Simonschreibt.

I didn’t embed the video directly to avoid any tracking from Google and complications with the DSGVO.

Welcome guys to the yearly welding contest! Are you ready to show off your skills?

With pleasure!

Yes, Sir!

Today we’ll compare the cutting torch of Alien Isolation with the one in Wolfenstein. At first let’s see which one can cut a better shape.

In Alien Isolation you can weld on special prepared places. It looks gorgeous but it happens on a pre-defined path! The player can choose going left or right but that’s all freedom you get. On first look it looks almost like an interactive animation.

Like in Alien, you can also only weld on some exclusive areas in Wolfenstein (special metal plates). But in comparison you’re free to weld any shape you want and you’re not bound to a default path.

Ha! I knew I have the better tools!

But careful! There is a limitation! Yes, the mesh is divided dynamically but for performance reasons there’s a restriction in precision so that you can not cut the metal into too tiny pieces (unfortunately I wasn’t able to capture a wireframe to visualize the dynamic splitting of the metal plate).

Here’s an example. On the left you can see that the cut begins at the first hole in the plate. On the right you can see that I’m not able to make a cut at the exact same place because another cut was already made really near to it.

That’s the limitation – you can’t set the cuts too close to eachother.

Restriction or not, at least I’m able to cut whatever I want. Hey Ripley, look! I made a 3-eyed alien!

…

Good work Blazkowicz! Now let’s look at the edge of the welding work.

In both games poly-stripes are rendered along the way which make the edge glow very nicely.

In addition to all the stunning detail effects in the curves are pretty wide so there’s no problem creating a perfect poly-stripe.

By the way: the small flames are animated via a flipbook texture.

The created stripe in Wolfenstein looks awesome too but seeing it side by side I must say that Ripley wins the race in this case.

Especially at the corners you can see some interruptions which seem to be the price for the freedom of cutting whatever form you want.

Source: Alien: Isolation

Well done Ripley! So, how do you guys handle the transition when the cut is finished and the newly created metal falls down?

In the Alien game this is pretty straight forward: As soon as you “close” the welding cut, the poly-stripe disappears and the formerly un-damaged door gets exchanged with a new geometry. This time the geometry is already divided into parts so that Ripley can pull the inner part out:

Within one frame the poly-stripe gets removed (the particles stay) and the new door geometry comes in. You can see that the welding edge still exists in the “new” door but is “cold” for one frame. You can see the bare metal. One frame later, it starts glowing again to act like it’s the welding edge from before.

Source: Alien: Isolation

If you look very careful you can see this happen even in motion (video is in slow motion):

In Wolfenstein it’s similar and different at the same time. Here the part falls down dynamically as soon as the cut is finished. Notice the the newly created metal has no glowing edge anymore.

Similar to the Alien game you can see that for one frame the original geometry disappears and is exchanged (now not having a glowing edge anymore). But here it is a dynamically created model and not pre-defined by an artist:

But that’s not the end of the story! Let’s have a close look on the glowing edge. If you have a poly-stripe around the cut it may look like that:

As you can see the polygons reach outwards and inwards to cover both sides of the cut. Not a problem until the inner metal plate falls down. Now you end up with a poly-stripe which “hangs” over the inner area:

The obvious solution might be to divide the stripe in two parts and delete the inner one:

But I’ve another theory how Wolfenstein did this and will show you the proof later.

I guess you guys know soft-particles, right? You can avoid having hard cuts at intersecting geometries (left) by fading it out the closer it gets to other geometries (right):

You can also invert this to only show geometry which is near to another surface. On the right you can see that my example cloud is only rendered when it’s near to the ground:

What this means is, that if you have a plane with a nice glow texture and you apply this trick, you see it only if it’s near to other surfaces and gets invisible when nothing is in close distance (the black area on the right is just empty space):

And if we apply this to our poly-stripe it looks like this:

Of course I don’t know for sure if it was done this way but here’s why I think I’m right: When you get near to the edge with your hands in the game, the stripe gets visible again:

My guess is that the hands write into the depth buffer and therefore the stripe thinks “Oh…something is near to me. I better show up!”

Not bad Mr. Blazkowicz! But now I want to see how you handle the bridging.

When you cut a hole into the two polygons (the front and the back of a metal plate) you’ll run into problems because then you can see “into” the model. It’s necessary to create new polygons to close the gap:

In the Alien game this is relatively easy because an artist can close the gap manually since the mesh isn’t created dynamically. But in exchange the edge looks nicely frayed:

Source: Alien: Isolation

Wolfenstein creates these bridge-polygons on the fly with the help of awesome code magic:

Source: Wolfenstein: The New Order

But they are not created immediately! As you can see here I cut the surface a bit (left) but while I glitch through the surface (right) there is no polygon visible…

…until you set the last cut which closes the welding edge. Now all necessary polygons are created:

Thank you both! Now let me announce the winner. Ripley, your work looks incredible but it’s very static. Blazkowicz, your dynamic technology is impressive and looks great. So the winner is…

…

…me! Because I can cut through metal AND aliens!! Ripley, why did you never thought about that? Let me…

Hey guys! Am I too late for the exam? Just wanted to show you my skillz.

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(ಠ益ಠ)

(Unfortunately I’ve no idea how the Rainbow Six programmers did this but there will be a talk about it on GDC this year! I hope we’ll see a wireframe rendering! :)
If you want to read more about geometry destruction you may findmy article about slicing/destruction in Metal Gear and other games interesting.)

Thanks for reading and feel free to drop me some feedback in the comments!