More studios turning to Popul8 for much-needed solutions to lower cost and development timelines for future games and content updates
Porto, Portugal, Nov. 27, 2023 - Didimo, the leading provider of top-quality 3D character creation technology for games and entertainment, today announces AVALON and Colossal Order as the newest partners joining its growing global network of game studios using Popul8™ to enhance game worlds with hundreds of unique characters in a fraction of the usual time and cost. More partners to be revealed soon.
With the budgets required to develop games growing significantly each year, with no slowdown in sight, the need by studios for innovative, effective technology solutions that allow them to maximize the creativity and expertise of their teams is a must. It is estimated today that a AAA game can cost anywhere between $200 million to over $1 billion.¹ Depending on the game, the cost for character creation can account for a significant percentage of this budget.
“Across the games industry, the interest for more cost-effective, time-saving, scalable development tools that enable the creation of next-generation games that really push the mark on delivering rich, immersive environments populated with characters that are more diverse and life-like has never been more paramount,” says Veronica Orvalho, CEO and Founder, Didimo. “We’re thrilled to be working with Colossal Order and AVALON to help achieve the vision for their games with Popul8.”
“Using Didimo’s technology allows our players to journey through unlimited, interconnected worlds that are backed by characters that look like them and feel like them,” said Jeffrey Butler, Chief Product Officer, AVALON. “Didimo’s technology allows our artists to magnify their output so that we can produce a single outfit for a base model and it works for all of our morphology. Our artists can let their imaginations fill the game with true variety, instead of iteration.”
“When we set out to create Cities: Skylines II, it was especially important that the citizen characters were designed with as much variation as possible,” says Mariina Hallikainen, CEO, Colossal Order. “Rather than build our own character editor and create them from scratch, which would be time-consuming and costly, Didimo’s Popul8 offered the perfect solution, so our artists could easily achieve our vision. We’re excited about the depth and richness that the resulting characters bring to the game for our players.”
Didimo’s Popul8™ end-to-end character creation platform accelerates game production by enabling game developers and artists to quickly generate, edit, manage, and load infinite and unique characters into games. It tackles a long-term industry problem where game characters – even in secondary, non-playable character (NPC) roles – are central to realistic storytelling yet are time-consuming, tedious, and very expensive to create. This greatly impacts the overall cost of creating great games. As a result, developers sometimes must choose to limit or bypass this step, leading to a disappointing gameplay experience for consumers.
Popul8™ enables the creation of games featuring greater diversity and density of characters in significantly less time and up to 80% saving of traditional character costs. Artists can design characters to match a game’s aesthetic style and then generate an infinite number of animatable, diverse 3D characters in minutes, automatically fitting them with existing and new assets and serving them in a memory-optimized way to allow more characters to fit within a game’s memory limits. Comprehensive creator options allow for fine-tuning to a game’s look and style. Teams can further accelerate milestone completion using 2D concept art to instantly create fully rigged 3D characters. Batch creation and editing enable the commanding of hundreds of characters in groups to fill worlds, levels, or specific experiences and with the unusual ability to randomize traits across groups. Popul8 characters output in standard file formats and are compatible with Unity, Unreal Engine, and other industry-standard tools and formats like Mixamo, ARKit, Amazon Polly, and more. Watch the video to learn more - Popul8 Video.
In addition to AVALON and Colossal Order, other Didimo customers and partners include NOS Communications, Ceek, Soleil Game Studios, Sony, Atom Stars, and more.
Didimo Inc. is a leading creator of digital characters to populate new and existing gaming worlds. With a patented, cloud-based technology platform, Didimo revolutionizes 3D character production by supporting ambitious studios looking for top-quality character variations to enhance their game world, regardless of genre or engine used. Our products turbocharge game developers' creativity for more diverse and immersive worlds while streamlining workflows and reducing costs at each level, from executive producers to artists. Didimo has offices in Porto and London.
Media Contact:
Colin Regan, Zebra Partners for Didimo
¹IGN (2021, April 28). According to the report, AAA games that are greenlit now with potential releases in 2024 or 2025 typically receive development budgets of $200 million or higher… Retrieved from https://www.ign.com/articles/major-publishers-report-aaa-franchises-can-cost-over-a-billion-to-make.
