'Genshin Impact': Crafting an Anime-Style Open World

[Music] hello everyone hope you are all doing well today it is an honor to be here at the game developers conference to present you on the topic catch an impact crafting an enemy style open world so before we start please allow me give you a brief introduction about myself my name is i'm the game producer and ceo of behold you so you can find my contact here so feel free to email me if you have any questions after today's presentation so today i'm going to cover these topics in the presentation first of all i'm going to give you a brief history of gas and impact and talk about the core philosophy of the game after that we're going to dive into why we think characters are so important

for an enemy style game as most of you may know that we have a lot more playable characters in gas and impact and i'm going to tell you how we create and design our characters and lastly i will explain how we go about building this anime style npr world so first let me give you a simple overview of why we want to make gas an impact definitely it's not because we have been mentioned and we have noticed that open world games are popular it is because our company has a goal in mind and which is to create the hyunkai universe something like metal universe we mentioned recently i guess but we first had this idea in 2014 long before we started genji impact uh it is not difficult to see our goal if you look at our look at our history

to see the games we made from guns girls to hong kong impact and gas gadget impact which i am the producer of all three till they launch from our first side scrolling action shooter game to our first third person action game and finally to our first open world game games and impact we strive to create a more immersive gaming world when we start the games and impact project we want to create a new ip based on what we learned from hong kong impact and built a more user-friendly world as you can see ganshin impact is available to a broad range of audience for example in early years of hong kong impact there was no availability of male characters but you can do so in gas and impact since the very beginning also rather than having a sci-fi or hardcore sim setting

we hope to create a visually stunning and beautiful world instead as you can also tell with functional impact as you know they are seven nations in gas and impact so let me take liu as an example here is the concept art of latin right which is a festival in liu i guess maybe some of you already joined this event during the february engagement impact when we create different nations in the game we try to integrate elements from various cultures in reality under the fantasy world concept we have a motivation to enrich the world with diversity of different culture styles so players from all around the world may find something fun and interesting in the game for instance in the uf although it is heavily inspired by chinese culture

we hope that not only can chinese players feel connected to liu but also the players from different backgrounds enjoying the ancient and eleven culture from a fresh perspective so for those who might not be familiar with chinese culture when they think about china i guess panda maybe kung fu or the three candidates may come first to their mind with li yue here we want to present something different something new obviously in my point of view chinese culture has much more than these popular concepts mission above so we integrated some iconic chinese landscapes into the skin nails of liu such as squealing with its hues and waters you can find the similar things in the ui and the janjajir with a picturesque peaks and rocks like the mountains in the uf we want to build a

fantasy world that contains these beautiful things which is our goal to let players may find their inner peace when they play in gangster impact and for global players we hope that everyone can feel the common beauty together of course most of our developers are born and raised in china and we immersed ourselves in chinese culture we want to refine what we are familiar with into something that is easy to understand and then deliver it to global players we hope the global players they will also enjoy and share the beauty of libya and the cultural elements that we integrated even without much knowledge of chinese culture so for example likely it is as a nation with agricultural civilization we use the geo as the element of it to reflect the characteristic of the city and its pursuit of peace

so for now we only released mondas and liu so far two of the seven nations in tibet the third city inazuma will come available in a few days as said we want to create a fantasy world filled with cultural diversity we believe the anime art style allows us to collaborate and integrate more cultural element into a visually stunning world the characters and the world of tibet are indeed important carries of the concept of the diversity so next let's talk about the character engagement impacts before diving in let me answer a question how many playable characters in cash and impact i think maybe you know the answer actually for now the answer is 33 exclude the avatar of the player

so i don't have enough space in this page to show you all of the characters and in a few days after we update version 2.0 there will be 30 cents and we expect it to add about 17 characters per year so for an open world arpg game it really seems a lot in this chart it is easy for you to see all the characters in different element categories character is one of the most important aspects of the game not only because each character carries the unique gameplay and the element but also it represents cultural characteristics so why are characters so important in gas and impact and why it's so important to keep up the consistence of our character updates i will list several very important points here first of all characters are

one of the most desired content for our players which makes it essential for us to keep up updates to fulfill our players demands no doubt the multi-characters gameplay this phone is inherited from japanese card games before we launched the game we were also worried about whether western players would accept this fall the result exit our expectation it shows that both eastern and western players in against an impact they like to collect multi characters and secondly engage in impact the world and the storytelling revolved around characters which has a different focus from some triple-a games that emphasize highly uncinematic narration based on my understanding of the triploid games or including some popular tv series and

enemies those productions prioritize the product line the characters are serving the development of the plot but from the very beginning when we start gangster impact we are trying to create it with parallel and melting narratives to this to depicting the stories of characters in a massive vast world which is quite different from those examples i mentioned about and finally and then most importantly characters serve as the foundation for our commercialization gauntlet impact is a free-to-play title in addition to some characters a large portion of the game's content including the world exploration quest since all the quests and various events came with no charges while some players have an uh relative smooth gameplay experience we also heard

someone may complain that they are getting stuck in certain adventure levels which comes down to the issue of insufficiency insufficiency with our content production so this situation can be improved if we are more effective at creating new contents and of course we are working on it right now so to illustrate how we design characters let me take shell as an example this is your yeah show is an important playable character in game he is an adapter and the only reminding member of the five yakshas dispatched by morax to subdue the demonic spirits that plagued the ligue according to our character pipeline first we confirm the world setting and where the character live in and then any member from any team maybe our team

design team and rp team ip team in our team means writers yeah if any of them have ideas from for the new characters they can bring it up for group discussion during the production we always insist on collective creations especially in the early stage the final decision of a character design was not from any single person it's made by group honestly we don't have a typical art director or creative director in our team and i guess that's that is why i am here today to give the lecture so in the group we evaluate the idea from aspects including but not limited to art settings gameplay and the study of players preference afterwards we follow the same procedure to proceed with character creation

when the carries come when the character's concept is settled we started to implement it our goal is to ensure the characters look as good as the original character concept while in game this picture is the drawing of a characters in three wheels shelf drawings of shot in three wheels and this is a character with finalized 3d model and texture assess we review the model from an orthogonal perspective in game to make sure it looks exactly the same as the original concept as well as having reasonable tessellation topology and follow our texture standards following that we will continue with combat and movement design action designs and also integrating with gameplay design to ensure the ultimate visual effects in the game world

okay in order to achieve this goal many technical and artistic details must be confirmed and the following are a few of the most important first and foremost as i mentioned before the models and textures must be authored as perfectly one two one recreations of the concept art this is the basic requirements and secondly given the anime art style we created the terminator you can see this in the video the terminator between light and shadow on the face must be good looking enough and the normal physical based shading cannot accommodate this so as a result we created hand painted shadow masks specifically for the face

which can be adjusted automatically based on the direction of the main light this is the effect of the dynamic light map in the video you can see that the artist can control the shape of the shade on the every light directions from the front or from the side the artist can totally control the shape of the shade on the face so we can make sure the shadow on the face could be good looking anytime from any direction and another point worth mention is that in game the characters and sins are rendered independently using two different random pipelines they are random separately we used the deferred rendering pipeline for the sins of course of course taking into account time of the day weather changes and the complexity of the environment however because there are many

complicated npr stylization requirements for the characters we decided to continue to use the forward rendering pipeline to ensure that the character can always show the effect that the artists don't want in the games because this allows us to control all the lighting effects and the impact they have easily uh maybe render the character and the scene separately sounds a little weird but we can show you an example later for example while character shadow is primarily determined by one single light source the transition of the shadow can be artificially set based on material settings light intensity and mesh curvature in order to achieve the best shadow transition performance the color the color in the darker areas can also be controlled based on the color of the environment and the artist's

preference so let me show you the light of the things first to better support our 24 hour cycle and dynamic weather system we don't use any big delighting industrial impact all lights are dynamic the video shows how our image-based lighting and the ambient lighting component changes throughout the day and night and as you can see when local lights turn on at night you can see there is a lamp when local light turned on they also make contributions to both direct and indirect light as shown in the video okay and for character shading our character shading has very unique style while keeping the cartoonish look we also apply real-time lighting onto

characters the environmental light condition changes characters will also get affected you can tell from the video you can tell from the video when you are here when you're walking walks under the tree the tree leaves cuts the shadows on her body yeah okay let's see it again yes so uh after talking about the character uh following that let's move on the creation of gas and impact world we built a world cup composed of seven nations from the start of the project and the world will be updated on a long term based on an annual agenda as a result how to create a stylized world that

becomes critical so after settling on the basic concept of the world we encountered some hardships creating the art style this is the concept art of inazuma as you can see we intend to create a world with enemy rendering style following this idea our artists create many concepts on their own like this picture yes this is the concept of of inazuma so now when we have this concept our job is to recreate it in-game however considering the tod better changes lighting environments as well as the procedure content generation and production and asset sharing we found it is really difficult to perfectly recreate the impact in the original art concept

during the actual production process and to be honest like to recreate the character is much more easily than recreate the sins so but if the methods for creating stylized art cannot be standardized our painters they will create different art styles from their own strokes and which makes massive productions impossible so how to solve this problem yeah finally after more than a year of struggle we built our world first uh the ppr pipeline and then tweak it to achieve the stylized look and we desired so thanks to and when we have a very clear idea of our character style so we have at least one standard to adhere to so that is match the style of the sins with our characters and make it harmonious and

beautiful to achieve the stylized effect we want we need to make some hacks on the real rules in nature as far there are too many examples and our time is limiting this presentation so i only list a few of them here first as an open world game failing the huge landscapes became an important job for kenshin impact we made some specialized design terrains to fulfill the stylized art effects we want because each block of talent has an upper cap of mixing eight layers we can mix eight layers at best so our art effects production has its limitation for this we made customize the 10 functions for the terrain material we can get color variation without adding layers then we fill it with grass

feature same color tone and to add color variations on the land surface as an important element in the world grass is used a lot naturally in order to avoid the representatives of just using a single model we use a valve or a variety of grass cancer models these models have randomized densities size and orientation at the same time we grouped multiple sets of grass lods and even prepared simplified models for mobile platforms as you know gas impacts is available on mobile platform and console platforms so to maintain the overall color of the picture each grass counts has only one color but the color can be changed the color of the grass corresponds the color of the terrain by default but everything can be

tuned by artists the artist can also modify the color again and next engage in impact cleaves and mountains occupy a big proportion of the things and when you play this game the players can climb all kinds of hills as they wish so in order to make stylize the rock we need to recreate some of the brushed stroke effects we use substance painter's blur slope filter to stylize each layer of the texture after our rocks and mountains and then mix three different textures together at the same time to show different details and textures at different distance the three pictures below shows the rock effect from different distance from the near to to meteor distance to far so we also consider the reusability of rock sets making the details of rocks change when

zooming and zoom out another eight words to be mentioned are trees trees are also an important element in the world unlike realistic trees trees engage in impact uses lots of shading tricks to blend in with the surrounding environment while retaining the details so let me list some key points uh about how we make trees uh first we use a spherical normal for leaves you can tell the differences between these two three pictures here and next we have to weaken the specular and the shadow between leaves in order to make it more like an enemy style and for tree shooting we set a minimum value for moonlight intensity this prevents tree from looking too dark to black when the main light intensity

is pretty low in dawn and dusk but after doing all of these things above there still have a very critical problem the size of the leafs cars are still looking too obvious like it's showing on the right picture so we click the leaf out by dot production of the leaf and card normal and the view of the direction okay so at last there is another very interesting i want to show you uh it's about the stylized dynamic cloud production let me give you a pretty brief introduction about it this video shows the stylized dynamic clouds in the game you can see the clouds the shape can changes the cloud will grow and the color of the cloud changes according to the weather change and the time change so we made this cloud in the following

steps first the artists draw the cloud silhouette and the growth animation of the cloud's keyframes and next according to these keyframes we have a tool to interpolate the cloud k frames into a gradient map as shown below and then we use two basic light map and rim highlight map to realize the 24 hours light effect lastly when we finish this we used generated gradient map with some noise to realize the dynamic changes at the clouds due to the stylized art style of the game the dynamic lighting effects mentioned here refers to the 24-hour color greetings was pre-set by our artist too so well that is all i want to share with you today although gangster impact has been online we are still developing future content

we just finished the three nations in seven and the third line in nazuma hasn't been updated yet it will take us another four years to finish all the same nations in the event i believe that in the future we will encounter many more problems and i also hope that i also hope that in addition to the content update our team can continue to make improvement in technology so thanks for your listening today if you have any question please contact me by email [Music] you