Delivering 3D Art to Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

Working as part of the Magic Media group has offered us excellent opportunities to grow and expand our team and capabilities. The group’s assistance has meant bigger and better things for the Ringtail Studios team, allowing us tremendous opportunities like working with Remnant 2! Another incredible opportunity is delivering 3D art to Cyberpunk 2077’s latest expansion, Phantom Liberty. Working alongside the CD Projekt Red team was a pleasure and we were delighted to assist their work by delivering our own suite of services.

Alongside Magic Media, we delivered several game development and game art services. Our main workload, and the bulk of the work for this collaboration, was 3D artwork. The focus for this production was optimization and ensuring a smooth player experience. Since its launch, we were thrilled to see many reviews and players noting the smooth gameplay experience and its technical performance.

 

3D Art Services Delivered to Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty

As mentioned, most of our work was 3D art for this engagement. A significant portion of that work was focused on LOD or Level of Detail of many of the game’s environmental objects. With an entirely new area for the expansion, Pacifica, our focus was optimizing the environmental objects in this area. The art of LOD is about how detailed an object looks, the closer the player is to it. As the player progresses further from the object or it leaves their field of view, detail will be reduced at intervals. This is to preserve a game’s performance given many modern AAA games are a staggering size. This commonly used technique means the game focuses on fully rendering only what is in view and what is within viewing distance of the player.

For this project, our LOD work included a range of in-game objects including buildings, terrain, rock formations, and statues. Executing this work begins by extracting the asset being worked on from the game’s engine – in this case, CDPR’s propriety REDengine.

Once extracted, we optimize the texture using trims and overlaps where possible. The textures are then baked in-engine, the LOD distances required are delivered by us, alongside several other parameters which can be very different depending on what object is being optimized.

 

Working with CD Projekt Red

The team prepared for this collaboration was hand-picked for their expertise in dealing with sci-fi and particularly their experience and interest in the cyberpunk genre. 12 3D artists, 2 QA engineers, 1 head of production, 1 producer, and 1 CEO, meant our team of 17 were eagerly working on the Cyberpunk 2077 expansion.

The communication pipeline was the first thing we ensured was established for our collaboration. The CDPR team were stellar and we knew that with streamlined communication, flowing clearly between both teams, that we’d be delivering the utmost quality. This meant that any issues or questions could be communicated clearly to the right member and were addressed quickly. Given it’s a proprietary engine, we had a bit of a learning curve with the REDengine. The CDPR team were fantastic assisting us in our understanding and comprehension of their engine. Thanks to their technical support, we were up to speed in no time.

The communication also extended to CD Projekt Red’s environment and production leads, who we stayed in touch with mainly through Slack. An effective tool, every member was involved on the designated Slack server and it proved useful for inquiries and prompt solutions. Feedback was delivered through Slack and Jira tickets as well.

This collaboration lasted roughly a year and we can’t stress enough how enjoyable it was. We were delighted to be involved in delivering CD Projekt Red’s creative dreams to this expansion and Cyberpunk 2077’s experience.

If you’d like to leverage our 3D art, animation, co-development services or the wider services offered by the Magic Media group, get in touch today! We guarantee an engaged and bespoke team of industry veterans who will help deliver your dream game into reality.