Chernobylite devs spent days at a time scanning the real Exclusion Zone

There are few places in the world as eerily evocative as Chernobyl. Much of it abandoned for decades, it remains a constant source of fictional and real accounts; a fusion of Cold War tension, nuclear threat, conspiracies and cover-ups. No wonder, then, that it has become such great fodder for games. The latest, survival horror RPG Chernobylite, is right around the corner, and ahead of its launch I chatted to creative director Wojciech Pazdur about the extra lengths the team went to as they recreated the infamous Exclusion Zone.

Photogrammetry is an increasingly popular method of creating realistic 3D environments through photography. Lots of snaps are taken of an object, and then that data is used to recreate it digitally, conjuring up a 3D model that can be used in the game. Pazdur, who was formerly a 3D artist and has a background in programming, decided to introduce photogrammetry at The Farm 51 around seven or eight years ago, seeing it as a technique that the team could use to make the creation of realistic environments “faster, easier and more accurate”.

“The key advantage of photogrammetry is that the amount of detail you can capture is almost unlimited,” Pazdur explains. “In regular 3D content creation, when the artists start with the polygonal modelling or 3D sculpting, they need to work by adding details to some simple meshes. So the more time you spend on creating some kind of model, the more detail you can add. The cost of creating the detailed model is the amount of time you need to spend adding detail to this model. But in photogrammetry, if you get a good camera, not an expensive camera, but simply a good camera, you can capture very detailed photographs; you can zoom and you can capture any data you want, and then you can include them in your recreated 3D model.”

Traditional techniques had become too costly. “I blame the cost of today’s videogames mostly on the cost of creating 3D content,” says Pazdur. The Farm 51 started to experiment with photogrammetry during development of an earlier game, Get Even, and it proved to be effective. That led to the team discussing what the most interesting place to recreate with photogrammetry might be. They settled on Chernobyl.