Next week, the highly anticipated new SSX game finally hits the shelves. Over three years in development, it IS a massive game… a re-invention of the popular franchise on a whole new scale, with new characters, new game play challenges, 9 mountain ranges, hundreds of tracks, and an epic new visual style.
Vancouver ACM SIGGRAPH is excited to host SSX team members Ron Bignell, Caleb Howard, and Frank Vitz, who will take you through their creative journey, describing the technical challenges they faced on the project, and sharing some of the solutions they and the SSX development team came up with along the way to creating the Massive World of SSX.
Senior Art Director Ron Bignell will take a look at the artistic implications of the re-invention of SSX for the Gen 3 platforms; how to take a much loved franchise with deep arcade style roots and debut it on the Gen 3 consoles, how to make it appeal to the existing fan base and attract a new one and how to find an art direction style that walks the line between arcade game play and stunning realistic visuals.
CG Supervisor Caleb Howard will describe the challenges of creating the huge amount of SSX content needed to be competitive against today’s block buster games; Researching the epic mountain ranges of the world, exploring NASA and Google Earth, and developing new algorithms, were all part of the journey. The end result was a set of procedural track creation tools and work flows that became a key to the team’s success.
Technical VFX Director Frank Vitz will share the dev team’s quest for a new visual style for SSX, and how they leveraged advanced rendering techniques in support of an exaggerated yet realistic looking world, using such techniques as HDR, deferred rendering, atmospheric scatter, weather effects, snow spray and the signature SSX “Tricky” effects.
Join us next Wednesday, February 29th, at the Vancity theater for an inside look at the Massive World of SSX.
Doors open at 6pm for an industry mixer. (Ticket holders only)
TICKETS:
Register
Non-members – $25
Members – $15
Group – $20 (5 or more) Please contact us for the group rate discount code.
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