I made a post about the event on
Wartide's forums so I figured I'd c+p that over here for anyone who missed it. For those who didn't, feel free to, via replies, add to my post.
Quote
Wartide Forums[/url]"]So how was the Crytek presentation? EFFING AMAZING.
Eric Cochonneau began the presentation by opening up Sandbox 2 (CryEnigne 2's editor- which you can play around with if you have Crysis which you should ;)) and displaying a bunch of uniform teapot models on a long table. Each teapot had a different texture and maps. He went through each and modified spec and diffuse and normal and etc maps and showcased various shaders (cloth, metal, rubber, etc...). He went back through some of the teapots and showcased some hybrid procedural shaders (some rain/water shaders, a snow shader, etc... all generated procedurally on the teapots and interacting with not just their geometry but their maps as well)- not particularly new because it's something you can see in Crysis but he did a good job of isolating everything and really showcasing what CryEngine 2 and Crytek's tools can do.
He ended the teapot showcase by giving a lot of insight into Crytek's LoD (Level of Detail) system. While CryEngine 2/Crysis definitely use traditional LoD scaling where a high resolution texture gets scaled down the farther away it is from the user (and Crysis definitely uses billboarding). However, rather than solely relying on a very high resolution base texture to hold-up to the player zooming in on particular parts of a texture/map, Crytek applies relatively low resolution maps with a lot of detail to the area the player is zooming into. This allows the engine to show much more detail to players when zoomed-in on a specific spot and not only reduces the amount of texture stretching but actually increases texture detail (particularly considering that this process seems to be infinitely iterable). The improvement in quality was very tangible.
He next showcased how Crytek creates normal maps- he first used a rather interesting example that combined three types of maps to put treads in a tire without having to actually sculpt out the treads in 3ds Max. He also showcased an application that allowed him to take two pictures of one thing (specifically a cliff) and to combine them to create an extremely detailed 3D model and normal map (the application was even able to triangulate the 3D positions of where the cameras were when they took the pictures).
Cochonneau also played around with Photoshop and a bunch of other periphery apps and further demonstrated the many kinds of maps Crytek uses as well as subsurface scattering. He next once again opened Sandbox 2 and displayed the character in real-time in a sort of rustic woodland environment with a stereotypical log cabin. Nevertheless, the facial detail displayed was arguably better than that even of Prophet in Crysis and Psycho in Crysis Warhead (and this was all in real-time on his laptop)- not to mention that the environment was amazing (granted, I have been playing a lot of Far Cry 2 lately so that is undoubtedly skewing my opinions here a bit but nevertheless...).
Still, the highlight was his final showcase of SSAO (Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion) and Parallax Mapping. He showcased these features in another environment, this one a wrecked train yard. He moved away from the yard and towards what seemed to be ruins of some kind with dilapidated cobblestone that had grass peaking through it. As amazing as Crysis's many environments are, this topped all of them. The amount of detail on display here was just fantastic. More impressive was that the cobblestone looked completely 3D and modeled and yet that effect was accomplished entirely through parallax and normal mapping (he removed parallax mapping to demonstrate this and while I have seen plenty of parallax mapping demonstrations I haven't seen any as effective as this one). He also used the environment to demonstrate SSAO (and ofc that also helped the cobblestone xD but the lighting as a whole changed drastically).
For the most part, Eric just walked through many of Crytek's artistic techniques and pipeline, but in the process he really cemented just how advanced CryEngine 2 is and, in particular, how effective Sandbox 2 is and how robust Crytek's toolset is (and from my discussions w/my friend from EA who is a technical director, an engine's toolset is often the definitive factor on whether or not they choose to use that engine). He also demonstrated that even Crysis Warhead has not tapped all that CryEngine 2 has to offer, which is insane when you think about that. He admitted that they are working on console development now and are basically scaling everything back as much as they can in a frantic attempt to get the engine to work on consoles but in the process of doing that they have also been working on a lot of new ways to optimize CryEnigne 2 (they're making prolific use of alpha channels now, lol) but they're also still adding features to CryEngine 2 (so yeah, anyone who thought that Crytek was going to drop serious PC game development... yeah...).
On another note, after the presentation I got a full tour of FIEA (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy- it's a graduate academy for interactive entertainment attached to UCF) which impressed me greatly (despite that I know a great deal about FIEA already as it was actually a big influence in my decision to attend UCF). The facilities are amazing and they are preaching all the right stuff atm and not falling into the pitfalls that most other such programs fall into. The link to the Crytek event in the OP also links to FIEA's site so I won't go on too much more about it because you can find out plenty there.
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