Developers can spend years building beautiful 3D games, but they can add some amazing visual effects in just a fraction of that time thanks to a tool from the Japanese development team that made the surprise hit Bravely Default.
Silicon Studio, the developer responsible for Square Enix’s 3DS role-playing game, revealed a new demonstration of its Yebis 2 rendering engine in action. This tool enables any team that uses it to quickly add post-processing visual effects to their games. That includes light bloom, depth-of-field, and other tricks that real-world photographers use. In a new video it released yesterday, Silicon Studio showed off some of the features of its technology. While the clip focuses on high-end visuals, Yebis 2 is capable of scaling down to work on Android, iOS, and more.
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“Yebis 2 is the result of 10 years of research and development,” Silicon Studio president Takehiro Terada told GamesBeat back in August. “We were focusing on high-dynamic-range lens rendering since 2003, when the original Xbox was in the market.”
In addition to the video, Silicon Studio released its Yebis 2 tech demo software for Android devices last month. This enables people with certain tablets and smartphones (the latest Nexus 7 definitely works) to see what certain scenes look like with different effects. The company also has an Android benchmark program called Mobile GPUmark that can measure the capability of your hardware when running different Yebis 2 processes.
“Because we started on the original Xbox — which wasn’t very powerful — and we discovered a way to simulate visuals effects on that device, we were able to move those effects to the mobile version of Yebis 2,” said Terada.
We’ve reached out to Silicon Studio to ask if any third-party developers have picked up the technology to use in their games. We’ll update this post with any new information. So far, the company has only confirmed that Square Enix used Yebis 2 to add visual flair to its Final Fantasy XV announcement trailer. Check it out below:
