At Ubisoft, we are constantly working to develop new technologies
that will generate ever more realistic worlds,
improve the player experience,
as well as provide the best tools to our creators.
We want to introduce you to three emerging technologies
that we draw upon at Ubisoft
to continue creating the future of gaming.
Look at these two images from Watch Dogs: Legion.
Do you see the difference?
How one of them is more realistic than the other?
Developers achieve this level of detail thanks to Raytracing.
Stephanie Brenham, Team Lead Programmer at Ubisoft Toronto,
tells us what Raytracing is and how it works.
Raytracing is about simulating how light actually moves in our world.
It's not just about a set piece where you're looking at a static shot.
It's about interacting with the world in real time.
The main areas are reflections,
shadows, global illumination.
These reflections are not just limited
by what is in front of the screen.
These are things that come from off of the screen
and can be crisp, as we would expect in a modern urban landscape.
In the real world,
light from a light source doesn't end in crisp shadows,
there's a fall off,
there's a rounded shape to these shadows,
and that allows extra light to come into the scene.
If you have a bright red object sitting next to something white,
you're going to end up seeing a bit of a pink tinge to it
because the light interacts with everything that it's touching
and this global illumination adds to the warmth of the scene,
to the drama of the scene,
to making it immersive.
In game development,
teams are not only working on delivering more realistic worlds,
but also on creating innovative experiences
and delivering them to players in new ways.
That's where cloud technology can play a big part.
Jimmy Boulianne from Ubisoft Saguenay
explains how cloud streaming works to play games on any device
and the promise of cloud gaming
for the future of game experiences.
Playing a game in streaming
is the same as having a virtual console.
So instead of having those devices at home,
they are running into the cloud and through the internet,
it's ready to play.
The main advantage is to have access to it from anywhere,
as long as I have a stable network connection.
is to make sure that the latency
so the time between you and the game
is as short as possible.
So the other advantage is that I can play
recent games right away
without the need to install it or to upgrade.
In the future
since the game is running into the cloud,
we'll go more and more into cloud gaming.
We're going to move from streaming to cloud gaming.
Game developers can use this extra power and resources
to extend the game or improve the game experience.
So it means more physics, more AI,
more non-playing characters,
the size of the world,
or even the number of players
that can be connected at the same time
in the same world.
The best thing to do is to try it out.
It's good opportunity to go through our latest games
on Stadia
Luna,
Microsoft Cloud
and Go Force now.
So enjoy!
And it's just the beginning.
Technology is at the service of Ubisoft's creators.
We have R&D teams that are working on cutting edge tools
to improve our production pipelines.
Abassin Sourou Fangbemi,
Data Scientist at Ubisoft La Forge
introduces us to one of those prototypes.
A machine learning software that can generate
3D animations from 2D videos.
Our project, ZooBuilder, helps us create 3D animations for animals
from videos, using Machine Learning.
Animals come in different forms and shapes
and they also have different skeleton structures.
So to create animations for animals
most of the time are done manually
and it is what we call "keyframe animations."
Machine Learning algorithms are a set of algorithms that are capable of learning
different features or patterns from different data
we provide them. Using those assets,
we try to create a set of synthetic data
that we use to train our Machine Learning models.
Once the models are trained,
we integrate them into an end-to-end pipeline
that we call ZooBuilder,
and that takes us inputs the 2D videos
and then generates as outputs the 3D animations.
The process of creating the 3D animation goes like this:
Firstly, ZooBuilder tries to identify on each frame of the video
the different locations, or the 2D coordinates,
of the different joints that constitute the skeleton of the animal.
ZooBuilder use that sequence
to infer the corresponding 3D coordinates
and it is those 3D coordinates that we use to actually create our 3D animations.
Because ZooBuilder is still a prototype
we cannot use it yet in our productions.
We think ZooBuilder can be used
to help animators prototype quickly their animations.
Additionally, AI and Machine Learning models
are capable of generating more content than humans are capable of
in a short amount of time.
And though those contents generated by AI are not necessarily perfect,
still they can be a great source of inspiration for our artists.
Want to learn more about our in-house technology and expertise?
Visit www.ubisoft.com/technology