Material

The “Portal: Prelude RTX Edition” (Portal: Prelude RTX) created by Nikolas “NykO18” Grevet, the software engineer who gave birth to “Portal: Prelude”, and David Driver-Gomm, a mod enthusiast, is now available on Steam Available as a free download for players who own the original Portal game, the two engineers also shared at NVIDIA’s “In the NVIDIA Studio” how they used the NVIDIA RTX Remix tool to bring NykO18’s popular “Portal: Overture” to the next level. Into a new content that combines real-time ray tracing, DLSS 3 and RTX IO.

In addition, NVIDIA partners are also expected to provide 16GB GeForce RTX 4060 Ti from July. Although the basic performance is not far behind the 8GB GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, it is still very important for depicting large-scale 3D scenes, editing 12K high-quality movies and executing Native AI basic model, etc., larger memory capacity will bring significant help, and even make applications that could not be executed originally possible.

“Portal: Prelude” is an original content developed by NykO18. The plot revolves around the theme of GlaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System; Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System). The fictional artificial intelligence created by the company has also become an outstanding work among the Portal game mods that won the Best Mod of the Year from Mod DB because the developers added more chapters, test rooms, challenges and a huge storyline.

Mod players have one person to work as principal and have limited ability to strike the bell, RTX Remix changes the mod process of classic games

▲ The 3D map seen by Valve’s Hammer engine

But after all, NykO18 develops Mods in his spare time, including level design, graphic art, scripts, texts, web content development, etc., and at the same time must ensure the quality of Mods. It is not easy to modernize the content of “Portal: Overture”, and don’t forget that “Portal: Overture” still uses the original Hammer engine. It is difficult to reproduce the scene in a modern engine that supports more effects , At the same time, there is a problem that the material needs to be upgraded.

▲Left is Nikolas “NykO18” Grevet, right is David Driver-Gomm

However, the RTX Remix classic game remake tool suite launched by NVIDIA solves most of the problems in the modernization of classic games; NykO18 and Driver-Gomm use the GeForce RTX 40 series graphics card system, first use RTX Remix to collect “Portal: Prelude” 360-degree screenshot of the scene, and then use the RTX Remix Runtime component to capture the scene, and upgrade the material to a high-resolution texture in USD format. At the same time, enable the function to add RTX technology to the game so that the “Portal : Prelude RTX version” has a higher resolution, and also adds new features including ray tracing, DLSS3, RTX IO, etc., and also adds NVIDIA Reflex technology that can reduce operation delays.

RTX Remix makes upgrading game textures and adding modern effects as easy as the in-game level editor

▲The 360-degree capture screen viewed with Shortcut video editing software

The two of them used the Blender Connector to upload high-resolution materials in the OpenUSD format to the NVIA Omniverse platform, and then they could connect to their familiar 3D applications to model new geometries and make beveled edges in real time, and inject complete real-time Ray tracing enables the picture to have more realistic lighting and shadows, while Blender Cycle’s RTX-accelerated OptiX ray tracing also enables the two to move objects smoothly while viewing the picture.

▲ The Omniverse platform makes it easier to remake objects or add polygons to original objects

Although the original materials can be replaced by open source materials, many materials still need to be modeled from scratch, and some materials need to add more polygons to make the beveled edge appear smoother. However, with the help of the Omniverse platform, it can be done more quickly. Complete the work, such as enhancing the self-extracted mesh, no need to apply a new mesh for individual materials; the two use Blender’s UV Unwrapping function to expand the material, so that the mesh can be used to make 2D textures, which is convenient for upgrading The final 2D texture is overlaid onto the 3D object.

▲Using Adobe Substance 3D Painter to create high-quality textures

NykO18 and Driver-Gomm use Adobe Substance 3D Painter and Sampler to create a high-quality rendering model that conforms to physical principles, so that it can conform to the optical effects of the real environment, and render lighting and object surfaces in the image; and use GPU accelerated filters to speed up To simplify the process of creating materials, RTX-accelerated lighting and ambient occlusion can complete the baking of materials in seconds.

▲Determine the final details repeatedly through RTX Remix

When they prepared new high-resolution materials, they then used the RTX Remix platform to replace the original old materials, and recreated the lighting of each level through the path tracing technology in ray tracing to make the interface come alive. NykO18 happily said that through RTX Remix, not only can he achieve his ideal game visual effects, but only by capturing parts of the game and modifying them with 3D tools, the process of reproducing old games becomes as simple as the original level editor of the game , and it saves time and has better effect and quality than making by him alone in the traditional way.