RealtimeUKare a Creative CG Studio that has spent the last 18 years forging a strong reputation within the games industry for the quality of our Cinematics, Animation and Marketing Imagery.Whilst our team often work with developers in creating in-engine assets, it has been the quality of our trailer work for which we have become best known. Trailers for such games as 'War Thunder', 'World of Tanks', 'Smite' and 'Total War' have become the benchmark for what can be achieved, in terms of visual fidelity, by using a pre-rendered solution. Our studio has always been very ambitious in this regard and has always tried to maintain its position in being a leadingcreative production studiothatdeliversexceptional qualitybypioneering cutting edge solutions for the video games industry.
With this in mind, when ARM first approached us with the ‘Ice Cave Demo’ project, our team were very keen to explore the ways in which we could collaborate with one of the world’s leading developersofSemiconductor IP.With their technical know-how inreal-timemobilegraphics technologyand ourstrength in producing compelling visuals, it seemed like a match made in heaven. It was a great opportunity to explore the ways in which we could collaboratively push the quality of the next generation of mobile graphics processors.
We initially treated this production the same as any other – what will be the most effective way of realizing this production and making it as visually compelling as possible? What struck us first about the piece was its ambition – even to produce the ice cave using our existing pre-rendered pipeline approach would prove challenging enough.The brief specified the need for real-time global illumination, reflection, refraction and soft shadows. Addin the budgets of the ARM® Mali™-T760 GPU-based platform and it was clear that we would haveto plan the project carefully.
Fortunately, we already had a head start having recently completed 'SMITE: Battleground of the Gods' in which we had invested in exploring cutting edge techniques for creating ice and snow.
Given the ambitions we had in our own mind for the quality we wanted to achieve, the first steps we took were tohighlight any technical concerns that stood in the way of us effectively realizing this production. Having done this, we then made some creative decisions that would best enable us to create something extremely 'high end' that would allow us to make the most of this collaboration and enable us both to get the best out of the platform.This process helped us realise the challenge of working on mobile devices, where budgets are very small in comparison to other platforms. Armed with this information, we created a brief for our pre-productiondepartment to produce a piece of concept that wouldallow us to get the maximum visual quality, respect the restricted performance budget of mobile devices and also help ARM showcase the features they wanted to demo. This was further refined in line with discussions with ARM.
Using this as a starting point, the team atRealtimeUKfurther refined the vision following useful technical meetings with the team at ARM. The budgets for this production were dictated by the platform upon which the demo would run. In this instance, the target was to show the demo running on one of ARM’s latest designs in its ARM Cortex®-A Series - the powerful processor that is used in most of the world’s mobiles and tablets.
Whilst its core specs were incredibly powerful, they were far from the kind of processing power that we were used to wherepre-rendered trailers could take up totwo hours per frame to render. Although initially daunting,the only real deviation away from our usual pipeline was that all the assets had to be built more economically. Whereas all assets are ordinarily builtwith great integrity and technical precision as standard, it is usually not so much of an issueif apiece of geometry is built with excessive triangle counts for a pre-rendered production. Of course, this is not the case where the geometry is intended for an in-engine production where every tri and UV Map counts. With this in mind, our artists carefully followed the guidelines set by the team at ARM and modified the authoring pipeline so that the assets could easily be integrated into Unity. Using Unity on this project helpedspeed upthe project flowmore easily and was a new process for ARM who had, up until this point, used their own proprietary engine to realise their technical demos. In particular, Unity’s prefab feature was a big help for our collaboration, with Unity helping to refine our workflow and techniques. Having a large community of Unity users was helpful to both parties and made fora less complicated production as it removed the need to learn a bespoke engine.
Once these factors had been taken into consideration, the asset creation itself was relatively straight forward with our team generating the normal, diffuse, specular and any other maps to the usualRealtimeUKstandards. A separatededicated teamwas used to create and rig the characters that would feature in the demo as were the effects which were created with a more artistic lead approach.
Once all the assets were built,the team atRealtimeUKwere able to render them to match its intended vision. Using our own well tested pipeline in this process, which replicated the finallighting rig, we were able to share a pre-rendered version of the assets as a movie with the team at ARM. The intention with this was that the ARM team would then be able to realise our visionin Unity by replicating it as closely as possible, using theshaders but basing them on the properties of our visual target sequence thatthey had created specifically for the project.
The end result is something we’re all proud of atRealtimeUK and has been regarded as a huge success by ARM. Both RealtimeUK and ARM have learnt from the creation of this demo and it is something that ARM’s ecosystem will benefit from, with the results feeding in to the 'ARM Guide to Unity: Enhancing your Mobile Games' which is available to view on the Mali Developer Center. As ever, our team has constantly pushed what is achievable in terms of graphical fidelity, regardless of the final platform. Whilst no one will deny that there still remains a clear discrepancy between what can be achieved in-engine and from a pre-rendered pipeline,it’snice to know that collaborative efforts between studios likeRealtimeUKand technology pioneers like ARM are closing the gap.