Chris Doran is the founder and COO of lighting outfit Geomerics, which is providing tech for the Kim Swift-made Quantum Conudrum. Will Freeman asks how the industry looks to a company shining a spotlight on games
First off, how are things at Geomerics? Great, thanks. The reception for our new tech at GDC was excellent, as was the response to seeing real-time global illumination on mobile devices. There was a real sense that lighting is becoming increasingly important, and you could see that in the calibre of developer that was coming to see us.
Chris Doran (above) and his colleagues are spearheading developing lighting tech for the next generation of platforms
And are there any new games you are allowed to talk about? There are over 20 games currently in production using Enlighten, but we can only talk about a handful. We were delighted to see Quantum Conundrum receive a Best in Show nomination at E3 and are really looking forward to seeing the final game. Medal of Honor: Warfighter is looking great and really pushing the lighting and the Close Quarters pack for Battlefield 3 shows off how Enlighten works in destructible environments nicely.
What has been the focus at Geomerics as you look towards a generation transition? Ease of authoring is the overriding theme. We have our core technology in place, as well as
60| JULY 2012
differentiating features for more powerful hardware. The challenge is to wrap this up in as simple a way as possible and we have been making major improvements in this area.
As we look to more powerful hardware
developers expect some tasks that used to require artist intervention to be automated.
Chris Doran, Geomerics On current generation memory and
compute resources are highly contested. Most developers will accept some authoring workload if it helps minimise the load at the point of runtime. Enlighten is no different in this respect. We
provide a range of optimisation strategies, and developers choose how much up-front work they want to do.
As we look to more powerful hardware
developers expect that some of the tasks that used to require artist intervention can be automated. This shift is essential to freeing up teams to focus on entirely new stuff. The transition for Enlighten is no different.
We are replacing tasks that used to require authoring and mark-up with fully automated options. These improvements ensure the Enlighten workflow is even easier than before. The option to go in and make final optimisations by hand will always be there, but will become increasingly unnecessary. When making the decision to automate
workload our philosophy is that we cannot compromise the quality of the final image. We spend a lot of time researching real-time global illumination techniques, but we only ever implement those that we know give high-quality results matching those of an off-line renderer.
What other tech have you been working on at Geomerics? One feature we are very pleased with is our integration in Autodesk’s tools. We have