Oliver Franzke

If you want to know more about how Monkey Island, Grim Fandango or Broken Age were made then this is for you! Pls RT youtube.com/watch?v=38kpv_…

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) ▶️ youtu.be/71Q6aqxrzdo

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: youtube.com/watch?v=sdDsoK…

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.

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

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. :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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

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.

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. youtube.com/watch?v=f9V_LV…

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.

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

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.

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.

A major inspiration for the morphs in Keeper is the Nome king and his creatures from the movie "Return to Oz" (1985), which Jeremy brought to our attention. Rock surfaces change shape in unexpected ways thanks to the wonderful stop motion animation.