Taking the “Work” out of Workflow

The Vision Engine 7’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 content streaming
• Terrain editing, including heightmap painting, colormap painting, and vegetation painting (including trees, grass and other arbitrary objects)
• 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.
• Remote on-target previewing on game consoles.

vForge is not just a static editor – it is a streamlined 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 arbitrary resolutions
• Sky lighting for realistic outdoor lighting
• Full radiosity support for indirect illumination (global illumination)
• Self-illuminating surfaces
• Stained glass
• 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.