You mentioned the culling system before. What happens a lot of times in many games is when you have to bend down and move, the duster ends up clipping through your butt. How are we dealing with that?
TL;DRClipping is reduced by splitting each item into body zones and marking which zones it hides, so layers can be stacked without modeling each combination or producing puffy tube-like sleeves.
So actually that'd be a great Mark McCall question because he's working on simulation. But in terms of culling, I'm not sure if this is the way other games do it, I think in a similar way. But a lot of games you basically make certain variations that are just modeled to not have stuff underneath. But because we want this intricate layering system, we've developed another thing where in CryEngine you have your top nodes and then you have your meshes under that. And normally it was just your CryEngine node and then your mesh node and that would be like a shirt. But now we've gone further and we've divided that into your CryEngine node, which is your item, and then it divides into all these zones on the body. And then we mark up on a top item which zones it should hide. So let's say you have torso 1, 2, 3, 4 and then arm 1, 2, 3, 5. You get a certain type of outfit that would maybe cover some of these and you mark up in our items which of those zones it culls. So now this one item is divided into multiple sub-items and then our system will tell it which ones to hide when a certain object is on top.
So it's not like in other games where every shirt always comes to exactly here because it doesn't have that system.
And it gives us a lot of flexibility because now instead of modeling things to only show a certain area, we can put multiple things on top of different things because we can just cull out what we need to instead of modeling it specifically for one item.
And that freedom will be passed on to the player.
This is mainly made for the PU system so players can put on whatever they want. And it still looks good too. Things actually look pretty decent.
Because how you would have done it is essentially you would have put a shirt on top of another shirt, right? Which wouldn't penetrate the shirt underneath it. But then all of a sudden you have these giant cylindrical arms on almost everything, right? Every outfit, big tubes. So now if you're wearing a jacket, you can still have a tight-sleeve jacket, and you take that off and you've kind of got a shirt that's a little bit more loose fitting and stuff like that, right? So it simulates how it would work. It looks more realistic.
It frees you up artistically for sure. Because like you said with the cylinders, let's say you want to fit a bunch of stuff, you start getting this super fat puffy jacket, but we can avoid that through the volume system.