The Unsung Hero of Documentation

Pipeline of design for “Super Nova Stadium”

The pipeline for Super Nova Stadium is designed to be simple for anyone with an understanding of 3D software. The living document (currently at 72 slides!) is maintained by Phil Kukura, the VFX and Lighting specialist for the game.

Lighting in Blue Spawn

The beginning is simple, from creation of the UV’s, moving swiftly to the Substance Painter line of work finally ending in the game engine Unity. Within Unity, it excels at not only explaining how to import materials and assets, it will teach you how to create, optimize, and place the materials for the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP). There are some finite differences between the standard pipeline and the HDRP for Unity. The HDRP utilizes real world light physics to give the world a more realistic feel, and the Super Nova Stadium line of assets takes this into account.

With every system that people work with, there are bound to be some hiccups that are out of our control. The issue our team ran into is to do with transparency. With much effort we have resolved this issue due to some layering concerns.

Advanced Particle System

Finally. The documentation comes to a close with a simple particle tutorial, and lighting optimization to boot. All of the efforts explained in this pipeline are to optimize for the reflection and refraction calculations used for the projectiles in the game. These calculations are extremely CPU intensive, and more research is being completed in this living document to further optimize the performance with the inclusion of lighting probes, and a switch to GPU processing for particles and lights to make sure everything moves as smoothly as possible to aid the players’ experience.

Lighting Probe System (From Above)

All of this comes together with a multitude of people working together and researching problems together so they can be solved in a timely manner.