The second floor of Sony's Metreon Center in the center of San Francisco was bustling with talk of Katamari Damacy and Donkey Kong as game industry professionals and a few not-so-professionals funneled past a pair of turnstiles into the three-screened Action Theater for the latest IGDA meeting and mixer. Matthias Worch, designer and technical art director for Factor 5, was the speaker of the evening. He was armed with an updated version of his technical lecture from the Game Developers Conference this past March, one that now discusses art creation for Factor 5's still somewhat mysterious PlayStation 3 title Lair.
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He played a recent extremely high-resolution trailer in real-time, occasionally pausing to swing the camera around or turn on or off various effects. To be fair, the scene in question was clearly a cut-scene calculated to show off just how many polygons the PS3 can throw around; it's still a lot of polygons, though.
Each model, Worch claimed, contained somewhere between 100,000 and 170,000 triangles. Each had a bunch of other special maps and lighting applied, and the main character was built up with "over ten textures". He compared this to an estimated 10,000 for characters in Gears of War and other recent high-res games. The high-res models, meanwhile, that got dithered down to produce the in-game models, ran up around 5,000,000 triangles.
Lasting Impression
It was abundantly clear, from this IGDA-hosted presentation, how art departments will need to adapt for the PlayStation 3 and other next-gen consoles, to compete at this level of detail and sheer muscle power. Strictly on the level of brawn, models like this are basically unprecedented outside of feature films. This does not, of course, address the issue of how much detail is actually necessary for (or will even be visible to) the player, or what concepts this type of power will enable that were impossible to realize before. But it's certainly pretty.
