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Blender being used for SEGA's Virtua Tennis 4

23
By on Games
It is always great to see that Blender makes it's way into the bigger CG studios. Our latest report comes from the Japanese game studio SEGA where Katsuhiko Omori utilized the node based material system in Blender to design the mulit-layered materials which latere were implemented into the game consoles.

Katsuhiko Omori writes:

Hello

My name is Katsuhiko Omori and I work as technical artist at SEGA Japan.
One of my main responsibilities is to research new technology and evaluating them for a possible application for SEGA’s game titles.

In 2010, I designed a shader rendering pipeline for Virtua Tennis 4 (SEGA) with the help of Blender 2.4. I utilized the material node-editor to generate and compose different surface materials and fine tune the finale results. In this aspect, the node-system was an extremely helpful tool in exploring the possibilities of this artist oriented experiment.

VT4 adopted the ueber shader and thus was it possible to re-implement my designed materials and user parameters on the game console. The attached image illustrates the face-skin material - the most complicated shader. As you can see it is a rather complex combination.

At the beginning the ueber-shader produces real-time shading effects such as direct light and ambient occlusion passes [1].
The results are being combined with passes such as "diffuse direct light[2]","diffuse indirect light[3]","specular light[4]","sss[5]"and "sub fuzz scatter[6]". After this lights are added [7], exposure adjusted [8], and finally converts the color spare [9].

Blender is for us a very valuable tool.

Katsuhiko Omori

 

Katsuhiko Omori

Sega Virtua Tennis 4

http://www.sega.com/games/virtua-tennis-4/

(c) SEGA. All trademarks used herein are under license from their respective owners.

 

23 Comments

  4. toontje on

    Me and my early dyslexia, I thought the RSS feed said "Blender being sued for Sega's Virtua Tennis 4".

    That made the news sweeter after I found out my mistake XD

    Reply
  8. chimp on

    "...One of my main responsibilities is to research new technology and evaluating them for a possible application for SEGA’s game titles. ...Blender is for us a very valuable tool."

    Looks like more blendering is going to happen at sega :D

    Reply
  16. Jon on

    "Blender is for us a very valuable tool."

    So can we presume that Sega has been grateful enough to donate some hard cash to the Blender Foundation?

    Reply
  20. VvSch on

    "sub fuzz scatter"?

    I've never heard of that before. I've Googled it, but without success. Could it mean the light scattered by the small hairs on the skin?

    Can anyone enlighten me?

    Reply
  22. ChicOrtiz on

    Wow! I grew up playing SEGA games... After Burner is one of my favorites... Arcade soul!

    Thank you very much for the new Cekuhnen and Katsuhiko! It's a joy to see both names, Sega and Blender in the same sentence. :)

    Reply
  23. rorkimaru on

    Would have been nice of them to release the shader though I suppose thats a pretty big ask.

    Still, cool to hear though I'd hoped it was used in the modeling process.

    Reply

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