Behind the Scenes: Evolving Our Animals
Join us as we head behind the scenes for an in-depth look at exactly how we create the species for Planet Zoo 2, discover what's changed in the years since the original Planet Zoo and learn just what makes our animals such a leap forward!
Hayo Zookeepers!
The process of creating Planet Zoo 2's truly awesome animals is a long one, requiring extensive research, huge skill and dedication from our talented development team along with more than a little elbow grease (with a bit of Frontier's secret spices thrown in for flavour)!
Join us as we head behind the scenes for an in-depth look at exactly how we create our terrestrial species for Planet Zoo 2, discover what's changed in the years since the original Planet Zoo and learn just what makes these animals such a leap forward!
Building a Sequel
When creating the animals for Planet Zoo 2 we found ourselves in the privileged position of starting from a solid foundation, with over 7 years of development on the original Planet Zoo to build upon.
After bringing over 200 animals to life, we had a wealth of information, established processes and ingrained knowledge which really enabled the team to hit the ground running for Planet Zoo 2. For example, we greatly improved the collaborative efforts across all our team to really push the limits on what we could do, and figure out new methods of working together for the huge collaborative undertaking that is creating a game.
Of course, it wasn't only our experience in creating animals and ways of working that had developed.
The technology and tools we use have also grown leaps and bounds over this time, providing extensive new opportunities from upgraded fur shaders to new materials for transmissive and sub-surface scattering. All these advances have enabled the team to bring even more detail to our animals for Planet Zoo 2, with unrivalled realism in how their fur, skin, feathers and scales are rendered in your zoos. One of our first stops was auditing the animals we had created for the original Planet Zoo (some of which were over 7 years old!) and then identifying which ones to start with, completely rebuilding them from the ground up with this new technology.
From the very beginning, our community has been invaluable in building this sequel - you've been with us all the way, you just may not have realised it!
Our passionate fans have a keen eye for detail and have provided extensive feedback and commentary over the years, so we've been continually listening along the journey to keep track of everything that had been said about the original Planet Zoo's animals. We dove into forum posts, watched hours of videos and scoured your wishlists to build an extensive hit list of where to focus and make Planet Zoo 2's animals even more special. We even spoke to you directly, using surveys to gauge how some of our early ideas would rank across the community.
Wherever possible we've folded all of your feedback into our approach to Planet Zoo 2's animals, making it a truly collaborative effort between our development team and the community.
Hitting the books
Creating awesome true to life animals is at the heart of our approach to Planet Zoo 2, so there's no better place to start than looking to the natural world.
When designing an animal we conduct extensive reference gathering and research, from trips to the zoo to online research and consultation with experts.
For every species we source from publicly available wildlife photography to build huge compilations of reference for each species. Though this process we've often been very grateful to the photographers who capture the more unusual angles of animals! Sometimes it's really not clear what the undersides of paws or the back of heads look like from general reference gathering, so these more specific shots are a fantastic help.
We also watch huge amounts of footage of animals, including everything from nature documentaries to YouTube deep dives. This footage is especially useful in helping us understand how the underlying anatomy works, what body landmarks are useful for sculpting in the model, how the animals look in motion and what behaviours we can expect to see from them.
It doesn't end with visual reference gathering either. We also consulted with an external researcher to gather information about each species, as well as reading ethological studies and zoological literature. This occasionally resulted in some trips down the rabbit hole as we discovered cute or unusual behaviours that we wanted to represent within the game.
Since we apply audio to all parts of our animals' movements and behaviours, not just their vocalisations, we also complete extensive research into how these animals sound. This requires asking lots of questions, including considering how big an animal is, how they eat and drink (do they lap with their tongue or purse their lips?), what circumstances change the sounds they make and how their sounds vary between adults, juveniles, males and females. To answer these questions we use a whole range of resources to research all of this information, including huge libraries of audio that we can dip into and even seeking specific audio files from animal specialists.
All in all, this research across all our disciplines results in an incredible bank of reference information for every species in Planet Zoo 2, encompassing everything from the structure of their musculature, to the sounds their feet make and how they behave when living in the wild or in zoos. This huge bank of information is then refined to work within Planet Zoo 2's systems, with the team completing daily critique sessions to review progress and stay true to our vision for Planet Zoo 2.
Down to the last detail
Once we have this extensive library of information about a species, we can start the process of bringing them to life on our screens.
We don't create concept art for our in-game animal models, since what better reference is there than the natural world? First our Character Art team sculpt a 3D model of the animal in Zbrush, using our reference materials to translate the species' anatomy and form into a high-polygon sculpt.
The model is then taken through retopology, a process where the high detail Zbrush sculpt is taken into our 3D software Maya and a low-poly game-ready mesh is created. This allows us to create an in-game asset that features a high level of detail and fidelity, while reducing the overall size of the model so that it can be rendered efficiently in game for a smooth gameplay experience. This process also involves creating loops in the topology which are suitable for all the different animations the animal will do, without deforming the model. This is particularly important for supporting Planet Zoo 2's new features, including the visible pregnancies some animals exhibit.
Next we hand-paint the model in Substance Painter to appear as realistic as possible, painting fur and placing hair cards to simulate luscious manes and wispy tails, before setting-up the model in our game engine. This process requires our Character Art and Shader Art teams to work closely together to generate all the special materials and custom shaders we use to create truly lifelike fur and skin effects on our models in-game.
Poetry in motion
Once the Character Art team has completed their work to sculpt and texture the model, it is then passed on to our Rigging department who place all the joints inside the model allowing our Animators to bring them to life. This takes lots of skill and careful planning given the huge variety in skeletal structure and locomotion within the animal kingdom.
Each of our animations are crafted to capture each animal's unique personality as well as work with all our layered systems in the game.
We've taken our animation layering system to the next level for Planet Zoo 2, adding even more controls and blends to make the animal's movement really smooth. Each animation is broken down into bitesize layers, like head movements, ears flicks and tail swishes to name a few. This allows us to layer up all these different animations into the final result you see in game, giving each animal's motion more nuance as they react to the world around them.
Throughout this process our Animation team consult with different departments to determine what we want to include in each animal's animation set, such as mouth movements from the Audio team or wing poses from the Character Art team.
Each species presents unique challenges in how they move, meaning every animation requires a slightly different approach, but the team love pushing their skills in different ways to bring each and every species to life!
The sound of nature
Next it's time to give our animals their voice!
The sounds for our animals come from a huge variety of sources, from specialised animal sound libraries to audio directly recorded by our Audio team and from trusted partners and institutions specialising in animal research. To manage the complexity of movement and behaviour for our upgraded Planet Zoo 2 animals, we also had to expand our existing footstep and movement library, as a real world recording of an animal might have happened on grass, when we would also want our animals to climb or traverse diverse environments. The Audio team need to create all these layers separately so we can recombine authentic sounds for every possible combination that you can build in Planet Zoo 2, requiring this massive variety of sources to work from.
For Planet Zoo 2 we completely rebuilt the way animals produce sounds. To ensure perfect sync as animals run, swim and climb, all Foley sounds are now bound directly to the skeletal movement of each animal. Data from body, head and tail movement helps determine how an animal moves across the diverse environments you create, so animation-driven audio remains in perfect sync with the expanded movement sets of animal.
For the crucial area of vocalisation, we focused on improving how animal welfare is communicated, increasing the diversity of calls and creating more audible interaction between animals of the same species.
The Animation and Audio teams work very closely together to create more variety in these vocalisations. Jointly they developed a new system called ADP (Audio Driven Partials). This system uses the volume curves of each vocalisation to directly animate the animal’s mouth and other body parts, forming a unified presentation where the vocalisation and animation are locked in sync automatically.
This has allowed us, for the first time, to create vocalisations of varying length and expand their variety and rhythm beyond the previously fixed length of hand-authored facial movement.
By this point we have the animal's movement and vocalisations ready, but we also wanted to improve player feedback about the animals' welfare and general surroundings.
A background vocalisation system continuously scans all animal brains (more on that in a moment!), triggering vocalisations at the correct time to match the animal behaviours and moods. These procedural driven vocalisations are a vastly improved system compared to the original Planet Zoo which was more random and less representative of the welfare state of the animal. With the animal brain and mood determining the sounds they make, this results in much more reactive and authentic audio.
This system also brings emergent audio behaviour to our animals in Planet Zoo 2. For example, if an animal is unhappy because they don't have access to enough food, they might vocalise to indicate this. This can even spread across the other animals in the habitat, leading them to all let the player know their collective displeasure!
Seeing these new systems work together has also resulted in us discovering some wonderful new unplanned behaviours from our animals. We noticed that when something good happened to make our chimps happy, this automatically created a crescendo of excited and happy chimp sounds rippling across the habitat, which would then gradually dissipate as their moods returned to a neutral state. These sort of organic events are not directly engineered by us and are a happy consequence of your park management. It's years of research and co-operative development coming together in interesting ways, which we can't wait for you to discover!
Animal instinct
Outside of the huge visual and audio improvements we've made to our animals for Planet Zoo 2, we've also entirely rewritten the "animal brain" from the original Planet Zoo. Animals in Planet Zoo 2 are now more reactive and think about their decisions more than ever before, using a dynamic system to take into account things like the time of day, the season, the weather, their internal state and even the actions they've performed previously.
When creating a new behaviour for an animal, we first consider whether they will want to showcase as part of their standard routine or as a behaviour that is performed in response to something. If it's a reactive behaviour, we consider what sort of triggers make sense, for example if an animal comes across something that scares them, they should do their best to avoid it. We also consider what factors might cause a behaviour to occur more or less often as a result, for example these scared animals will be less likely to use enrichment objects.
As part of this improvement of the animal brain for Planet Zoo 2, we rewrote our entire behaviour system structure which makes creating specific combinations of actions a lot easier. An action like sleeping in the original Planet Zoo may have had only a few special cases, but was generally restricted to an animal being on the ground and in shelter. Now with our new system we're able to specify unique cases for each situation an animal can find itself in.
Whether on the ground, climbing, swimming, or even in the sky, animals can adapt to activities like sleeping for each of those situations. These behaviours also need to look appropriate for both zoo and Wildlife Reserves, and we are incredibly mindful of authentically representing the animals in both locations. After all, an animal in the wild may behave differently to an animal in a zoo!
This change in animal behaviour extends to how they cope with their welfare needs. In the original Planet Zoo, we had a long list of behaviours that influenced how an animal would best try to preserve their welfare, leading to repetitive cycles of animals sleeping, drinking, and eating, with little time to do anything else. For Planet Zoo 2, we have slightly detached the behaviour system from animal welfare, allowing animals the ability to present a wider variety of actions than you'd see previously. We even encourage our animals to not only show realistic behaviours, but to demonstrate a wide variety of behaviours, making watching an individual animal more rewarding, as they're encouraged to show off what they can do!
The Design and Animation team work closely together to use a variety of behaviours in specific situations and further push the authenticity of our animals. For example, our chimps are encouraged to perform the majority of their behaviours while climbing, as that's how chimps prefer to spend their time in the natural world. While a chimp can perform actions on the ground, we created more for them to do while climbing, resulting in more natural looking behaviours.
For Planet Zoo 2 we also developed a powerful new interaction system that lets our animals interact with loads of objects in their environment that they were previously unable to use. Many of the natural objects you'll place in a habitat can now be eaten from, rubbed against, or even used to get a good scratch in! You can place these objects at any position, any rotation and any scale, and our animals will still use them if the object is accessible in some way.
It was important to us that animals in Planet Zoo 2 don't only interact with their environments in realistic ways, but also interact with each other in more ways than ever before.
The original Planet Zoo featured social animations, but for Planet Zoo 2 we wanted all aspects of an animals decision making to be affected by how their peers were behaving. This led us to the concept of formations, a new system where animals in a group are incentivised to perform the same action together.
All these new behaviours and systems come together to interact with each other, which can lead to lovely shared moments between animals that aren't hard-coded into our systems. Scenes like one animal leading another to water, or an animal knocking an enrichment item into a sleeping mate and waking them up, are all things that can now happen without any direct input from us.
All together now
Planet Zoo 2's animals have had more than just a face lift, thanks to a truly collaborative process involving everyone working in the team at Frontier, building on years of experience from the original Planet Zoo and listening to the passionate voices of our community.
Our animals have been the subject of a huge amount of love and attention to detail and we can't wait until you get to meet them yourselves in your zoos and Wildlife Reserves this October.
Planet Zoo 2 is available to pre-order now on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Join the conversation and keep in touch by following our social channels, subscribing to our mailing list (for an exclusive in-game reward) and watching closely for updates on the website.
