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Taking the “Work” out of Workflow

The Vision Engine 8’s SDK provides an intuitive WYSIWYG (= what-you-see-is-what-you-get) workflow designed to maximize creativity and minimize time-wasting complexity. Artists can export art assets like geometry, textures, animations, materials or lights from their preferred modeling software into the scene editor, vForge. The scene can be interactively populated, visual effects can be created and tweaked in runtime, and all aspects of your gameplay can be fully tested without ever leaving the editor.

3ds Max/Maya Exporters

State-of-the-art and powerful exporters for the latest versions of Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya are available. Among other features, the exporters can export both static geometry and animated characters, including skeletal animations, vertex animations, and morph targets.

vForge for Flexible Scene Editing

The Vision Engine’s scene editor, vForge, is the core tool of the content creation pipeline. It incorporates:

• Adding and editing shape instances of game objects (entities)
• Adding and editing special effects, such as dynamic lights, volumetric effects, projectors, mirrors, paths, particle systems etc.
• Script editing using the Vision Engine’s integrated LUA scripting solution
• Interactive shader and material editing
• Shader assignment
• Setting up zones and properties for dynamic content streaming and dynamic visibility determination
• Terrain editing, including heightmap painting, colormap painting, and vegetation painting (including trees, grass and other arbitrary objects)
• Setting up and configuring Vision's default forward and deferred rendering solutions as well as custom renderers, including standard and post-processing effects
• Particle effect editing, including constraints, collision volumes, emitters, and many other properties
• Static lighting/global illumination computation and tweaking
• Adding and editing objects provided by third-party middleware integrations such as IDV SpeedTree, Kynapse AI, nVidia PhysX, Bullet Physics, various sound modules, and many more.
• Previewing all types of resources and assets, profiling a running scene, and dynamically monitoring resource usage on all target platforms
• Remote on-target previewing on game consoles.

vForge fully supports prefabs and multi-user editing, providing a streamlined editing environment for artists and level designers. What's more, vForge is not just a static editor – it is a modular technology with a highly flexible architecture that allows you to easily create an editor perfectly suited to your workflow needs. Extending vForge with plug-ins written in C# is a matter of a few lines of code. You can expose custom, game-specific shapes such as AI nodes, or even features as complex as 3D brush painting for voxel editing to artists or level designers. All custom shapes benefit from the whole spectrum of vForge´s editing conveniences, such as copying, undo/redo and visual linking to other shapes.

vLux for Computational Lighting

vLux is a very powerful and very intuitive lighting tool that is perfectly integrated into the Vision Engine’s workflow. vLux includes:

• Generating lightmaps for complex scenarios at user-defined resolutions
• Sky lighting for realistic outdoor lighting
• Full radiosity support for indirect illumination (global illumination)
• Self-illuminating surfaces
• Stained glass and sky lighting
• Generation of orthogonal light maps, allowing normal maps and specularity to be used with an arbitrary number of static lights and full radiosity support
• Generation of volume-based lighting information for dynamic entity illumination, fully taking radiosity into account. This means a character that moves close to a wall will be influenced by the indirect light bouncing from that wall.

Powerful Animation

The Vision Engine´s powerful animation system provides support for many of the animation methods in Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya. Optimized quaternion-based skeletal animations, morphing deformers, and vertex animations provide the basis for smooth, lifelike character animations. Skeletons and animation setups can be shared across meshes in order to save memory, while the sharing of animation results across entities allows for high-performance mass scenes with little performance impact.

Fully configurable animation trees makes dynamic layering and blending of arbitrary animations extremely easy. In keeping with the philosophy of creative and technical freedom, the Vision Engine additionally allows you to define your own vertex and bone modifiers, resulting in an extremely flexible animation setup.

Depending on the requirements of your game, animation can either be performed on the CPU, the GPU or the PlayStation 3´s SPUs, with many platform-specific optimizations ensuring optimal performance characteristics.

Remote Script Debugger and Profiler

Developers can directly connect to a Vision-based game and remotely view and debug its LUA scripts - regardless of which platform the game is running on. What's more, the debugger looks and feels similar to Visual Studio, so developer's will immediately feel at home browsing code, setting breakpoints and inspecting variables. Code and variables can be changed dynamically, immediately taking effect in the running game.

The Remote Script Debugger also includes a powerful script profiler, allowing developers to quickly analyze the performance of LUA script code.

A Range of Extra Tools

A large set of useful tools completes the package. This includes a model viewer and scene viewer for PC and game consoles, a resource viewer to monitor and benchmark all loaded resources and their memory footprint, and a bitmap font generator to turn arbitrary Unicode character sets into textures.

Featured Screenshots

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