Two months ago, NVIDIA unveiled Half-Life 2 RTX, a modding project developed by the newly created Orbifold Studios with RTX Remix. Orbifold Studios was created by bringing together the teams behind some of the most popular mods, like Half-Life 2: VR, Half-Life 2: Remade Assets, Project 17, and Raising the Bar: Redux.
Yesterday, we finally had the chance to hear directly from the makers of Half-Life 2 RTX, thanks to a video interview hosted by YouTube's Lambda Generation. Kralich (David), who previously worked on Raising the Bar: Redux and the Portal: Prelude RTX project, revealed how many more polygons key models like Lamar the headcrab and Gordon's HEV suit have in the remaster.
Lamarr, the debeaked and completely harmless headcrab, has 49,668 polygons in Half-Life 2 RTX, compared to the original game where it had 1690 polygons. That's about 30 times more detail. The added fidelity is really used to give Lamarr physical sculpting where it was implied with textures or normal maps on the original model, all those little fat folds and weird little shapes that construct a head crab, the almost turkey-looking thing. But that's our approach really to improving a lot of the other game's models. Another really big one in the trailer was of course the HEV suit, which is 95,000 polygons, an increase of about 4,000% compared to the original's 2800 polygons. These are very detailed and efficient models rendered through RTX Remix, which is very good at handling this kind of high-poly things. It's not very difficult to put stuff like this into the game.
The interview dropped several interesting tidbits:
- Valve gave its blessing for Half-Life 2 RTX and is being kept in the loop, even though it has no role in its development;
- NVIDIA is helping with engineering support (they have added Parallax Occlusion Mapping to RTX Remix after Orbifold asked them) and art creation support by mentoring Orbifold on the PBR/path traced workflow;
- Assets remade by Valve for Half-Life: Alyx will be reused whenever possible;
- Textures are being remade by hand;
- The resolution of world materials textures will be upped to 4K, while other textures will be 2K;
- Some animations will be redone as well;
- Most vanilla mods should work with Half-Life 2 RTX;
- The team would love to remake the two Episodes, though those would be separate projects to be handled after this one is completed;
- Orbifold is experimenting with implementing a player character model for reflections and shadows (Gordon doesn't really have one in the vanilla game), but they still haven't figured out a great way to do it;
- As much new content as possible will be backported to the original engine so that it is compatible with the Half-Life 2 VR mod.
In other RTX Remix news, NVIDIA has just released a new version of the Runtime on GitHub. Version 0.3 adds support for DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) and delivers other performance optimizations, such as dynamic texture quality when running low on VRAM. Some of the changes made to the RTX Remix Runtime should also increase compatibility with shader-based games.
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