Embark sessions at NDC 2021

At this year’s Nexon Developers Conference, game makers at Embark hosted sessions on physically-based animation, procedural content creation in hard surface modeling, and photogrammetry.

Nexon Developers Conference is an annual game dev conference hosted by Nexon.

Every year, Nexon hosts the Nexon Developers Conference. In case you’re unfamiliar, it’s Korea’s largest game industry knowledge-sharing conference. This year, it featured a number of sessions on everything from data analysis to programming and visual art.

A few of us from Embark hosted sessions too, about machine learning animation, procedural content creation in hard surface modeling, as well as our photogrammetry workflows.

You can check out our sessions below.

In his session on physically-based animation of large virtual robots, Tom Solberg walks through how we apply reinforcement learning to create more emergent and interesting physical gameplay.

Just like physically-based rendering improves fidelity and realism of graphics, physically-based animation improves the quality and realism of movements and lets players interact with these animations. It’s a topic that we also covered in this post the other month.

Erik Hallberg, meanwhile, talks about how we’re automating the creation process for our hard surface assets. The session goes through what the simple input geometry looks like, as well as how the fully automated UV, high-poly, and baking sub-processes work.

Finally, Darko Pracic goes through how we use photogrammetry as a tool for content creation here at Embark, and what we see as the main strengths and weaknesses of applying photogrammetry in game development. Darko also shares some tips on how anyone can scan objects at home, with free, open-source software using a mobile phone. Darko has written about our photogrammetry tools before, you can read his post here.

Enjoy!