3D character creation technology platform Didimo announced on Wednesday that AVALON and Colossal Order have joined its Popul8 partnership network. The news signals growing collaborations among companies seeking enterprise-grade solutions for content creation for extended reality (XR) content.
Avalon is a global, remotely-operated gaming studio staffed by some of the world’s top video game industry executives. Many of them have worked with Diablo, God of War, Assassin’s Creed, Elden Ring, Call of Duty, EverQuest, and many others.
AVALON, a massively multiplayer online (MMO), is currently under production. The gaming studio will leverage Didimo’s Popul8 platform to expedite character development.
Additionally, Colossal Order, a Finland-based gaming development studio, has created best-selling titles like Cities: Skylines. Its upcoming release, Cities: Skylines II, will feature characters developed from Popul8’s immersive technologies.
Didimo’s Popul8 tool allows world-building firms to create hundreds of unique characters in a fraction of the time and cost needed to do so.
The Porto, Portugal-based company and attendee of the Immerse Global Summit 2022 Miami will announce further partnerships in due course.
Comments on Didimo’s Popul8 Collaboration
Veronica Orvalho, Chief Executive and Founder, Didimo, explained in a statement,
“Across the games industry, the interest for more cost-effective, time-saving, scalable development tools that enable the creation of next-generation games that really push the mark on delivering rich, immersive environments populated with characters that are more diverse and life-like has never been more paramount.
She added that Didimo was “thrilled” to work with Colossal Order and Avalon to assist the studios in achieving “the vision for their games with Popul8.”
Jeffrey Butler, Chief Product Officer, AVALON, added that leveraging Didimo’s Popul8 technologies allowed his players to “journey through unlimited, interconnected worlds that are backed by characters that look like them and feel like them.”
He continued,
“Didimo’s technology allows our artists to magnify their output so that we can produce a single outfit for a base model and it works for all of our morphology. Our artists can let their imaginations fill the game with true variety, instead of iteration”
Mariina Hallikainen, Chief Executive, Colossal Order, explained that while developing Cities: Skylines II, it was “especially important that the citizen characters were designed with as much variation as possible.”
She added,
“Rather than build our own character editor and create them from scratch, which would be time-consuming and costly, Didimo’s Popul8 offered the perfect solution, so our artists could easily achieve our vision. We’re excited about the depth and richness that the resulting characters bring to the game for our players”
Popul8 the Virtual World with Didimo
Solutions like Didimo’s Popul8 platform have grown in popularity over the last few years due to increasingly demanding production pipelines for gaming and real-time 3D (RT3D) content.
Many of their benefits include speeding up time to deployment, cutting costs, freeing up production budgets, and maximising creative content rapidly and at scale.
For many AAA games, costs normally rise to between $200 million to $1 billion USD, leading to tremendous expenses for gaming studios. This also indicates that characters in AAA titles can comprise a major part of a total studio budget.
However, with the power of generative AI, many companies like Didimo are offering gaming studios the tools they need to circumvent costly content generation demands.
On average, Didimo’s Popul8 solution can create more diverse, densely populated characters for gaming content, saving gaming and metaverse studios up to 80 percent of costs compared to traditional methods.
Using the platform, artists can build 3D characters in a matter of minutes, complete with new and existing digital assets with full memory optimisation. This allows gaming and metaverse companies to reduce the overall memory required to save on gaming titles, leading to hosting cost reductions.
It also uses batch content creation and editing to permit users to command hundreds of characters for immersive spaces.
Furthemore, the platform is compatible with most gaming engines, including Unity, Unreal Engine, and others. This also includes Amazon Polly, Mixamo, Apple’s ARKit, and many more.
Additional Didimo clients include Sony, Atom Stars, Soleil Game Studios, NOS Communications, Ceek, and many more.
Updates on GenAI Content Creation Firms
The news comes as solutions like Popul8 become vital to the development of metaverse companies.
Leveraging serious gaming technologies like generative AI world-building platforms, virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) companies can rapidly build and deploy RT3D content for gaming, training, collaboration, and other use cases.
As the global tech industry teams up to develop serious gaming tools, enterprises like Meta, Improbable, Epic Games, Unity, NVIDIA, and others are creating their own solutions to facilitate the rise of the enterprise metaverse and XR. This has significantly democratised cutting-edge tools for the enterprise
For example, Apple released its Object Capture software on its iOS 17 update, leading to the rapid creation of photogrammetry-based 3D assets. These can then port into online stores, games, virtual spaces, and other immersive platforms, ranging from small businesses to multinational firms.
In an interview with XR Today, a key Shopify executive explained how Apple’s Object Capture solution led to the tremendous democratisation of 3D digital asset creation for small to large companies.
This also eliminates the barriers to content development by providing highly realistic, immersive, interactive, and interoperable digital assets across use cases.
In a recent interview with XR Today at the IGS 2022 Miami, Orvalho explained,
“We created a software solution that allows game studios to define how they want their virtual worlds or games to be. Imagine [developers] want to create the diversity of a city like New York. They can define all the properties of how they want ethnicities and the types of characters that they want to have by automatically generating them. On top of that, artists […] only need to create outfits, makeup, and garmets, and other assets once and then automatically asset-fit the content to all the other digital characters being created”
Atlas Shrugged: The Freedom to Create Immersive Worlds
In addition to characters, other companies have incorporated generative AI features into their content creation platforms.
For example, Atlas, a generative AI-based virtual world creation platform, launched its platform on Tuesday following a series of fundraising from top investors in the industry.
Similarly to Didimo, Atlas leverages GenAI to create fully functional virtual worlds on the fly, leading to rapid game development and adjustment turnaround times.
The Vienna, Austria-based company empowers XR developers for enterprise and commercial metaverses, multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), MMORG, and other use cases.
Some of the individual investors and partners with Atlas include Timmu Tõke, Chief Executive and Co-Founder, Ready Player Me, Abel Mathew, Former CEO and Co-Founder, Backtrace, and Geoff Renaud, Chief Marketing Officer and Co-Founder, Invisible North.
Additional partnerships include Consortium 9, Shrapnel, and Square Enix. The latter company is also a partner of Sony, which is a client of Didimo’s XR solutions and services.
