I have been working on Ryse for almost two years now, it’s one of the most amazing projects I have had the chance to work on. The team we have assembled is just amazing, and it’s great to be in the position to show people what games can look like on next-gen hardware.. Autodesk asked us to come out to Anaheim and talk about some of the pipeline work we have been doing, and it’s great to finally be able to share some of the this stuff.
A lot of people have been asking about the fidelity, like ‘where are all those polygons?’, if you look at the video, you will see that the regular Romans, they actually have leather ties modeled that deform with the movement of the plates, and something that might never be noticed: deforming leather straps underneath the plates modeled/rigged holding together every piece of Lorica Segmata armor, and underneath that: a red tunic! Ryse is a labor of love!
We’re all working pretty hard right now, but it’s the kind of ‘pixel fucking’ that makes great art -we’re really polishing, and having a blast. We hope the characters and world we have created knock your socks off in November.
I can finally talk about something I have been working on in the past two years. One of the reasons I returned to Crytek was to push the use of game engines in linear content creation like film and television. On Avatar I saw how much time and effort went into layout, blocking, virtual sets, etc. The tools were archaic, the feedback loop was abysmal at times. In games we have to layout massive levels that people can roam through for 8-15 hours or more and CryEngine’s tools are some of the best for that.
I have been working as Product Manager with a small team of great guys, where I basically define the goals and backlog. It’s thrilling to finally get to see things like Catmull-Clark subd in runtime, or multi-channel EXR output, or Alembic support. It’s been really fun to define what the product is and prioritize features largely without external dependencies or politics, I thank Crytek for trusting me to helm such a project.
I have been researching the best options available for the D300 when it comes to quickly generating some lightprobes/panoramas. This of course means fisheye lenses. Currently, Sigma is the only company that makes a 180 degree circular fisheye. They come in two flavors, 8mm, and 4.5mm. The 8mm projects a full circle onto a full 35mm sensor (full frame), but on an APS-C sensor it is cropped. The 4.5mm however, throws a perfect circular image onto an APS-C sized sensor; I believe it is the only lens that does this.
The Pixels
You would think that the 4.5mm would be the way to go, I did until I took a look at both. It really comes down to the pixels. The width in pixels of the image thrown by the 4.5mm lens is roughly 2285px in diameter. So while you can shoot less, an entire panorama taking about 3 shots, it will come out as a <4k equirectangular. However, using the 8mm, you need 4 shots, plus one zenith (5 shots total) and it generates an 8k image. While the 4.5mm does generate a 180 degree image across, as you can see it is very wasteful.
So why doesn’t the lens have full coverage in at least the short dimension? I think it’s because it’s a lens designed to fit Canon and Sigma cameras, not just Nikon. Canon sensors have a 1.6 crop factor and Sigma’s Foveon X3 has a 1.7 crop factor (13.8mm)! The coverage is so small because Nikon DX format has a 1.5 crop factor, the APS-C sensor is much larger than Canon or Sigma. The actual circle measures 12.3mm, even small for the Sigma, which makes me believe they future-proofed it for Four Thirds.
For an APS-C sensor like the D300, I would recommend the 8mm, unless you really need a full uncropped image. The 4.5mm, while being more expensive, also has an aperture of 2.8, compared to the 8mm (f/3.5)
I am not super constrained on time, if you are on set and shooting bracketed probes between takes or something, the 4.5mm will save you two shots (18 pictures) and this might be preferable. That said, it will only generate a 4k image in the end (which might be enough)
