Videogames are one of the most relevant creative industries in Europe - encompassing almost 100,000 individuals – with countries like UK, France and Finland representing the excellence in game development internationally. The market is very interesting, but very competitive too, with an increasing demand of games that are bigger, better and with more realistic computer graphics.
Such qualitative and quantitative advancements in videogames present many draw backs for developers related to increasing costs, need of complex management systems, longer asset creation pipelines etc.. These factors have direct negative consequences on the videogames industry in Europe: they reduce the number of titles released, impede creativity involved (a typical equation is: the more original the idea resulting in a bigger risk and thus lower investment), they stifle innovation and this may cause a financial overexposure of developers.
In CR-PLAY we propose an innovative mixed pipeline for videogames development which will drastically reduce both time and expenses involved in the creation of assets, and make high quality realistic contents accessible even to small game developers. Game developers will be able to capture and reconstruct houses, buildings, trees and other real life elements by simply taking a few sequences of photos and videos to be processed by the semi-automatic software created in the project and integrated with traditional assets made of polygons and textures.
CR-PLAY's approach will represent a major shift in the content creation pipeline for games, with an important positive impact on development costs and time-to-market. The simplicity, speed and quality of the new pipeline will have far-reaching consequences, freeing resources to achieve more creative games faster and cheaper and consequently giving a significant competitive edge to the European SMEs in the game sector.