Using Megascans for Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem

Simon Majar from Wolcen Studio published a post about the use of Quixel Megascans for the development of Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem. The developer discusses importance of the recently released tool and gives some ideas on using Megascans when working with a title. 

Megascans is one of the world’s largest online scan resources, with thousands of standardized and physically based surface scans, vegetation scans and 3D scans.

When I met Teddy, the CEO of Quixel, a year and a half ago, we shared the same passion about realistic rendering, and the same vision about his project Megascans. I was (and still am) very excited about it and its possibilities. The quality/accuracy along with the simplicity of production would allow 3D artists to do amazing things. At this moment, we entered in the private beta, and it became clear that it could be a great match with Wolcen. We were four people at that time, and Quixel tools would allow us to realize our ambitions.

Building an Open World, with a dynamic time of day, and many different environments is a great challenge. Both from the technical and artistical perspective. Hopefully, the Quixel team would help us to achieve this task. They worked for more than a decade to build the biggest scan library, with an Ecosystem Philosophy.

The technology used is called photogrammetry, you may have heard of it, it consist of taking photographs of an object/surface from different points of view, to re-create it in 3D. To make it usable in a renderer, you’ll then have to extract the albedo/normal/roughness/reflectivity and delete all lighting information. This technique is easy to handle, but hard to master.

All the scanned elements are physically based, which means every texture or asset in the game looks and feels consistent no matter the lighting condition.

With different other techniques, we use a variety of optimized materials, that can fit with many different objects. This way, we keep our production efficient, we maintain visual quality and save ressources for better performance. Here is some materials of our internal library.

A tool called Studio let us mix different materials, making them more complex, and unique. This is something we haven’t used a lot yet, but it looks promising.

We use the Quixel SUITE to texture (almost) all our assets in the game. By example, each piece of armor we create use scanned materials. It is of course not all automatic, many things are hand crafted (with love from our 3D artist Benjamin).

These tools are powerful enough that we can match AAA graphics even as a small indie company, and their efficiency allows us to better concentrate on the artistic and gameplay side of the game.

I must say that it is a great honor and pleasure for me to work with assets of this quality, and to be in touch with the great team behind it.
Their passion and work for years have created a whole new step forward in the world of realistic computer graphics.

If you want to know more about Megascans, visit their website.

The Beta just got open to everyone, so you can try it at home!

And here is the Suite’s website.

Simon Majar, Wolcen Studio