Legokit / Greyboxing Overhaul — Jonathan Dagar // Apocryphea

My greatest contribution to Far Cry 6 was the overhaul of the Greybox/Legokit system.
This was entirely by my own initiative - Modelling, texturing, metrics and integration.

Prior to this project, Far Cry level designers were severely limited in what they could achieve to build layouts or placeholders. They could only place cubes and rectangular objects with predetermined sizes.

This undertaking has earned me a meritorious commendation, in recognition of the value this work influenced the production. Production time for layouts went from a matter of weeks to single days!

Assessment & Planning

Early on during Far Cry 6’s development, it became evidently clear we could no longer fulfill the needs required for the types of locations we needed to build.

Many major outstanding issues were identified, and became the root of this initiative.

Multiple locations were industrial, with organic or round shapes, that were not possible to represent simply with cubes and rectangles.
Building believable placeholder locations such as a church with the basic cubes and rectangles required a significant amount of entity count. This taxed the engine heavily, and made testing or optimisation difficult.
It became difficult for level artists to identify design intentions and purposes for layouts - Grey boxes didn’t mean much besides volumes. Many ideas were lost in transit between both professions.
Time consuming building - No modular kits existed to build commonly used layout things, such as catwalks. Level designers often used workarounds, but resulted in problematic layouts.

Since cubes and rectangles are powerful in their own right, additional kits were fleshed out to complement and retain compatibility with the original material.

The 3 great families that were devised were :

Curved Objects Kit
Catwalk Kit
PlaceHolder Furniture (PHF) Kit

The first step was modelling everything and ensuring metrics compatibility - increments were needed as well.

The video below showcases the modularity, ease of use and rapidity of construction from the Catwalk Kit.

Below are 3 test layouts constructed with the various Legokit elements, showcasing different gameplay possibilities and the endless flexibility of the kits.