REAC 2024 DAY 2 Maya as Editor: The game development approach of Santa Monica Studio.
Historically, many game studios have used Maya as a game editor. This is particularly prevalent amongst first party studios, where console targets take precedence over PC versions of the engine. Santa Monica Studio, the developers of the God of War franchise, are one such studio that started and has continued with this approach. We will discuss how game content at Santa Monica Studio is authored in Maya, and how that influences the architecture of the engine and the build pipeline. We will also discuss how this influences studio culture in general, and other tools developed such as the material editor. We conclude with the challenges this approach has presented us with and a path forward for the future, including our move to OpenUSD.
Speakers:
Stephen McAuley started in video games in 2006 at Bizarre Creations before moving to Ubisoft in 2011, where he spearheaded the graphical vision on the Far Cry brand. In 2020, he joined Sony Santa Monica as a Lead Rendering Engineer and is now Technical Director. He focuses on physically based lighting and shading, data-driven rendering architecture and overall improvements in visual quality. He is also passionate about sharing his knowledge with the industry as a whole, running internal and external training and conferences.
Matt Pettineo (mastodon, twitter, github) is the Lead Rendering Programmer at Sony Santa Monica Studio, and has been a rendering and engine programmer in the games industry for nearly 15 years. Previously he was Lead Engine Programmer at Ready At Dawn Studios, where he worked on The Order: 1886 and the Lone Echo series of games. Matt’s interests and contributions span a wide range of topics, including physically based shading/materials, rendering APIs and abstractions, low-level platform optimization, and general engine architecture. Matt also maintains a personal blog called “The Danger Zone” which hosts many articles about graphics programming topics and open source demos that are hosted on GitHub.
by Rendering Engine Architecture Conference
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