Resident Evil: Raccoon City Dev Licenses Donya's LOD Tool

Author: by Staff

Slant Six Games, the Vancouver, BC studio developing the upcoming Capcom-published Resident Evil: Raccoon City, has licensed Donya's level of detail (LOD) solution Simplygon to increase graphical performance. By adopting Simplygon, the team working on the new mulitplatform Resident Evil will be able to optimize the title's 3D graphics with LOD models that require "little to no fine tuning" by the game's artists, according to Donya. LOD is an optimization technique used often by game developers, in which visual details that players cannot perceive (e.g. visual details of far-off or fast-moving objects) are removed, freeing up processing power and increasing a game's visual performance. Donya said its solution points towards a "one-model approach," which would involve a developers creating a piece of 3D content just once, and that content can then be optimized and repurposed automatically to fit the limitations and needs of different platforms. Slant Six Games' technical director Paul Martin explained how his studio is implementing the solution. "Slant Six is currently using its standalone tool to generate LODs for character rendering meshes, plus to generate lower-detail physics meshes. We also intend to integrate the API into our data conversion pipeline for automated LOD generation for all prop meshes."