Origins According to Julien Merceron, the Worldwide Technology Director for
Square Enix in the early 2010s, the concept for the new engine was born in 2011 while he was in the final stages of working on
Final Fantasy XIII-2. This was a difficult period for Square Enix: the project then known as
Final Fantasy Versus XIII was hitting technical barriers as it transitioned to open-world environments its original
Crystal Tools engine could not handle, and
Final Fantasy XIV had met with a disastrous launch due to development and technical problems. Faced with these issues, Square Enix decided to bring in former developers from
Sega to create new engines for their products, including Luminous Studio. Talking about sharing the engine, Merceron said that he advised the company to avoid sharing between companies or internally between games until the engine had been finalized with the released game: this resulted in Luminous Studio being restricted to what would become
Final Fantasy XV during development, while other major next-generation titles would use other outsourced engines. The construction of Luminous was similar in concept to
Epic Games'
Unreal Engine or the
Unity engine from
Unity Technologies in that it incorporated all the development tools needed from asset editing onward, as well as being "high quality, easy to use, flexible, high speed, compact, and supporting both manual and automatic [game development methods]". The development team drew inspiration for this concept and approach from Unreal Engine and
Crytek's
CryEngine. The name "Luminous" was chosen to reflect the crystal theme of the
Final Fantasy series. Luminous was developed based on high-end
DirectX 11 technology. While designed for eighth-generation video games, it was said to also be compatible with any console and hardware that could handle
shaders, such as
PlayStation 3 and
Xbox 360. Its compatibility with Nintendo's seventh-gen hardware such as the
Wii and
Nintendo 3DS was doubted, as those consoles did not support shaders. During this early stage, they were looking into the possibility of adjusting the engine for use on
Wii U. The company were hoping to promote Luminous as a kind of brand, showing off the logo and tech demo when they were ready.
''Agni's Philosophy'' ''Agni's Philosophy'' is a tech demo created by Square Enix to show off the capacities of Luminous Studio. The demo was a collaboration between the cinematic Visual Works division—a section of the company generally associated with
CGI movie production for the company's video games—and Square Enix's
R&D department, Advanced Technology Division, with a goal to create a
real-time graphics tech demo that has a quality coming as close as possible to
pre-rendered CGI. Development of the demo took approximately half a year. Unlike previous technology demos created by the company, which were based on pre-existing games, Square Enix decided to create something completely original. The demo was themed around the
Final Fantasy series: during discussions, the team asked the question "What is
Final Fantasy?", broke down its basic components and used them, along with added unusual elements, in the demo. A focus during the demo's development was the creation of Agni, the central character. For the demo, as it was a work-in-progress, they optimized it for graphical performance. While the story and themes were created by the Japanese staff, many of the character designs were done by staff from their western subsidiaries. The technology to create the demo was all sourced from then-existing high-end PCs. The entire development process, from conception through development, took approximately a year. It was also shown at
SIGGRAPH 2012. There is a scene where 100,000 illuminated
firefly-like insects appear on screen, each one a full
polygon mesh model with body and wings, which proceed to merge to generate a summoned monster. Production for the demo began in June 2011, and was initially produced as pre-rendered
CGI animation by Visual Works before Square Enix attempted to reproduce it entirely in
real-time with the Luminous Studio engine, using the same assets as the CGI version.
Final Fantasy XV Prior to its rebranding from
Final Fantasy Versus XIII and full move onto
eighth-generation consoles,
Final Fantasy XV used lighting technology from Luminous along with a purpose-built proprietary gameplay engine. For its
E3 2013 re-reveal under its new title, the company used a specially-created engine environment named Ebony. In July 2014, Hashimoto left the company, citing personal reasons. While still working as an advisor for Luminous Studio, his position as project leader was filled by Remi Driancourt, a senior engineer who had worked with games featuring Luminous technology. The version of
XV shown off at Tokyo Game Show and Jump Festa that year ran on Luminous 1.4, which combined Luminous with components created for Ebony. The
Episode Duscae game demo ran on version 1.5, and the developers plan for the final game to run on version 2.0. With Luminous Studio, real-time scenes in
XV have five million polygons per frame, About 150 bones are used for the face, 300 for the hair and clothes, and 150 for the body. The inner hair for each character uses about 20,000 polygons, five times more than seventh generation hardware. The data capacity for textures is also much greater than before.
Witch Chapter 0 In April 2015, Square Enix announced that the engine would support
DirectX 12, and
Nvidia revealed a new real-time tech demo developed by Square Enix for the engine, called
Witch Chapter 0 [cry], featuring the character Agni from the earlier ''Agni's Philosophy
demo. The demo renders over 63 million polygons per frame, uses "8K by 8K" resolution textures, and her hair is rendered with over 50 shaders, with each strand of hair rendered as a polygon. It also portrays human crying with a high level of detail, and the quality of the real-time graphics have been compared to pre-rendered CGI animation. The tech demo took a year to produce, and was running on a PC with four GeForce GTX Titan X graphics cards. In October 2016, Square Enix registered for the trademark "Luminous Studio Pro" before the release of Final Fantasy XV''. ==Features==