diablo 3 art and questions about painting shadows

snake85027

I am interested in the hand painted process when it comes to shadows and having a directional light in your scene. Im having an interesting discussion at work regarding painting in shadows on a model and it conflicting with the directional light. So how does diablo 3 handle how the lighting in their textures, is it a basic AO bake and let the directional lights do the rest, or do they paint shadows in the texture as if a light was shining straight down..hope this makes sense.

AtticusMars

They paint shading into the texture, same as every handpainted game more or less.

You can't rely exclusively on realtime lighting and expect to get good results unless you have an extremely high poly model or you are using normal maps. 

Zack Maxwell

-Edit- Nevermind, just tired.

thomasp

it's probably best to use a standardized lighting environment and layer that over the (otherwise flat) textures for the sake of consistency and to be able to change it across assets if needed. it can be a domelight with some subtle bounce lighting from below and the odd highlight placed here or there. then usually you end up shading certain elements like metal pieces a bit more. it's a subtle thing and the goal is to just bring out shapes and materials a bit better, not end up with pitch black armpits, inner legs or mouth corners.

as for the interaction with ingame lighting i think the choice is to have an asset that looks good but not really correctly lit for perhaps 80% of the time that may have some issues in those other situations or one that may look correct all the time but often not all that nice due to lighting fidelity issues. just do what works for the majority of cases.

if you have the camera far out like diablo, then painting seems the obvious choice.

Burpee

@snake85027  You portfolio's link in your signature doesn't work! You should write https:// before it 
Cheers!