Images: CrytekCrysis was released back in 2007, and it was beautiful, which meant it had pretty high hardware demands – something that players still joke about with the "Can it run Crysis?" meme.Crysis's director and Crytek founder Cevat Yerli explained that the team wanted to "make sure Crysis does not age, thatis future proofed, meaning that if I played it three years from now, it should look better than today."If you are curious what was going on at Crytek during the development, you're in luck: Michael Khaimzon, former art director at Crytek, who worked on the game, generously shared some insights that you should hear."The back-stories are almost as crazy as the visuals, so I figured I’d start sharing a few," he said on LinkedIn.The developers, based in Frankfurt, Germany, were tasked to build "the most realistic jungle ever.""What do we know about jungles? We book tickets to Tahiti. The brief is simple: study how a real jungle works and shoot enough photos for textures. ... Ironically, none of the photos we took were usable. In the end we decided to model every single vegetation texture in 3D instead. It sounds insane, but that call ends up driving one of the biggest leaps in real-time graphics. So the trip was essentially useless other than a pack of reference shots."With Crysis, the team wanted to delve into photorealism: "Not “pretty,” not “stylized” – we wanted players to squint and wonder if it was real." Before, Far Cry was lauded for its amazing jungle environments, but for this game, the "trick of hand-painting specular and bump effects straight into textures wasn’t gonna cut it.""At the time, no one used high-poly models for foliage. Leaves were painted, not sculpted. Modeling them sounded insane – until we did it. Suddenly, we had full control over layout, and flawless normal maps where every leaf caught light at its own angle."Another solution that made Crysis look so good was light scattering. The developers simulated the color shifts and shadow plays of leaves, used vertex color and bone rigs to make leaves sway realistically, and did some manual alpha tuning for mipmaps to fix long-distance opacity glitches, "but honestly, the two real breakthroughs were high-poly leaves and subsurface light scattering."Yerli wanted to create "something the world has never seen," so art director Magnus Larbrant provided a concept showing winter in the jungle."As production rolled on, our regular jungles started looking insanely good – photoreal, even by today’s standards. Next to them, the icy levels felt gimmicky, but we’d promised them, so they stayed. ... Sometimes the image that sells the game isn’t the one that defines it. Still, that frozen-jungle concept sparked the entire franchise, so here it is for the history books," Khaimzon explained.What players do remember is the Nanosuit, which, it turns out, "wasn’t even planned until a year into production." Apparently, Delta Force agents were supposed to wear tank-looking supersuits mid-game, but "that didn’t strike a nerve, and Cevat was never satisfied with mediocrity," so the developer tried to focus on "the rubbery muscle structure" from early concepts, but it was not enough, still."And then came the franchise-defining idea: strip away all the armor. Keep the muscles only. Let’s go for a ninja-like figure – black, agile, enhanced. We made our first actual nanosuit... ...but it still didn’t work."The muscles were flat, Khaimzon says, so Crytek asked an external concept artist to look at the suite "with a fresh set of eyes, to take our design and separate each major muscle group as much as possible." This resulted in "the most amazing concepting and modeling feat I’ve ever seen."Crytek's artists created a low-poly model using smoothing groups to separate muscles and then a detailed high-poly sculpt."The Nanosuit was born."In 2004, voxels were all the rage, but they didn't suit the game: "No creature with an IQ over 1 would build a spaceship out of blobs and mush." Playing with the shapes, Crytek loved the organic feel and started looking into blending organic and technological forms, "how to make something that looked alien, but also engineered.""We quickly realized that the key to making it look like advanced technology was in repeating, parallel elements – something that looks artificially crafted."Once that was done, the team focused on zero gravity, which sounds great but demands a lot from developers. Players could get nose-to-nose to textures with zero gravity, but they didn't look good that close; they were "pixely and blurry." "Add detail textures, and they barely helped – they only showed when you were right on top of the surface. Using lots of unique textures wasn’t the answer either – it ate up memory and made the surface look noisy and chaotic from afar."So Crytek invented "one of the most unconventional art pipelines" it'd ever used: designing all alien objects using only tiled textures. The entire 1000-meter alien ship and its interiors were built with a handful of unique textures."Artists had to break objects into clearly defined zones, each mapped with a repeating texture. The structure and flow of the texture became part of the design itself. The real challenge? Creating compelling, alien shapes under such a strict limitation. A huge task."I'd say the developers succeeded in their task, creating a game that will stay with gamers for years to come, thanks to its amazing environments, characters, and mechanics that Crytek worked so hard on making work.Khaimzon has shared 6 parts of this exciting journey, and if you want to know more, follow him on LinkedIn.Also, join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more. #making #crysis #former #crytek #developer