Remedy Entertainment’s environment art technology and workflows in Alan Wake 2

AAA games require an ever-increasing number of high-quality assets to generate complex environments. At Remedy Entertainment, Principal Technical Environment Artist Benjamin Lindquist shares more about the studio’s content creation pipeline for their latest hit game, Alan Wake 2. Thanks to Substance 3D Designer, in-house tools and technical implementations, the art team was able to generate vast environments, streamline their material creation workflow, and maintain top-notch asset quality throughout production. Read more in our interview with Benjamin.

My name is Benjamin Lindquist and I’ve been working as a Game Artist / Environment artist in the games industry since 2012. Despite making “art” for quite some time and enjoying it, I’ve always had a fascination with technical aspects of content creation.

During the 10 years at Remedy, I’ve slowly moved towards a more technical focus and taking ownership of how we create content in the Ernvironment Art team. I’m currently working as a Principal Technical Environment Artist which, to put it simply, is a sort of nerdier version of an environment artist.

My day to day is very varied, depending on current needs, ranging from R&D related to content workflows, writing documentation, mentoring artists, overseeing art-quality, working on visual targets and a lot more.

Remedy entertainment

Remedy Entertainment was established in 1995 and is the oldest independent game development studio in Finland. We’re currently based in both Espoo, Finland and Stockholm, Sweden with close to 400 employees from over 30 different nationalities in total. We’re known for visually striking narrative driven action games such as Max Payne, Alan Wake, Quantum Break, Control and most recently Alan Wake 2.

Alan Wake 2

Alan Wake 2 is a 3rd person mystery driven survival horror game. You play as two heroes, Saga Anderson and Alan Wake. Saga Anderson is an accomplished FBI-agent that arrives in a small town in the Pacific Northwest to investigate a string of ritualistic murders. Alan Wake was a best-selling author that got trapped in a nightmarish version of New York after the events of the first game 13 years ago. These two characters' fates intertwine in numerous ways, but I won’t spoil it more than that.

The game was in development for roughly 4 years until initial release in October of 2023, but we’re still working on more content for it in the form of expansions and updates. We released the first expansion called Night Springs along with a free update containing a photo mode. The second expansion called The Lake House will be released in October this year.

The reception has been overwhelmingly positive both among critics and the gaming community. Receiving over 200 awards and glowing reviews has been astonishing. We’ve been really taken aback by the reception and we’re incredibly grateful for it.

Art direction

Our art director, Janne Pulkkinen, has a strong vision for what he wants to see on screen and that influences a lot of different aspects of the art. The themes of the Pacific Northwest were quite different from the ones of the Dark Place and as such a lot of the materials used in one setting weren’t usable in the other.

The materials themselves were crafted with realism in mind however and as such we were able to utilize a lot of scan data. Materials weren’t necessarily art-directed in the same capacity as lighting, VFX & color-grading for example. You can affect the final look quite a bit even if your materials are fully realistic.

Come to think of it though, one aspect that did have a sort of otherworldly quality was the fact that materials were authored a bit more wet than what they might have been in “normal” circumstances. It’s a subtle thing but the player might sense it even if they don’t fully realize it.

The Environment Art Team

The environment art team was mainly divided by game locations. Each location had a main owner and several artists supporting them. Nazareno Urbano, the lead environment artist, was involved in all the locations but was doing a lot of hands-on work in the Dark Place, for example. I wasn’t dedicated to any specific location but supported the team with various fixes and improvements while keeping an eye on the material and asset quality.

As we collaborated with Epic, we had full access to the Megascans content, so we leveraged that a lot in building our material library. We exported them from Quixel Bridge straight into Substance 3D Designer where we modified and tweaked them to make sure they were cohesive and within acceptable PBR-ranges. These materials were then used in our in-engine layered material system where we could combine them based on height data and painted masks.

Tileable materials that weren’t based on scans were mostly made procedurally in Substance 3D Designer while unique texturing was done in Substance 3D Painter.

Substance 3D tools

The Substance 3D tools are incredibly powerful, and I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what can be done with them. Even though Substance 3D Designer might not be the easiest to get into, once you do, you quickly realize its massive potential. Designer is at the heart of our material creation workflow, allowing us to tweak and validate our scanned materials, and provides the flexibility of creating materials from scratch when needed.

During production, we naturally don’t have that much time to test out different features. Part of my work is also dedicated to R&D, as we will definitely use Substance even more on future projects.

Northlight

Our in-house render engine Northlight allows for live-editing content so anything that changes on disk will be updated in-engine while the game is running. This allows us to iterate on materials in, for example, Substance 3D Designer very quickly as any changes can be automatically exported which in turn are almost instantaneously visible in-engine.

Regarding raytracing we mainly tried to keep in mind not to have too long and thin triangles as those are suboptimal when it comes to RT performance. In certain cases that might mean subdividing an asset for a more even poly-distribution.

Workflow Enhancements

From what I’ve been told by our artists the setup of clear guide values (swatches) for our materials with the accompanying PBR checker that I developed in Substance 3D Designer made material creation a lot more streamlined.

We used to have a PBR checker that only flagged extreme values and didn’t really help in visualizing how far off the materials were. I changed this behavior to act more like a heatmap which gave a more informative view of the acceptable ranges. This PBR checker was replicated 1 to 1 in our engine, so our artists were able to verify the materials both in Substance 3D Painter, Designer and our engine.

Iteration time was a lot faster as artists could check their material ranges in any of the contexts that we used for material work. It’s hard to estimate how much time it saved in total but one thing that we know about any creative work is that context switching kills a lot of the momentum you gain while creating, so minimizing that is ultimately very helpful.

R&D

The R&D work pertains to figuring out how we could make our environment art content workflows better or more accurate whether the issues are related to meshes, materials, textures or something else.

As that might be a bit vague, I’ll share an example of R&D work that I’ve done in the past. A lot of times it involves bringing up a difficult or tedious workflow, in this case normal map baking, and researching and suggesting an alternative, depending on the field, to either our tools-, engine- or rendering-programmers.

At the time we baked our assets to our proprietary tangent-space by using custom plugins in xNormal. This was a less-than-ideal workflow as most of our artists were used to using the Substance 3D tools and xNormal wasn’t otherwise part of our pipeline in any way.

Once we agreed with the rendering lead that it would be beneficial to move to the more standardized MikkTSpace I figured out which engines and DCCs used which “flavor” (per vertex / per fragment) of MikkT and what would make sense for us. As soon as we had a clear goal in mind, I prepared example cases for our rendering programmers from different DCCs, and we worked out the quirks until we had a perfectly synced workflow. This sounds simple enough but requires a lot of iteration to get right. Now our normal baking is a lot more straightforward and less error prone.

This was just a single example of what it could be but essentially my hope for the R&D work that I do, is that I’m making the artists’ lives a bit easier by trying to pinpoint workflow issues, finding solutions to them, and helping in implementing the solutions.

OpenUSD

We’re quite big fans of OpenUSD at Remedy, so much so, that our new editor is entirely built on USD. OpenUSD offers the ability to express variations, override existing data non-destructively, create cross-engine and project-portable data, and so much more! Our Principal Technical Artist and main USD evangelist, Kristof Minnaert, even wrote an internal “beginners guide to USD” that was later published as “Book of USD”. It’s open source so anyone can contribute!

With OpenUSD, we foresee that we can maintain the same level of fidelity yet enable parallel editing workflows between artists. This allows for far more flexible workflows as OpenUSD acts as a sort of intermediary “assembly” stage between DCC and converted data.

We’re also planning to make our actual assets USD instead of the current FBX. While we’re still in the process of converting our pipeline to output USD directly we’ve developed a plug-in that converts FBX-files to USD. You can read more about it and get the plug-in (or contribute, it’s also open source!) via this post on our Northlight blog. We hope it can serve as a basis (or drop-in solution!) for your pipeline migration into OpenUSD.

For more information on the OpenUSD initiative please visit here.

As usual, I’d like to mention that we’re looking for talented individuals to join our ranks. Check out our careers page for open positions.

For a full overview of our environment art pipeline, check out our Substance Days at GDC 2024 session: