This is part two of a three-part series on data clean-up; an ongoing effort to help sustain the long term support of Rainbow Six Siege. To learn more about the philosophy of clean data, learn more about what we’re doing to the maps, please check out part one here.
The look and feel of the Operators is one of the most important aspects of immersion in Siege. Each one of these details from Tachanka’s iconic helmet to Caveira’s face paint is critical to making the characters feel unique. As part of Operation Health, one thing we have been working is making these Operators more optimized.
The impact of this optimization will ultimately mean fewer out-of-memory crashes and slightly increased quality for our operators, and will be coming in Season 3.
Operator Uniformity
When looking at an Operator, each texture of its uniform takes up a certain amount of memory. When you take all of the textures (the arms, legs, chest, head, etc.) and add them up, you get the total memory budget for an Operator. As we were designing Operators in the beginning, some of the textures took up a larger amount of space, while some had a smaller amount. After almost two years, it was necessary that we reevaluate all of our texture UV Mapping; the process of applying a 2D texture to a 3D object.
In Operation health, we have done a complete pass on all of our Operators to make sure the total sum of their textures meet a consistent memory usage. This means that textures that were not adequately optimized are now remapped in the UV Mapping with greater efficiency so that they take up less amount of memory without reducing quality.
Because we’re meeting a consistent memory budget across all operators, it also meant that we could slightly improve the quality for some Operators. Lower budget Operators, like Sledge, will have a slight improvement of quality.
Olivier Couture, Technical Director, says “The impact on the player will be a better experience overall with fewer crashes. At the same time it allowed us to slightly improve their quality.” He explains that if all of the Operators are close to the same memory budget, it also means we can better plan for the future of Siege and optimize the player experience better.
Elite Uniforms
The quality of Elite uniforms are extremely important to us and to you. We took extra care to ensure that the textures of these stayed consistent. Through optimizing certain aspects of our game, we’re able to further optimize our Operator’s textures. One example of this is Thermite’s logo on his helmet. We introduced a new way to texture all of the protective visors. This allowed us to get better usage and higher quality out of our UV maps, which is how we texture our headgear, weapon skins, uniforms, and other customization items.
Face Rigging
We have strived to bring personality and feeling to each of our Operators. We built the faces of our Operators on a facial rigging system that controls various parts when a reaction hits them. For example, when a shot connects with a body part there is an appropriate reaction by the face rigging to reflect pain.
By doing a pass on the facial rigging of the Operators, it means that they now have a more consistent reaction with the shape of their face. This will result in more accurately aligned points of movement in the face, and will result in less derpy Valkyrie faces.
Stay tuned for part three of our Clean-Data blog series where we will cover how we are optimizing PC texture quality settings. Additionally we will be covering the size of the patch on PC, which will be significantly higher than other platforms. More details on this next week.
We hope you enjoyed reading up on the work being put into our operators and would love to hear from you on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and the forums!
