One of the world’s leading developers of gaming software, Eidos Interactive Ltd. based in Wimbledon, has selected the Belgian DAM-solution “ADAM” to organize their worldwide art development asset library facilitating exchange of the most wide variety of assets including 2D, 3D, Audio, Video etc…
Eidos consists of development and publishing operations across Europe and the US, including studios in Copenhagen (Denmark), Montreal (Canada), Bath (UK), Redwood City (USA) and London (UK), in addition to other locations. Artwork creation is said to be accountable for the biggest part of the budget of new game development. To release the pressure on the total cost of ownership (TCO) of “artwork assets” amongst the different studios, collaboration and re-use of data is key. A proper classification of data will help to overcome the obstacle of labor intensive file sharing. Most of the art assets are large in size, hard to locate, and without a proper previewing system. There is a large amount of redundancy of art asset creation across projects and studios.
“Aware of this the business-driver was clear: reduce the cost inside the studio’s and across studios”, explains Ian Tomkins, responsible for the implementation of the ADAM-platform at Eidos. “By using ADAM, artists and designers have the freedom to quickly and easily preview assets prior to actually downloading the file. Thus the focus remains on creating game specific art assets, rather than repeatedly reproducing similar generic assets. By using ADAM, Eidos is able to focus our efforts on raising the quality bar for our titles.” At this moment Eidos uses ADAM as a library for asset re-use and exchange. “In the future ADAM can also lead our workflow and will be the new publication drive for the publishing side of our business”, says Ian Tomkins. Eidos selected ADAM Software out of other DAM-vendors for “ADAM’s powerful but simple and intuitive search engine, and its extensive support for metadata, including taxonomy, extracted metadata, and custom metadata”, Tomkins continues.
A team of 3 librarians set up the Eidos-ADAM-Library. “By taking away the burden of creating commodities such as common objects found in games, we give our artists and designers a great tool by which they can remain focused on their most relevant and enjoyable work: To create high quality game specific assets, and focus on exploring design ideas”, Ian Tomkins explains. “Those assets can be reused in new game productions for a variety of purposes, and to store them we are very happy to work with ADAM. The classification structures of ADAM are completely configurable which leads to smart and thus fast asset retrieval”.
Eidos wish to exchange a variety of assets including photographic references, textures, 3D objects, animations, audio, video, and more. ADAM can handle all these different types of assets. For the 3D assets Eidos required these assets to be ingested and viewable within ADAM. The 3D assets are made up of many mesh, texture, and material files and a requirement of the solution was also to ingest many files within one record, as well as linking files within one record to files within another record. Finally, Eidos required a way of viewing the 3D asset and it’s full hierarchy of files, as well as being able to download all files or a sub-set of these files with one click.
“In order to achieve this, the developers at Ashton Court utilised the powerful API exposed within ADAM v4. A custom indexer was first created which would reference XML files that described the structure of our 3D assets. The XML detailed which files should be incorporated into which records in ADAM as well as links to other files in other records. The ADAM UI (User Interface) was also extended to allow for the front end requirements of Eidos. Additional buttons were added to the standard record mosaic view to allow 3D assets to be viewed in a separate customised ASPX page, as well as additional buttons for the different types of download required. Finally, the preview button was overridden to allow the 3D assets to be previewed via QuickTime. This preview could also be extended to other file types, by configuring the custom system setting added by Ashton Court”, explains Alec Wadey from Adam Software’s partner in the UK, Ashton Court.
Eidos implemented ADAM in different steps. Three librarians kicked off with a basic and concept-training. A dozen artists acted as a test group. Their experiences will be paving the way for a company wide deployment where all artists will enjoy the benefits of ADAM. Already three studios are working with ADAM. In spring/summer 2008 Eidos will roll out ADAM to the other studios.
ADAM continues on building strong, global references in the Media and Entertainment branch. Together with Microsoft® and Warner Bros EMEA, Eidos is the third player in action in the gaming/entertainment vertical.
