Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and we're here at GDC 2016 i'm joined by Wes McDermott and he is working at algorithmic who makes substance which is an asset authoring tool basically for game companies before getting to this discussion all this content is brought to you by raw Furies goner platformer game which you can see on the screen now so Wes with the audience we have it's all gamers but they're interested in how this stuff is made behind the scenes what sort of tools obviously you may can work with substance what sort of tools do developers have to use on the art side to create the assets for their games well it could be a wide range of tools as an artist myself I use pretty much everything I can think of used Maya for probably model creation also use the foundries moto software a great deal also you're going to use like maybe a sculpting app so some of our customers will use ZBrush mainly or you might see some use 3d coat but basically it's kind of hard to find like a one-stop shop for you know all the asset creation like not one program is going to do everything perfectly so it's kind of as an artist you got to have like a tool bag or a toolbox full of stuff so for me it's you know I got Maya ZBrush moto and then of course substance for texturing right so with tax trained specifically this is one everyone talks about even on the consumer side obviously you can see textures and everything that's modeled so in games you know you look at a character like these guys behind us they're all textured what goes into making a good texture and how do you balance that versus the load leveling on system resources well yeah it's kind of it's tough to really get in you know a high level of that but I think that we're really seeing kind of you know a change in the way textures are authored especially with the you know with gr you know physically based materials and that's what at algorithmic that's what we really specialize in and so you know the question of what goes into it I would say you know understanding you know the physical material that you're trying to simulate you know all the surface attributes and typically how I say that like would all the one of the service attributes that make up wood and when you think about that in terms of physically based rendering you're thinking well what's base color roughness normal ayo those kind of things and so when you look at it from that standpoint you are going through the process of you know having to know a bit about the material but you're also having to know how that material needs to be authored in a physically based environment so yeah a lot goes into it I think you also asked about the low time and things like that with a lot of the games that you see that are starting to come out that are going to be physically based that that has attacks on the GPU much greater than what we've seen before but you know as GPUs are increasing physically based games are going to be more you know the norm of what we see so yeah there is that that trade-off of that you know you do have to have you know more shader compute things like that but at the same time you know you can get a much physically accurate looking texture with with very little effort and one thing we were talking about the other day with one of your other team members here was just all the maps so we hear the words normal map specular map diffuse all these relief what are these words mean at a top level what you know what goes into the creation of assets yeah on a top-level the way I like to refer to that is I usually say when you have all these map types they're basically going to be inputs into the you know channel inputs into the shader so I say basically when you look at these maps think of the they're just describing the surface attributes of a material so if you look at say like again an example of wood again there's going to be a base color which is like representing diffuse reflected color then you're going to have normal map which is going to be kind of like the rough surface you know it's going to describe surface detail you're going to have like a roughness map which is going to describe the micro surface of how you know light is going to get scattered and things like that and you know things like that like the roughness map those are utilized by shader to simulate what we see in the real world because obviously we can't you know simulate something like that in real time the technology we have now but yeah in the process of what goes into that it really depends on the tool set and I and I i think you know not only as a an employee of algorithmic but as an artist myself that's where the substance toolset really excels because you know we think in terms of creating extras as a full material so in traditional workflows you would think like you mentioned okay i'm working on diffuse i'm working on specular i'm worried and you would think of these as separate entities and you would try to pull them in and render and just guess it looks right i'm kind of guessing these values and so on but with PBR and with our substance toolset you're not only thinking about these separate textures anymore you're thinking about i want a material like wood or metal or something and so you're viewing this in real time as you work and you and the guess work has been removed because with physically based rendering you know the the concepts of what the material is is based on scientific measure data it's not something that you know as an artist I don't have to go look up these guy I don't have to know like well this is you know I just know that these values are going to be what I need them to be because you know they're they're calibrated values and I can use those and metals going to look like metal and woods going to look like metal in all lighting conditions so is there we were looking at some new nvidia technology coming out soon and we were talking with them specifically about shadow maps versus doing something else like maybe put using voxels to generate some kind of shaders or something in the game shadows in the game are there instances where technology from plugins or other sources can be used rather than doing sort of the mapping manually or are you able to automate any process of the art creation oh yeah you're definitely able to automate processes of the art creation a lot of a lot of that can be done through you know substance as well where you know some of the items that you're going to have like you have a mesh you're going to bake some information about it like you might make normal curvature a mean occlusion all these things and you can feed those into a material and for instance you can say well in the occluded areas you know I don't want dirt to fall and things like that so when you're thinking of it in terms of a procedural texture you can have maps that were baked using GPU Baker's that are going to feed that into control how the procedural effects are going to work so those type of processes can be fully automated and one of our tool sets is that we allow command line batch processing of all these matt baking's so we've had several studios that use our tools in really awesome ways where they've had tech guards with setup a material they would basically run it through it just a system in-house program they made that's gonna you know they feed in the mesh bakes all of the maps takes the substance material it feeds in the maps the sets of material regenerates the textures based on the mesh data which is the baked maps and then outputs texture straight to the engine so the artist would sit down he hits a button it generates everything he switches his chair over to his other monitor he's inside his engine and testing the material so is a similar process used for LOD scallion where if we if we change mesh quality or something in a game in the game settings obviously you see a pretty real difference in some games is that manually created these different qualities or is that part of the automation process they can be part of the automation process and with that to you there's there's instances where you kind of have to rebate certain things depending on how much that changes but in that case you know you're going to be looking at it in terms of overall like silhouette of the object you know so like the normal map you know it's still going to be able to be utilized from the high res Bay and the curvature so you're not going to have to like rebate those things very cool and we'll close out here but why don't you provide everyone and understanding what substance does for for the developers and maybe some examples of developers who use it okay yes well here at GDC we've got a lot of presentations that are that are going on right now and so the presentations getting ready to start here in a few minutes we've got the team from Rainbow six who utilized that on siege we've got several amazing artists from Naughty Dog who are presenting you know how substance was used on uncharted 4 so a lot of Triple A studios black ops 3 was recently used with substance painter so we have a lot of these triple-a studios that are you know really embracing our tool set because it has it has the ability to be automated and be able to generate these textures in a very quick way well thank you for joining me west of course check out links in the description below for full content and thank you for watching it will see you all next time