00:25Forza Motorsport has always been a series about innovation.
00:29We always want to push the racing genre, so we've made huge improvements because we want to get people excited
00:35about cars in general.
00:38The Alps is the ultimate driving road because it's set in a beautiful location and the ribbon has been hand
00:43-tuned over months of testing to make sure that it's the right balance of speed, challenge, fun in a wide
00:49variety of cars for a wide variety of players.
00:51Because we're a virtual game, nobody's going to get hurt. Since we're not concerned about driver safety, we can go
00:56to these epic places like the Bernese Alps and build basically the world's best driving roads and we have total
01:01creative freedom.
01:01We actually looked at 15, 30 different locales and the Alps is just the most epic.
01:07The landscape is so surreal, it's crazy. These mountains are very different from any mountains you see anywhere else. I
01:13mean, 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 from
01:21turn 10 gather source material and basically 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. Did you guys see the
01:44background 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. The panorama head enables us to take pictures in
02:03different increments and multiple exposures.
02:06We stitch them all together and then we get an HDR.
02:10An HDR is high dynamic range image. Each 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.
02:23And that way it gives us the full range to play with when we go to make our skydomes 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. We 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. It needs to fit with the other real racetracks in the game.
02:51So we create a whole backstory 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. We got shut down.
03:04So by creating this rich backstory, 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.
03:17We've read on our lighting engine and this track in particular, with its very bright snow and blooming, really shows
03:24off what our graphics engine can do.
03:26The television can only represent basically one order of magnitude of brightness, from 0 to 255, black to white.
03:32Whereas 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.
03:48So 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,
03:54which means the sun is order of magnitudes brighter than a white piece of paper and is brighter than gray
03:58asphalt,
03:59which basically makes the cars look really grounded in the environment.
04:06We've traveled thousands of miles, we've worked thousands of hours, and here it is, the Bernese Alps track in Forza
04:124.
04:12So let's see.
04:23So let's see if this is where we are going.
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