Soul Calibur II

Soul Calibur II
PlayStation 2

• Model Data

Characters in Soul Calibur II are roughly twice that of other 'standard' games released on the PlayStation 2. By 'standard', I mean games that typically have several characters on screen at once, along with complex environments and AI; 3rd-person action-adventure games are generally a good example of this concept.

This game does not use backface-culling. The extent of polygon optimisation visible in the game is that it doesn't draw things that are not on screen. For example, the surrounding environment has polygons clipped as they go too far off-screen. However, notice that not even the environment uses backface-culling.

'Ivy'
8711 Tris
(Roughly 4355 Polygon Quads)

• Her model follows current-generation standards quite closely, allowing for some, at the time, advanced animation to be played on her. Examples of this would have included facial animation (she has the inside of her mouth modelled in reasonably low detail).

• Her weapon comes apart as several pieces to act like a whip. Generally items such as weapons are separate from the character model files, and have their own set of rules; the characters simply play the correct animations according to the weapon state (of vise versa; unknown which in this case).

'Kilik'
8635 Tris
(Roughly 4317 Polygon Quads)

• Again, he follows many rules topologically that current generation games do for advanced animation. However, one odd thing about his model that you don't tend to see very often is that his hair is modelled as seen, using no alpha maps, unlike 'Ivy' above.

'Taki'
8454 Tris
(Roughly 4227 Polygon Quads)

• Uses current generation modelling techniques, although personally I think she could stand to loose some polygons in specific areas of her torso, feet, and face. In game I don't think you would ever notice the difference if she did.






























Also I find this game to be very unoptimised, but having said that it does run absolutely fine on the PS2, so it doesn't need to be more optimised. The environments as well as some of the characters seem unnecessarily high-poly, and the textures are applied in a very odd fashion. Some of the characters have about 10 normal, diffuse (seeing as that's all the PS2 supported) maps, applied randomly to small parts of them at a time. Because of this, it would take a lot of work to re-texture the characters fully for this. The odd thing about this is again, linked to optimisation. Having the game load up hundreds of small textures instead of just the normal 1 or 2 for characters, would take far longer due to read/write calls. But again, the game seems to run fine either way.


In hindsight, I suppose games like this showed just how powerful the PS2 really could be at times. The real culprit as to why the graphics never looked 'amazing' was simply down to the texture types the PS2 could handle. For example, normal maps and specular maps would have made a massive difference to the graphics, but possibly equally to performance.

This screenshot shows the scene as captured from the game emulation, displaying just how unnecessarily  high-res some of the backgrounds were and yet the game ran just fine. I find this so interesting because other games released even in the same year as this were often incredibly optimised as if they needed to be, using every trick in the book to run faster. I wonder if Soul Calibur II could have loaded much faster if it was optimised as well as some other games I've seen, not that it seems to take particularly long loading as it is....

This image below shows 'Kilik' up close with his triangulated wireframe. However, you can still make out how he was modelled using quads for the most-part, and it clearly shows the edge-flow following around both his orbicularis oris and his orbicularis oculis making for good facial animation. Even the initial 5-point vert lies on his cheek-bone just as expected to see in today's games, joining his eyes to his mouth in an area that doesn't deform much with any facial expression. Despite this, the in-game facial animation wasn't... brilliant, but it did clearly make use of these modelling techniques to work at all. More polygons or animated state-controlled normal maps would usually help out with this sort of effect nowadays. In contrast to all of this, his ear is still typical of that seen on PS2 games, whereas today we would often fully model the ear also.

Below are two more renders of 'Ivy' and 'Kilik' standing together. The first is simply a beauty render of them, and the one below shows their wireframes, while also showing a problem seen on specific polygons on 'Ivy'. When the 3D data is given back as a .obj file, it requires a lot of clean-up to even closely resemble what it actually is. During this process, I always find that the normals are often messed up quite servilely. However, due to the fact that it is essential for the normals to all be facing the right ways in games (generally game engines only draw one side of every polygon (unless told otherwise) to save on render times), I can only assume this is a technical problem caused by the capture software being used to grab the 3D data. Nevertheless, I still must go in and clean up this problem. Normally, there are automated tools in Maya that allow this process to be fairly easy. However, for some reason this process out-right didn't work on 'Ivy' properly. The only real remedy for this problem seems to be to go in and manually flip the incorrect normals, which can take quite a while. Without doing this, the Mental Ray render engine has some problems when it is told to render the wireframe, as shown in the 2nd image down; the incorrect normals are unfortunately causing distorted pixelation on the appropriate faces. 'Kilik' never had this problem.