GAME ENGINES // LUMINOUS STUDIO | BETA
PHILOSOPHER’S STONE The first demo for Luminous, called Agni’s Philosophy, is very slick. It tells a brief but classic Final Fantasy story about priests, magic and transforming demons. It revels in every detail, introducing a detailed, dusty town built into a mountain- top populated with characters both strikingly beautiful and realistic, but also ugly, with hairs and odd-looking facial nuances. When he sits down with Develop to talk us
through replay after replay of the real-time CG effects, Square Enix’s Japanese CTO Yoshihisa Hashimoto pours off the details, his labour of love broken down into impressive stats and humble demonstrations of technical genius. Hashimoto was director of the Sonic games for ten years, before moving to Square Enix to head up its next-gen technology efforts. One scene in his tech demo includes the
following: seven hugely detailed character models including Agni herself, whose outfit is built from hundreds of feather assets, an evocative temple environment, plus a giant contorting beast that is evolving from over a hundred thousand smaller insects, themselves made up of thousands of polygon meshes layered with detailed particle effects. Oh, and it’s all running in real-time. At one point Hashimoto pauses the action and spins the camera around to reveal the warts and all textures hidden off camera, to prove the content is real and not a trick. Later, during a close-up of a bearded hobo, his facial scruff dynamically generated in real-time using tessellation, Hashimoto jokes, “More beard!” and “Santa Claus!”, lengthening
strands of hair and recolouring the assets on- the-fly to comical but impressively swift effect. He explains: “This has been a very big deal
for our cinematic team, who would wait hours to see the rendering result of a single frame. Now, within seconds, they can edit characters and change appearances.” He adds: “If an artist came up with the elaborate design [for Agni’s costume] for a game on PS3 or 360, we would really scold them. But this kind of design can be
This has been a very big deal for our
cinematic team, who would wait hours to see the rendering result of a single frame.
Yoshihisa Hashimoto, Square
achieved with the powerful GPUs on the market now, and we can make it look realistic.” Part of this seems to be thanks to a clever, if undisclosed, way the engine is running live with Autodesk’s Maya to allow for live editing of assets in the game renderer – although Square doesn’t go into details. All in all, it is very slick, instantly catapulting Square Enix into a select league of studios that have dared to show super-HD games for PC and next-gen consoles before the latter are even announced. At E3, Square Enix contemporaries
LucasArts, Epic Games and Ubisoft Montreal were the only others happy to break away
from Sony and Microsoft’s sealed-lips policy to show equally marvelous videos for Star Wars 1313, Unreal Engine 4 and Watch Dogs. However any developer that has built a
tech demo will tell you that they are much of a muchness. Smoke and mirrors. Yes, Agni’s Philosophy’s mirrors are probably some of the most detailed, reflective surfaces. And if it was for an actual game, the fanboys would be frothing. But the fact is CG showboating is still showboating. What really intrigues about Luminous Studio is the impact Square Enix hopes it will have on the craft of making games.
CG EYED Fittingly for a Final Fantasy concept, Agni’s Philosophy began with a CG cut-scene. Since Final Fantasy VII, the series has been notorious for almost jarring switches from beautiful rendered cinematics to gameplay featuring vastly downgraded, less expressive character models. The dramatic jump between movie and gameplay may have been leveled out over the years as game technology has improved, but Luminous goes further, blending the fields of traditional CG and in-game rendering. That might seem like a bit of a
non-revelation, but to Square Enix and many other triple-A studios which still fall back on video teams to generate unforgettable CGI segments that prop up a game, it offers a unique change to the workflow and how teams can be structured. “To create this demo, we requested the visual arts team create a pre-rendering CG first, and that was ported into our engine,” explains Hashimoto, showing the two
JULY 2012 | 21
Square Enix CTO Yoshihisa Hasimoto (above) insists the impressive visuals from its Luminious engine (top) can be achieved with powerful GPUs on the market already
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