Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

Yes, that's all our work is. So what Jake's doing now is... basically we use this thing called custom normals or weighted normals where essentially, on your big flat faces, you point the normals straight, and then you'll have a single 45 degree angle edge and the normals will be facing towards the larger surfaces, and it'll fake a curve, essentially. So we don't bake any of our assets, because I've got, I don't know, a thousand props, and if each one had its own texture and you were like, okay, load all the props into this level, it would just go and then it would die. So yeah, we only really bake unique assets when it's either something really special for Squadron or it's an organic asset that you wouldn't be able to throw enough triangles at to do it justice anyway, and it would end up cheaper just streaming in a texture.

David Zipper · Senior Weapon Artist

We didn't quite talk about POMs before. It's a way we do details. So POM is short for parallax occlusion mapping, and we use it especially for stuff that goes in. You can see these indents here, and what we do is we model a high poly. That's the only case where we use it. So you can see that it really has perspective. It really goes in. And that is because it has a height map. Basically, everything that's low is black and everything that's high is white. Even if you zoom in, it still looks super cool, because it's really giving the perspective we need for screws and so on.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, POMs are amazing. When we started using those, that changed things overnight.

David Zipper · Senior Weapon Artist

So it's basically putting a sticker on it with the detail, and you can use the stickers as much as you want, basically. And it's kind of like baking a map, but just for the little part where you want the detail to be, right? For screws and indents, it's not worth it to model them. It's really easy for us to just... oh yeah, Jake is offsetting them.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So just to make sure folks are getting this here: the screws and everything, a lot of those indents, they're not actually modeled. It's a sticker that goes on.

Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

And the beautiful thing about having it as a sticker is it's not unique to that single set of pixels. You can place it wherever you want on the weapon. So you can have a bolt that is, I don't know, 64 by 64 pixels of texture memory, and you slap it on 90% of your asset, on 1,000 props. You're streaming in that one set of displacement maps, slapping it on hundreds of props, and you're just streaming that in. The second you stream one prop in, it'll stream in that texture. And then you bring the rest in, and it's like, eh, that's fine, we've already got that texture. So performance-wise, it's real nice.

David Zipper · Senior Weapon Artist

And in some cases, it can be, I don't know, 200 kilobytes or something, because it's a really small texture that you're using over and over again. It just needs to be these really small pieces. And the traditional way of doing it in a lot of games, which is still done and has been done before, is doing basically this technique, but for the whole weapon, even in places where it technically doesn't make much sense to have it, because on a flat surface we just don't need it, right? We don't need to tell the engine that a flat surface is flat, because it's already flat. If that makes sense.