InstaLOD empowered SEGA to conquer the challenges of Sonic Frontiers’ vast open world, automating asset optimization for 360-degree visuals and reducing production times by up to 15x while maintaining AAA quality for all gaming platforms.
Sonic Frontiers is SEGA’s next-generation action game that brings the franchise’s typical stage-clear gameplay into a vast open world called the Open Zone. The map is packed with enemies, uncharted ruins and unique Sonic challenges that the players can race through at the familiar, supersonic speed.
However, the sheer number of assets on the island posed a major challenge during development. SEGA needed to create a landscape through which the blue hedgehog could move at high speeds without the game breaking up or slowing down. It was also the first time in the Sonic series that the player was able to view the world from any 360-degree camera angle.
In order to reduce the performance load, different Levels-of-Detail (LODs) were necessary for nearly every asset. That’s why SEGA turned to InstaLOD to speed up their development pipeline.
Enabling game developers to build richer entertainment experiences while achieving massive time and cost-savings.
Automating the Process
InstaLOD was highly accurate in its polygon reduction making it incredibly easy for the team to automate the entire LOD generation process. For most assets this simply meant that optimization, which normally took several days to complete, was now performed in mere minutes.
Example of Kronos Island’s guardian deity ASURA
Landmark assets such as the ASURA model, however, counted among the most complex in the game. They needed to be visible from long range yet be highly detailed from up close. According to the developers, manually adjusting the polygon count and skinning for each LOD would have taken 5 days per asset. And there were nearly 70 similar enemy models in the game plus all the hundreds of other props and objects in the game. InstaLOD reduced the workload to just a single day of work to setup the pipeline automation.
Background objects, scaffolding and the most distant LODs, on the other hand, were the perfect application for InstaLOD’s texture baker. Transferring surface details from high-poly onto low-poly assets significantly eased the processing load on weaker hardware. If done manually, these processes would have taken up to considerable time per asset.
Supersonic Speed for AlI Platforms
Automation also resolved many pain points of developing a AAA game for all major gaming platforms in parallel. The team simply prepared profiles that set the polygon reduction to a suitable level for each model – and with a few changes they were easily adjusted for each platform.
Looking back at the project, the team at SEGA stated that the development of Sonic Frontiers benefited massively from automating their 3D data optimization process with InstaLOD. Artists could finally dedicate their time to improving the quality of the game instead of wasting it on non-creative, manual labor.
