A GTPlanet user has discovered that one of GT Sport’s flagship features, the Scapes function, has quite a great deal more depth than we ever realized — literally.
If you’re not familiar with Scapes, they’re scenic locations from around the world, captured for use as backdrops for in-game photographs of your vehicles. That somewhat underplays the technology at work though; in order to capture the Scapes, Polyphony Digital had to come up with a new way of capturing light. As Kazunori Yamauchi told us back in 2017, PD basically rewrote the software for the Sony Alpha cameras used specifically for Scapes.
The process then creates a 3D space into which you can place your car but, crucially, it also recreates the lighting conditions so that the incident light interacts with the vehicle placed into the scene to make it look like a real object. However it turns out that in some cases it’s even more complex than that, as you can see from this clip below:
First posted on GTPlanet by its creator, Sojiira, this video shows that some of the scenes are actually complete 3D models themselves. Seemingly it applies to only a very small number of Scapes in the game — the five in the video — but you can, with VR, literally walk through the scene and look around it as if it were a real space.
Of course this process isn’t all that simple and requires some shenanigans to achieve. You’ll need a jailbroken PS4 console running custom firmware in order to get access to the game files needed which, as they say on disclaimers, you do at your own risk. You can also see from the first clip with the mutant Mazda Miata that there are a few kinks too.
We know that Polyphony Digital is still in the process of capturing Scapes scenes for Gran Turismo 7 though, and if it has already built some scenes in 3D for VR, others may well follow. The increased capabilities of the PlayStation 5 console may enable a far more in-depth VR offering than Gran Turismo Sport…
With thanks to Sojiira.
See more articles on Scapes.
