Gamebryo Element Toolset

3ds max & Maya plug-ins

When artists model things, one of the problems is that they want to know how it’ll actually look in the game, and ideally they want that to be as near as possible as they see it in their modeling package. That also means fast and efficient preview is needed to maximize productivity. Gamebryo’s capabilities seem fairly extensive there:

• Preview interactive content, including animation, lighting and effects in the actual game environment.
• Preview how content will look on other platforms inside the modeling tool; auto-optimizes on export.
• Export practically any content (including particles, skins, etc.) the modeling package can generate.

Animation Tools

As we explained a bit above, Bone LODs allow artists to generate models that are less CPU intensive. Animation works by attributing each individual vertex to one or multiple bones; those bones are then “moved” on the CPU, and vertices are transformed based on their bone(s) in the vertex shader.

You might have a few dozen bones for a model with a few thousands polygons. While that might not look like a lot, it’s definitely going to add up in terms of CPU overhead (especially so in something like a MMORPG!). So, to cut a long story short, the animation tools let the artists preview how good (or horribly bad) their bone LODs look, which is obviously very important in order to make that annoying part of the art pipeline mostly trouble-free.

Two other notable features are “tweaking transitions between different animation sequences” and “apply sequences to different character models” – both of which are touched upon in the other piece.

Scene Designer

Any engine out there is obviously going to come with an editor and Gamebryo is no exception. You can place objects and navigate the scene as you’d expect, and on the plus side of things you can do it either do it inside Gamebryo itself, or at least using the Gamebryo renderer; either way, things will look the exact same way as for the actual end-user, which is a must nowadays. Otherwise, the artists will probably try to kill somebody.

Another thing we weren’t too sure about is that it’s supposedly capable of not only orienting and creating lights, but also cameras. And we also pondered whether it was easily extensible for diverse game genres (including for a RTS) so we’ll be talking about that in the main piece.