Hideo Kojima is giving a talk on the FOX Engine at GDC. Stephany is sitting in the audience, and will be reporting the happenings as they happen. Keep checking back for updates. Metal Gear Solid 5 Kojima is joined today by CG art director Jideki Sasaki, technical director Junji Tago, and lighting artist Masayuki Suzuki. The session: “Photorealism through the eyes of a “FOX”: The Core of Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes” is set to start any minute. So keep hitting refresh for updates. It starts off with Kojima showing up with his face wrapped in bandages, and then a new video for The Phantom Pain being shown. Kojima’s name was shown in the trailer. So the rumors were true – as if there were any doubt. Metal Gears Solid 5: The Phantom Pain is an open world game. The title was flashed across the screen. Kojima said that Metal Gear Ground Zeroes mixed with The Phantom Pain is Metal Gear Solid 5. Snake wakes up from a 9 year coma. He has lost a lot of his abilities – and a great evil has escaped. I hear Kiefer Sutherlands voice. Snake is weak and must crawl through the hospital to escape. The guy in front of him is crouched and you can see his bare ass sticking out of the hospital gown a bit. Everyone laughed. They are trying to reach the elevator – and once there a lady rises up from the floor into the ceiling. An explosion occurs. Both men are lying on the floor when a man in a trench coat and possibly horns comes out of the fire menacingly before disappearing. Surely, Metal Gear fans know who these people are. I don’t. The two head for the emergency stairs. Snake is still suffering from muscle atrophy so he is still crawling, laboriously. He can now finally stand, and that part of the demo was finished. After that ordeal, snake can now walk around in the open world, freely. The FOX Engine and photorealism The engine discussion started off with asset creation, with Hideki Sasaki, discussing the “what is real and what is Fox” photos the team released a while back. He showed the conference room photo. He talked about Linear Space and Phsically Based Diffuse reflection. Sasaki showed how Snake could be rendered into the Kojima Productions conference room, showed shots of clothes and leaves – one in FOX and one in life. The asset creators can us photos like these to make sure textures are shaping up. Sasaki is showing a picture of a male child who was scanned with a 3D scanner, and the bust of an older man, which was based on a plaster sculpture. Each were then rendered into the engine. The bust, is of a character in the game who is supposed to hundreds of years old. While they can’t show the finished product, they did show how they can scan an object into the engine, and how it can provide detail such as wrinkles, pores, and other flaws. Photscanning can automatically render textures, according to Sasaki. Rocks and tree trunks look rather “real”.
