Welcome to Simteract’s inaugural blog post! Simteract and its divisions are leading the technological field in advanced and realistic simulations. Today we’re going to provide a deeper look at one of our specializations, as well as tease how we’re using our expertise to develop our own family of games and tools.
Welcome to Simteract’s inaugural blog post! Simteract and its divisions are leading the technological field in advanced and realistic simulations. Today we’re going to provide a deeper look at one of our specializations, as well as tease how we’re using our expertise to develop our own family of games and tools.
Simteract’s Art Director, Artur Szymański, is creating streamlined integrations and pipelines between software such as Houdini, and game engines like Unreal Engine 4. Developing simulation games presents many difficulties and technical challenges. With the in-house solutions we’ve developed and refined, generating realistic and ready-to-use assets is important for all phases of the game.
Most simulation games need to emulate realistic cities, especially if using real-world cities as part of their gameplay. Simteract’s tools for generating real cities and buildings is not only fast and easy, but incredibly well-optimized.
OpenStreetMap data gives us accurate information for buildings, landmarks, and roads. In an instant we can have levels ready for aerial viewing or as a basis for level artists to touch up with more detail. Upcoming iterations of this tool will both increase its precision and speed, as well as enable designers to move individual buildings to fit gameplay needs.
In cases where data is missing, or specific needs are required, additional tools have been made with the help of Houdini to enable the generation of custom buildings. Integrated with Unreal Engine 4, anyone has the ability to generate custom building shapes and heights, all instanced with modular assets and LODs.
By simply creating a basic shape, near-instantaneous buildings can be generated and modified on-the-fly to fill empty spaces in levels without having to load up your 3D artists with trivial work.
Creating large and realistic landscapes can also be a huge constraint on the time of the art department, most notably when requiring dozens of landscapes for a massive open world game. Our solution to this problem enables artists to effortlessly ‘paint’ the vertices of any size of landscape in Unreal Engine 4 and, with the help of a custom pipeline with Houdini, generate a detailed and realistic-looking landscape.
Not only does it generate a heightmap for the landscape, but also vegetation splat maps and landscape layers. All of this is done at an incredible resolution with erosion details up to a single meter.
While this is only a teaser of the production advantages that the exceptional talent here at Simteract has developed, it should provide some great insight into Simteract’s core goals with our game and tool development. We look forward to talking about more technical aspects of the company, as well as delving into the minds of our designers and production team when we’re ready to discuss the games we’re developing.