You... are my hero!
Thanks a bunch for taking the time to snap some images and create an in-depth write-up, greatly appreciated. I love to see what goes into a project like this!

And I feel your pain on not being able to scale props :/

Thank you very much for this candy! goes straight to inspire folder

Wow

Thanks for sharing! Could you talk about some of the hurdles that the team had to overcome to keep a stable frame rate? Also, I love the particle effects that Ive seen. Could you share some info on that? Love the water on the dam!

somedoggy, frame rate stuff below. Interesting question because the original art and budgets were built for the Kinect version, Kinect costs fps and memory, more than you would think. Our target was 30fps @ 720p with 4xMSAA.

Real time shadows are expensive, we're not deferred. Started with 4 cascades, optimized down to 3, only 2 in split screen.

Props turn off at distance solved pop in by growing them in, Farcry 1! Props only allowed one draw call, artist rule of thumb not an engine hard coded requirement, went back and texture paged older props to use a single texture/shader/1 draw call. No LOD's can't afford the memory, prop is either on or off.

Physics programmer limited number of active broken pieces per prop, very hard limit. Extremely low poly Havok collision hulls for broken pieces, hard to debug, not artist friendly, artists don't understand how to build an optimized hull. Havok again?!!!!!! Too many broken pieces active at one time spike frame rate.

Stu does view frustrum culling I believe, hides any geo not seen by camera. Tracks are loops which means at any time you can see most of the world, camera fairly wide, 60-70fov based on speed, measured horizontally, implemented volumes that when the car is inside it, turns off artist specified objects, helpful on some tracks not so much on others, great Maya workflow very easy to set up and tag groups of objects to a particular volume in game tool for testing, don't actually have to drive the car around.

Avatars are expensive, no option to optimize, global asset linked to a bunch of existing games. 4player split does not render at 720p, slightly lower to keep frame rate solid.

All particles are rendered at lower res buffer, common trick, but if you pay attention they can look pixelated really bothers in some instances.

Even with our cartoony diffuse art style we still had fps concerns!

looks awesome! thanks for the breakdown!

So nice looking, and a great 'stream of consciousness' style breakdown as well ;) . Thanks!

Congrats Malcolm!

How important was smoothing group assigmant for baking and game? I suppose that this operation was done by hand.

cupsster, extremely important. For baked lighting it's the difference between looks awesome, or looks blobby/low res/unshippable light maps. The rule of thumb we use is if the edge is hard in the normals of the model you must cut that edge in the light map uv's to allow a clean separation between the light map edge to avoid smearing and stair stepping. Basically if you don't do this the baked lighting will fight with the hard edge you assigned in your normals often looking like a soft edge. Same is true for modelling, all those nice rocks the guys modeled looked shit if their normals were softened. The guys often started with an auto normals 30 degrees in Maya and then did hand clean up. Hand edited soft/hard normals were a must to make the game look good for the real time lighting and the baked lighting components.

Hey there Malcom, congratulations on the game! I'm nuts for this art style. Really amazing, job!

Sorry, just now got to adding this to the wiki
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryRe...rbo_.282012.29
Must be one of my favorite game art dumps

Oh and thanks Stu for all technical breakdowns! Really cool to see how you guys went around accomplishing this. Picked up a couple of new tricks as well.

p.s. dope concept art too.

Gorgeous looking game, especially liking the texture work.
Congratulations to all involved!

Wow, I didn't know polycount had a wiki for game art dumps. Awesome, some amazing work in there. Thanks for adding us d1ver.

Sweet I just came back from visiting family and I was playing the trial, my cousin wants to get it & told his nephew about it.

For me the trial was fun and I love this type of game play for cars, where you can throw them around and flip out I enjoyed this release, love the colors and art style perfect for kids too and It's been a while since I did any gaming.

Thanks guys!

Grats, that is the best looking thing to be associated with Avatars. Props :p

Congratulation, Looking Fantastic. Love the details. \m/

Purchased

Wow, every screenshot is like a work of art. You guys are really talented!

not gonnna lie..this looks awesome hehe good job

I'll be honest, when I first saw the screens, I said "This is soooooo Trackmania!"

But anyways the game art is awesome, congratulations. And the whole art dump is some serious s**t, I'll keep it for inspiration. :Q___

Love the colours! The desert terrain colours has inspired me to make a small hand painted Looney Tunes Environment.

Congratulations! Me and my wife are use Xbox live users and I have to say its great to finally see a purchase worthy game that uses the Xbox live avatars. The environments in this game look incredible!

This looks absolutely glorious! instantly added to my inspiration folder.
I'm considering moving more of my art and design process into maya because of this.
Just out of curiosity, what software/engine did you use to compile the actual game and how was the workflow pipeline from maya?

Looks really nice! I wonder what programs did you use to produce this title? I'm specifically thinking about the engine. I'm just now getting into the Untiy3D engine and it is lots of fun.

My wallet says no... but my eyes say .. screw you wallet, you don't know what you're talkin 'bout