Oliver Franzke

I'm making colored pixels for Double Fine Productions. Lead Programmer of Broken Age. Also worked on the remastered versions of Grim, DotT, FT and Monkey Island

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

If you want to know more about how Monkey Island, Grim Fandango or Broken Age were made then this is for you! Pls RT https://t.co/P7cb2veDK0

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

I recently gave a talk on parallel computing in video games at TU Dresden and OvGU Magdeburg, looking at the historical evolution of parallelism in game consoles, why graphics is easy and gameplay hard to parallelize. Had a great time doing it! https://t.co/VvD9MkMTyB

[Daniel Albu 🕹️ (Tech Talk with Daniel Albu) @danielalbu]

Tech Talk with Daniel Albu is back!

Noah Falstein is joining me again, and this time we're digging into something special: Noah’s original version of The Dig, the very first one, the one that started it all.

📅 Sunday at 12:00 PM (PT)
▶️ https://t.co/ZMkAD0WCQS

[Daniel Albu 🕹️ (Tech Talk with Daniel Albu) @danielalbu]

Two years ago today, my 4.5-hour conversation with the incredible composer Clint Bajakian premiered! 🎶

We talked about his music, creative journey, and the stories behind some truly legendary soundtracks.
If you haven’t watched it yet, check it out:
https://t.co/DKNi3TNiIk

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

The morph of the week is the "nightmare bridge". Nick did the initial pass and I tweaked the morph to make it more weird and "tentacely". This whole sequence is one of my favorites in the game.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

You can make things really weird by stacking a symmetry or twist operator on top of the fractal warp.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

My absolute favorite (and hands-down the most used) spatial warp in Keeper is the fractal. Our morph tech supports both Mandelbulb and Quaternion fractals. It's addictively cool and I could play with this all day long. :)

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

The morph of the week is this little peek-a-boo window. I love the fractal warp used for the tell and as always VFX made this look 1000 times better with the additional elements like the bugs.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

Spatial warps can be stacked in Keepers morph tech, but of course the order matters. For example applying the symmetry operator to something that is twisted looks quite different than twisting an object that was first warped by symmetry.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

By now it should be obvious that I'm a big fan of implicit surface representations. At the extreme, they let you tear objects apart and turn them inside out. While we didn't use these (stamp and repeat) warp types in Keeper it was straightforward and fun to prototype them.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

Spatial warps are fun because you can get break the expectation of how an object might move, for example combining a simple melt deformation with a pull operator and animated warp centers.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

Time for the morph-of-the-week. Nick modelled the source meshes and I set up the scene-graph and the basic sequence. Lee refined it and gave it the final touches.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

Spatial warps remap the positions used to sample an object’s distance field – effectively bending the space around the object.
This illustration shows that process in action using a twist operation.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

One of my favorite ways to utilize the twist warp is to align it with the cross-fade frontier. This way the shape blend happens in the coiled up region, which looks super neat. :)

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

Spatial warps are the real magic sauce of Keeper's morph tech. Since we use an implicit surface representation we can easily bend and distort space before the distance fields are sampled. This example is a showcase for the twist warp. Left: along-axis. Right: distance-from-center

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

One thing I didn’t cover in the video is how we handle emissive glow. Instead of using a third cubemap (and increasing GPU bandwidth), we used color segmentation: the user picks which part of the base color should glow. It’s surprisingly effective and very cheap.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

As promised I recorded the creation of a morph (from scratch) using the tech we developed for Keeper. In about an hour I show how we capture the “Essence” of meshes, blend between them, and spice things up with spatial warps.
https://t.co/mS2vXO7whl

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

Given what I've shown so far it won't come as a big surprise that Annihilation was a huge inspiration for our morph tech. This movie captures how truly weird alien life could be... and weird is what we wanted to achieve in Keeper.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

Here is another fun example of what one could do with the symmetry operator.
On a related note... I do love my job! :)

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

The symmetry operator is one of my favorite effects in the Keeper morph tech. It is so much fun to play around with since it creates absolutely stunning visual pandemonium like this one.

[Oliver Franzke @p1xelcoder]

The morph-of-the-week is the awesome "gear door", which was inspired by the "hands door" I talked about. With Lee's concept Nick modelled and animated this morph. I love the fact that gears temporarily appear while the passageway is revealed. The spinning ones are additive.