Inside Look - Unreal Engine

April 14, 2009

Here at Raven, we were able to look at the strengths of the engine and leverage them in the game to make a gorgeous-looking experience.

One particular area of the project that we’ve focused our attention toward is the quality of our material shaders. Unreal already had a great foundation for working with shaders, so we tried to push it in new ways that made sense for our title. In order to make our winter environments more believable, we made a really useful shader that automatically put snow on top of any object. This approach made it easy for an artist to fill an entire forest full of snowy looking assets. What this means for gamers is that they’re not going to see the same snow-painted rock a hundred times over, but instead each will have a unique look that makes sense for how they are placed in the world.

We also spent a lot of time making sure Wolverine has realistic skin shaders, lighting and especially battle damage. He’ll look great running around in a natural outdoor jungle lighting, but even better after he’s wounded. His wounds are accented with accurate highlights on the edges, and then everything slowly heals back up. This system is a blast to see in action.

We also built our tech to extend what Unreal does to each rendered frame after its finished drawing all of our models and effects. Our game has dedicated a serious amount of horsepower to what is called “Post-Process” in order to adjust the color and contrast similar to a Hollywood movie. If you’ve seen the first screenshot we released, that’s actually in-engine using our post-process to tweak everything. We even looked for ways to extend this tech into gameplay in order to show the player what we think Wolverine sees with his feral senses. It’s a great visual effect that rolls over the entire environment, highlighting enemies and point of interest in a super-stylized way.

Using the Unreal Engine has extended the boundaries of our content creators. The benefit of having every major game system live in the same editing tool has let us to raise the quality the X-Men Origins: Wolverine video game to a new level.