July Dev Blog

Announcing No More Room in Hell 2 at Summer Game Fest was a surreal experience, and we’ve seen you asking to hear more about the creative process that goes into creating our game, and more behind-the-scenes looks. When we brought this to our artists, they got excited to tell our community about how they create the assets using our SMART material pipeline.

For those that haven’t heard the term ‘material pipeline’ before, Art Lead Jonathan Wiley (aka Cenelder) offers this explanation, “For those of you unfamiliar with what a "material pipeline" is, let me explain! When a prop is built in a 3d software, it is initially a flat colour (usually millennial grey). It doesn't have the grit, grime, paint, or colours that you would expect to see on a prop. So we can peel that prop like a banana, colour on the banana peel, and then wrap the peel back around the banana. The "material" is that props "banana peel," and defines how light plays on the surface, the colour, or how rough/smooth/shiny it is. Materials can be very simple, or very complex with built in procedural elements like darkening the ends of the banana. All of this talk about materials is making me hungry.”

While building the Power Plant (the sprawling first map for NMR2), we wanted everything created and placed by hand. It's a key part of our ability to create the most cinematic player experience, and tell stories within our key locations.

In talking to Wiley about SMART material pipeline, he spoke to the limitations that came with last gen tech, and what it meant to upgrade to SMART, a system created in-house by a collaboration between our Art and Tech teams that was built upon UE’s Custom Primitive Data system, for No More Room in Hell 2.

Before we upgraded to SMART, the process was more painstaking. Textures were authored externally; unique for some props, or using seamless materials that looked flat. You could place expensive decals all over the asset to bring some of that realism back, or create complicated detailed texture trims that you had to line the prop up to. “We didn't have enough geometry to be able to vert bake in details for edges, or concave. So things had more unique masks applied to them, or manual vert blending in limited capacity like adding moss to a structure,” says Wiley.

“But now we can bake the verts and recreate texturing tools inside the engine to very quickly modify the look in real time without having to make new materials. So we can change edgewear, grim buildup, and see the change in real time in Unreal Engine.” What are verts though, and why does it matter when it comes to creating details? “Basically we need enough geometry to be able to shade each vertex correctly,” says Paul Carstens, Principal Environment Artist. “Kinda like pixels on a screen, the more pixels the more detailed the image and the opposite obvs. More geo equals more detailed vertex shading for the SMART system to use”

Every prop, location, & item is handcrafted with the goal of fleshing out and bringing to life a unique, planned, and designed world, but that takes an immense amount of effort from our artists. Having a system in place to quickly adjust an asset on the fly to suit the place, the style, and the overall filth or grime saves our artists time and helps iterate on concept.

A fire hydrant by the Gas Station shows the effects of