thank you for a job so the question is about updating the existing machines from zero Dawn so did you follow the same flow for

that and how much compared of course it's like it takes less time than creating a machine from scratch but how complicated was that was that like I mean updating the existing ones um well they the the model stayed the same so we we didn't do any updates of the model but we did redo the texturing just the texturing yeah okay thank you Maurice that's it there's people waving at me thanks [Applause] [Music]