Abschlussvortrag: V-Asteroids: A Procedural Asset Creation Pipeline for Beyond Good and Evil 2

Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Lürig and Prof. Dr. Rezk-Salama
Abstract:
In the rapidly evolving field of video game development, procedural asset creation has become
an invaluable tool for generating diverse and dynamic content. This master thesis presents
the development of a Visitable Asteroids (V-Asteroids) Generator for Beyond Good and Evil
2, a AAA videogame developed by Ubisoft. This pipeline is designed for the procedural
creation, editing, visualization and export of asteroid assets.
The problem statement centres around optimising the procedural generation process to
improve efficiency in workflow and in-game performance, and overall user experience for level
designers and artists.
The main objectives of this research are to develop, implement, and evaluate a procedural
asteroid generation pipeline; assure accuracy of meshes, optimise the pipeline by addressing
limitations and challenges of procedural generation techniques and appreciate the impact of
the procedural generation pipeline on the workflow of artists and designers during an
internship at Ubisoft.
The methodology involves a review of related work on procedural generation pipelines in the
gaming industry, a comprehensive examination of the procedural asset creation pipeline
through practical implementation, and a critical review of the pipeline's performance,
employing metrics to gauge processing times according to procedural steps and complexity
of the assets.
The main findings give evidence that the most important, critical steps for an efficient workflow
are a) a critical review of design requirements and testing of foreseen techniques in the
Preparatory Phase, b) assurance of fast preview availability and optimization of processing
time when compared to export of produced assets, with appropriate use of performance
metrics, and c) the importance of streamlining pipelines and use of auxiliary tools, within the
Companies procedures.
These findings demonstrate the potential of V-Asteroids as a practical case study in the
development, and optimization of a procedural organic asset generation pipeline. The
outcomes of the research contribute to the AAA game development knowledge in the field of
procedural asset creation and game development, benefitting designers, developers, and
artists in developing effective procedural generation techniques for game assets.