6/8/2020 Gamasutra - Using procedural destruction to unleash chaos in Control

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Using procedural destruction

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to unleash chaos in Control
August 6, 2020 | By Chris Kerr
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PROGRAMMING Control, the latest supernatural jaunt from Remedy, August 6, 2020 | By Chris Kerr
takes place in shifting brutalist structure called The
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ART Oldest House. It's an imposing, cinematic, and
impossibly beautiful skyscraper filled with secrets,
More: Console/PC, Production, GDC
AUDIO and wandering its ancient halls is probably the
second best thing about the otherworldly shooter.
DESIGN The first is how you can blow everything inside those
concrete corridors to smithereens.
PRODUCTION
As anybody who's played the game will know, the
destruction system in Control is a delight. Objects cascade around rooms and splinter into fragments as
BIZ/MARKETING
players blitz through levels with the finesse of a radioactive sledgehammer, painting a canvas of chaos
that Jackson Pollock would be proud of.
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View All RSS Explaining how that procedural destruction system was developed and implemented during a talk at GDC
Summer, Remedy's principle VFX artist Johannes Richter said the process began with understanding
August 6, 2020 'granularity.'

Square Enix Co., Ltd.

That principle of granularity revolves around the concept of recreating every level of natural detail in each
Experienced Game
Developer visual effect. That might sound overwhelming, but it's a fairly common principle in the VFX industry --
especially in film -- and asks VFX artists to do their best to capture the continuum of nature.
Plarium Michigan Studio
LP
UX Designer "You try and capture nature because nature isn't quantified. Nature is sort of a continuum from very big
objects down to dust and very thin veils of smoke. And you always want to encapsulate that to create this
rich gradient across all those different scales," explains Richter.
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"If you look at how to do that in a game engine, we're looking at an overlapping representation three
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different layers. And the first one is you can do rigid body simulations (RBDs). You have chunks and parts
August 6, 2020 of props and environments. All of that is RBDs. And the environments are a big static mesh that you can
collide with.
How big is your game's
Discord? (Not this big!) "Then you've got to start representing them with something else because the smaller you get, the more of
The Value Trap of Free them you'll have on screen. So now we're looking at something like mesh particles or rigid body
to Play Design hierarchies or material decals even. Those can sell a certain material richness on those layers. So now
Samsung bringing Xbox we're moving from objects to chunks, and almost to the debris already.
to its smartphones
strengthens Microsoft’s "The last layer is pure particles. Particle sprites, mesh particles for embers, sparks, smoke, fire, splinters,
cloud gaming ambitions
gravel, sand, and all that kind of stuff that plays a big role in filling out that kind of gradient."
How that game sold on
Steam, using the 'NB
number'

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August 6, 2020

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6/8/2020 Gamasutra - Using procedural destruction to unleash chaos in Control
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Farming: Orange Season
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About
Editor-In-Chief:
Kris Graft

Editor: That's the process, but why use a procedural approach to implement it? According to Richter, the VFX
Alex Wawro team on Control was restricted by its size. That meant they couldn't start working on hundreds of assets
News Editor: and props individually. What they could do, however, is assign those objects with rules and metadata that
Alissa McAloon would dictate how they behave.
Contributors:
Chris Kerr "We had to choose a certain approach to this and we went procedural, but what does 'procedural' mean?
Bryant Francis It's a rule-based processing and interpretation of world data. That's really all it is. You get some data and
Katherine Cross you have some rules, then you apply the rules and change the data. That's sort of the key to this," he
explains.
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"What that looked like for us, for this kind of environment process, was we got the art models and the
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world and used them as our data. Then the data was actually amended or augmented with a bit of extra
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stuff, extra metadata that basically told us what everything is made of.

Comment Guidelines "So we could say 'Hey, those cushions are fabric. That concrete is, well, concrete, and the plant is made
out of plant. Once you know that about an object, you can start applying rules based on what those
Blogging Guidelines objects are made of. So you could say 'well, grass spawns bits of leaves when you shoot it. Or concrete
breaks into smaller concrete bits when you shoot it and then spawns dust. Shoot a metal pipe and it
How We Work
spawns water that dribbles out of the hole, and then you add a bend decal to sell a little bit of
Download Media Kit deformation up there.'"

In short, the Remedy VFX team created a finite set of rules that encapsulated the whole process, and
ensured every object -- be it a wooden chair, plant, computer, or concrete pillar -- had a material-driven
reaction to whatever could happen inside the world of Control.

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Richter concedes that it wasn't the easiest system to create, but once the VFX team got over that initial
hurdle they had something they could unleash on a swathe unique objects and props as they came
through the pipe.

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