Utilizing World Creator for Halo: Outpost Discovery
Falcon's Creative group utilizes World Creator for "The Ring Experience" at Halo: Outpost Discovery.
As one of the top themed entertainment design firms in the world, Falcon’s Creative Group is proud to help its clients design and develop unique, content-driven experiences for location-based entertainment destinations that include theme parks, water parks, museums, resorts, zoos, aquariums, and more. The firm’s digital media division is often responsible for generating the audio, visual, and interactive content that is customized to each of these special venues.
In order to meet the demands and challenges when creating large scale 3D media content at high resolutions, high framerates, and for uniquely shaped surfaces, the Falcon’s Digital Media team is constantly researching, developing, and implementing new software and technology that can optimize their workflow and complement their existing pipeline.
The team had been searching for the best real-time procedural terrain and landscape generator that would leverage the processing power of modern-day GPUs. The 3D artists immediately found World Creator versatile, stable, and easy to use, allowing them to quickly create and iterate large scale 3D terrain environments. The studio has now fully integrated World Creator into its pipeline and process, and are achieving great results on several high-profile special venue projects.
World Creator render test by Falcon's Creative Group
Making the landscapes for "The Ring Experience"
Halo Outpost Discovery is one of the largest traveling multi-day events ever created, bringing the vast and epic Halo video game universe to life with enthralling themed attractions and interactive in-universe encounters. One of the marque attractions is “The Ring Experience,” an immersive, 360-degree dome-based theatrical presentation that explores the ins and outs of a Halo ring installation
“The Ring Experience” was a remarkable collaboration between Herschend Live, 343 industries and our team at Falcon’s Creative Group. We were brought in to develop an immersive and impactful digital media and audio experience for a 25 foot dome theater with a six-month production schedule from concept to grand opening
In the content, guests are linked to a live feed from a remote reconnaissance drone, called the QQ-45 Honeybee, as it takes flight through several unique environments in a seamless POV from start to finish.
During the scriptwriting and early development process, we elected to skip the traditional 2D storyboard animatic phase and move straight into what we call a 3D animatic to validate the timing, scale, and distance we were traveling. World Creator played an integral role in streamlining this process by allowing us to generate all our terrains very early in production, while we were still directing camera flight paths.
Our art directors were then able to efficiently work with artists in real-time to refine the sets – adjusting elevations of mountains, populating the right number of trees, and setting the right mood lighting for each scene. Once the team was happy with a look inside World Creator, we would export the parameters and data into our other software packages in order to render the final look.
Due to the massive nature of the environments and distance traveled, our terrains were procedurally built in real-world scale as tiled blocks with several levels of detail for each landscape. These terrain blocks were placed around the camera path based on distance to help optimize scene load and render times. For areas where the camera came closer to the environments, lidar and photogrammetry scans were conformed and blended to the procedural terrains to increase the level of detail and realism in these areas.
All 3D assets and environments were built and rendered in real-world scale. The ring installation itself measured over 10,000 kilometers in diameter, while the planet that the ring was orbiting was over 95,000 kilometers. World Creator was utilized to procedurally generate all the surfaces for both including all of the lakes, mountains, valleys, deserts, coastlines, and islands.
World Creator has now become an integral part of our production process here at Falcon’s Creative Group. We have now found ways to utilize the software across even more of our projects, from conceptual designs and architectural visualizations, to interactive experiences and film production. We believe that World Creator is the future of terrain generation, and we look forward to all the new updates and features ahead.
“We’ve found that World Creator is one of the most advanced terrain generators available on the market, able to build just about any kind of landscape you could imagine all in real-time. With a vast array of creative tools and improved efficiency, World Creator makes it possible for our directors and artists to focus on creating environments without worrying about lengthy render times. Falcon’s Creative Group has now fully embraced World Creator as a powerful iterative tool, allowing the studio to take large scale virtual 3D environments from a conceptual phase all the way through the visual effects production pipeline.”
- Claudio Gonzalez, CG Supervisor at Falcon's Creative Group
