GDC 2024 Session Viewer

The New York City of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is roughly twice as large as that of earlier titles in the series. At the same time, new quality and performance constraints required the creation of additional distant city LODs. The manual distant-LOD geometry pipeline of Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales was no longer viable. This lecture describes how Insomniac Games transitioned to automated distant-LOD geometry generation. In particular, it covers in-depth the applications of fundamental mesh analysis concepts (dual meshes, the Euler Characteristic, curvature estimation, etc...) to several difficult problems (beyond standard reduction and remeshing) that arise from the unique constraints regarding distant city LODs present in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2.

Takeaway

Attendees will gain a better understanding of how basic mesh analysis can be used to solve a variety of LOD-related problems, outside of the standard reduction and remeshing algorithms typically provided by middleware. In addition, attendees will gain insight into how the beautiful city vistas in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 were generated via automation.

Intended Audience

Programmers and tech-artists with an interest in distant city LOD generation or a desire to gain more insight into the properties of meshes and how to work with them in relation to LOD generation. A familiarity with standard reduction and remeshing software, such as Simplygon, is useful but not required.