Need for Speed Edge is a MMO racing game developed by EA Korea studio.
It is the official online game of the "Need for Speed" series. Launched in South Korea and China.
The game was used the Frostbite engine. It is the in-house game engine in EA.
The player can enjoy racing with other players with various vehicles: Lamborghini, Porsche, etc...
This page introduces the major tasks that I have worked on as a technical artist of this game.
Before you look at it, I recommend you watch the in-game trailer below.
#1 Support vehicle & track production
There are 250+ licensed vehicles and 30+ racing tracks in the game as of 2020.
Vehicle artists in EA Korea studio and Glass Egg Digital Media(art outsourcing studio) created high-quality vehicles with vehicle pipeline for Need for Speed EDGE.
I supported the process when there are several issues arise.
Import vehicle assets to Frostbite unsuccessfully.
Need to update vehicle pipeline for exotic parts vehicle asset.
Need to modify several properties or node graphs using automation script.
Rendering issues caused by shader & material.
The vehicle's FX or damage deform is unavailable in the game scene.
Asset version control conflicts for release and branch.
I was involved in making racing tracks as well as vehicles.
The most challenging track production was the Shanghai track.
This was not only the track of the first urban concept but was also based on real terrain.
I did the following tasks at that time.
Define track object outsourcing production pipeline from Autodesk Maya to Frostbite engine.
80% of building and prop assets in Shanghai track were created by Visual Dart base on this pipeline.Script Autodesk Maya, Frostbite engine plug-in tools for outsourcing pipeline.
Modify object shader graphs in Forstbite so that level artists can easily update shader parameters.
Optimize assets and scene with software engineers. To solve the low FPS problems.
And other tracks that I supported shader, event logic modify, pipeline tools and optimization.
#2 Define Warpping workflows
About 70% of vehicles have their own wrapping design attachable to a vehicle.
I wrote technical documents about it: vehicle UV layout, design guide, etc...
Each vehicle's UV is different, so it was hard to check the wrapping before importing it, the first time.
So I scripted a tool that saves rendering five directions of wrapping vehicle.
Vehicle artists' preview was much more efficient after the release of this tool.
150+ wrapping designs were produced in this process.
#3 Vehicle Exterior Parts
EA Korea Studio tried to create a feature: Customize each exterior part of the vehicle.
First, we discussed how to divide the vehicle parts. And we decided to classify the parts into 19.
One of these became the basic frame of the car. Our art team prepares to define rules about others.
Technical Artists, including me, defined the asset name rules of 18 parts.
And based on that, we scripted the tools we needed for the Maya and Frostbite engines.
I was in charge of the tools needed at Maya: parts selector, damage, and export to Frostbite.
This task also worked closely with Glass Egg Digital Media.
