Sitting down with Playground Games’ Ben Penrose in Melbourne earlier in the month, Stevivor was able to delve deep into just how Aussie landmarks like The Twelve Apostles had been recreated in-game.
“For the Twelve Apostles, for example, we used a process which we talked about a little bit in the past, called photogrammetry, which is all the rage these days,” Penrose began. “A lot of studios are using that. It allows you to take literally hundreds of photographs of a single object, in this case, an Apostle, or a section of cliff.”
“Then you put [all the photos] through a process back at the studio, which then calculates all the different positions. It knows where the camera was in relation to each picture, and then reconstructs that structure or object that you were photographing in 3D. It gives you like super accurate models of what it was you were trying to capture.
“You could spend hours with an artist sculpting something by hand, but by using this particular process, you get some super uncannily real,” he said. “It’s fairly, fairly quick once you take all the photos. It’s a fairly arduous process getting the data, but the quality that you get out of it afterwards is kind of unrivaled.”
That same process was used in various locations around the country, capturing things that were decidedly Australian. For the most part, it was a small team of just one doing the grunt work.
“The guy we had out there capturing all the footage, he’d send us updates as to how it was going. I remember once he took a picture of himself with his camera phone, like attached to the email.
“He just looked like the most battered soul,” Penrose recalled with a laugh. “His face was covered in sand and he looked like he’d been through hell and back. He was having a great time. He was still smiling, which was brilliant.”
Physically-based rendering will also be used inside Forza Horizon 3 to make sure the deep reds of the Australian Outback are just right.
“This is the first time, I think, in a console generation that we can really utilize [the physically-based] rendering method,” Penrose said. “One of the things that you have to get absolutely spot on with that particular technique is things like color accuracy, brightness accuracy. When we go out with cameras and we start capturing reference for things like ground surfaces and tarmac, that kind of stuff, we go out with color charts as well. When all that information gets processed back in the studio, that will go through a process which relates back to that chart and will make sure the colors are captured in the photograph will get translated into something that’s as accurate as possible. It sort of negates any inaccuracies you would get with a lens with a camera and that kind of stuff.”
With photo-driven modelling, physically-based rendering and 4K captures of the Australian sky that will cause light sources to properly reflect upon everything in-world, Forza Horizon 3 sounds like the most lifelike version of Australia we’ll ever see in a video game.
“I would hope so,” Penrose said with a laugh.
Forza Horizon 3 heads to Windows PC and Xbox One on 27 September.
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