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The Number One Educational Resource for the Game Industry

Session Name: Asking the Impossible on SSX: Creating 300 Tracks on a Ten-Track Budget
Speaker(s): Caleb Howard
Company Name(s): Electronic Arts Canada
Track / Format: Visual Arts

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Overview:

When Electronic Arts set out to create the next generation of the SSX console snowboarding franchise, the first question was how to create an order of magnitude more content without breaking the bank, or sacrificing the quality. Our answer was to develop a new generation of pipeline using procedural tools for the level designers and artists. Previous versions of SSX took between a year and a year-and-a-half of labor to take initial concept drawings to completed track. With the first generation of procedural tools in place, that was reduced to thirty days. In a procedural paradigm, the tools are continuously developed to isolate manual bottlenecks and automate redundant effort. In this talk, Caleb Howard - CG Supervisor and Procedural Lead at EAC - talks about the unique challenges met, and describes the evolution of the tools - from initial design to the delivery of SSX.

GDC 2012

Caleb Howard

Electronic Arts Canada

free content

Visual Arts

Visual Arts