In Remedy's first tech blog, Mika Vehkala (Technology Director) tackled the question, "is it better to have your own technology for making games, or should you license an engine?" This week, a new instalment in the series was posted, which sees Kristof Minnaert (Principal Technical Artist/Pipeline Lead) talk about the upcoming inclusion of OpenUSD (Universal Scene Description) within their content pipeline workflows.
If you're not familiar with game engines and the techy side of game development, you can still come away from the article with new pieces of knowledge. Kristof does a great job at slowly introducing new pieces and explaining them in a clear way. But if you're that kind of nerd, there's definitely a lot to jump into, with links to learn more and also contribute.
"To give some context, we have historically operated in a model where our 3D artists, animators, etc. output their content from a Digital Content Creation (DCC) suite of software like Autodesk Maya directly into our data conversion process, asset by asset. This process is responsible for converting the DCC output into our different asset-type-optimized runtime data formats for geometry, animation, etc. So for example, let’s take Jesse from Control. In our current workflow, an outfit for Jesse would be assembled in a DCC by our talented rigging team, who’d then export the full outfit to an intermediate file format such as Autodesk FBX. Our data converter picks up on this FBX file and translates that to the corresponding runtime data format."
In a follow-up comment on Twitter, Remedy's Senior Community Manager, Vida Starčević, shared the post adding: "northlight is our proprietary tech, but we want to keep true to the spirit of free open source software: the team are open sourcing our UsdFbx OpenUSD plugin. that's pretty cool!!"
Read Kristof's full article, HERE!
