00:25Forza Motorsport's always been a series about innovation.
00:29We always want to push the racing genre, so we've made huge improvements because we
00:33want to get people excited about cars in general.
00:38The Alps is the ultimate driving road because it's set in a beautiful location and the ribbon
00:42has been hand-tuned over months of testing to make sure that it's just the right balance
00:46of speed, challenge, fun, and a wide variety of cars for a wide variety of players.
00:51Because for a virtual game, nobody's going to get hurt.
00:54Since we're not concerned about driver safety, we can go to these epic places like the Bernese
00:58Alps and build basically the world's best driving roads and we have total creative freedom.
01:02We actually looked at 15, 30 different locales and the Alps is just the most epic.
01:07The landscape is so surreal, it's crazy.
01:09These mountains are very different from any mountains you see anywhere else.
01:13I mean, it's just all the jagged peaks.
01:16We are on part one of a trip that will take us through Switzerland and Italy as the guys
01:21from turn 10 gather source material and basically get inspired by the entire trip.
01:25What we're going to do is find the most amazing areas we possibly can and photograph them to no end.
01:33We took a really long elevator ride after a train ride and a long walk and another train ride.
01:40It took a while to get up here, but oh my God, it's worth it.
01:43Did you guys see the background and everything?
01:49So right now we're at the Grindelwald region of Switzerland and we're taking reference photos.
01:55We mount a camera to a tripod on a panorama head.
02:00The panorama head enables us to take pictures in different increments and multiple exposures.
02:06We stitch them all together and then we get an HDR.
02:10An HDR is high dynamic range image.
02:12Each frame that we do, we do it at multiple exposures.
02:14So when you stitch it all together later, you can slide through all the different exposures.
02:18So you can go from a very dark scene with a little pinpoint where the sun is all the way
02:22up to a very exposed image.
02:24And that way it gives us the full range to play with when we go to make our skydome later.
02:28We have a pretty long production cycle, so probably about a year of full production once we get home.
02:36So we bring back all of our reference.
02:38We start modeling rough landscapes that existed there so they're fairly accurate.
02:42But we're not bound to recreate it perfectly as it exists because there isn't a track there.
02:47We want it to be believable.
02:49It needs to fit with the other real racetracks in the game.
02:51So we create a whole back story about how the Bernese Alps came to be.
02:55It started off as a ski resort and roads were built for workers in the winter time.
02:59And then this rich entrepreneur bought it and tried to build a racetrack there.
03:03We got shut down.
03:04So by creating this rich back story, everything is there for a reason. It's believable.
03:11Fictional tracks are a chance for us to really showcase some of the graphical tech that we have in our
03:17game.
03:18We've redone our lighting engine and this track in particular with its very bright snow and blooming really shows off
03:24what our graphics engine can do.
03:26The television can only represent basically one order of magnitude of brightness from zero to 255 black to white.
03:33Whereas the human eye in the real world can see I think seven orders of magnitude of brightness and in
03:37the real world there exists far beyond that.
03:39The sun is infinitely brighter than a white piece of paper but on a television screen they look the same.
03:43Well we found a way to basically reverse engineer that at full HD resolution on the Xbox 360.
03:49So what we do is we capture high dynamic range images of the world and that gets baked back into
03:53the lighting and the reflections on the car.
03:55Which means the sun is order of magnitude is brighter than a white piece of paper and is brighter than
03:58gray asphalt.
03:59Which basically makes the cars look really grounded in the environment.
04:06We've traveled thousands of miles, we worked thousands of hours and here it is, the Bernese Alps track in Forza
04:124.
04:55Which means the sun is fully
04:55You can't see the sun.
04:55It's coming out.
04:57And they're going back now.
04:57And they're going to Direnculo X.
04:57Grazie.
