Ah yes Mashru Mishu, I know now. You have some great work but it has a very game type feel to it. Not so much realism, which is inherent with allot of hand built work. No offense but it comes back to my whole point about scanning. Speed, budget and realism. If that's what a client needs.
thank god i or most artists in general cant replicate 100% realism or likeness by hand sculpting or else all 3d scanning shops would go out of business. LOL
Well like you I've worn many hats to get where I am, I even started as a vfx artist and helped out where i could in concepting and environment work on the overlord and silent hill series before moving onto characters. But I still think its a bad way to look at it. If everyone thought like that your end product is going to be really stale and nobody would care about what they do. The artistry doesn't simply stop once the concept artist is finished.
I agree with you on the concept being bad, then there's not much you can do to save it but in my experience I have no problem giving suggestions to improve it and its something I know alot of art directors like. Sometimes the end product evolves so far away from the concept art its unrecognisable. My job is essentially to evolve the design and make it as bad ass as possible whilst still being in style and on budget etc.
I know I don't actually need to explain any of this but what you wrote just struck me as very strange.
Yes, it's all about the end result and everyone is a part of a team effort.
This doesn't make the individual contributors disposable, replaceable monkeys. In fact it makes it even more important to have capable artists and / or tech guys in all the separate roles.
Case in point, the best character concepts of all time can be turned into crap by modelers without a good eye and experience. Has everyone already seen it happen at his job, or do I have to dig up images?
Yes, it's all about the end result and everyone is a part of a team effort.
This doesn't make the individual contributors disposable, replaceable monkeys. In fact it makes it even more important to have capable artists and / or tech guys in all the separate roles.
Case in point, the best character concepts of all time can be turned into crap by modelers without a good eye and experience. Has everyone already seen it happen at his job, or do I have to dig up images?
Absolutely, which I don't think is a counter point to what Arsh was saying at all.
To get a solid end result you need good work everywhere along the line. The important thing is that the work is good, not how the work was done, I think that is the main point.
So no matter how well or "artistic" one small element of the process was done, it doesn't mean anything if it falls apart somewhere else down the line.
No matter how "cheap" or "machine generated" or "technical" or "with no artistic integrity" something was done, as long as it fits into the pipe and keeps the standard of quality high, the method used to create it has no relevance.
The only way this'll replace modellers is if all the characters run about naked in empty rooms.
No studio is going to pay for tailors and prop makers so they can make scans which they then need to clean up.
This just looks like a way of speeding up hyper real character creation.
I completely agree that it's all about the final product but the way arsh put it was that there's almost no artistic merit after the concepting stage. That's all that's got my back up. To each their own though
I completely agree that it's all about the final product but the way arsh put it was that there's almost no artistic merit after the concepting stage. That's all that's got my back up. To each their own though
Its a valid point though, the further you are down the chain(or the more specialized your tasks are) the less artistic freedom you're going to have in your work. There is a big difference between doing some personal work in your spare time, where you design, concept, model, texture, and light the entire asset, and simply doing one of those stages yourself, which is very common in production.
It really depends on the studio, and your position at the studio though, you may have a very small, or a huge impact on the overall artistic choices for your project.
Just a note on the WETA scanning stuff, in some of the LoTR production docs they talk about scanning the sculpted maquette's to get a start on the CG versions. I don't know how much they've transferred over to straight cg/zbrush concepting but I imagine they still use this method as well.
AS for working with scan data, it's been my experience that while, yes a lot the work is done for you, much of the important/fine detail like the eye's and ears still needs to be done by hand. This will vary based on the quality of the scan but I've yet to work with a single scan where all I had to was retop and project to call it done. I disagree that there's no merit to it since I've seen plenty of people fail to actually get a useable model out of the scan but I do agree with MM on the cleanup aspect of it. Stitching together individual raw scan data into something usefull is beyond tedious.
No matter how "cheap" or "machine generated" or "technical" or "with no artistic integrity" something was done, as long as it fits into the pipe and keeps the standard of quality high, the method used to create it has no relevance.
if end result is all you care about then why be in this line of work to begin with ?
most of the fun is in the process of creating something whether you designed it or not you are still responsible for majority of hand crafting.
that is the main point Blaizer brought up about merit of the work.
what the studio needs to do from a business/production stand point has no relevance to what we are talking about.
Sorry if I come across a little blunt, i am not one to sugar coat anything. I guess my main point is not that any one person is disposable in a pipeline, my point is that the video we are discussing is very pretty does its job very well, to hype you for the release of an upcoming game, to set the tone and style. So why would anyone care how the final result was achieved? why do the techniques matter at all? I was commenting on the process being not important, the result is. Of coarse the people involved should all be professional and good at their jobs, part of being good at your job is solving problems, and the manner in which you solve those problems should never be a focus or issue, but just that you solve them. It has nothing to do with merit, artistic ability, or what your personal definition of what "art" is. All that hippy, emo bullshit does nothing to help you or your team make something great together.
when i say things like get over yourself, i don't mean it in a condescending "your worthless" tone, i mean there are so many other factors to concern yourself within a multi-million dollar production, the merit of the artisans and craftsman is the last thing to worry about. Your ego and personal ideals should never come before the end goal.
Some great character artists in here claiming some greatly depressing thoughts, as much as some of you are right that in a production environment the end result and time spend on your character count its greatly disappointing to hear some of you speak of your job as if you`re screwing caps on bottles in an assembly line. Where`s the passion for your job? Where`s that spark that got you doing this in the first place?
And more OT
Loving the trailer and the making of, i would love to work with 3d scandata in the future. i bet theres a lot i could learn from doing cleanup work.
Nowadays they have a completely crazy workflow at Weta for skin textures.
Gino Acevedo, the lead texture guy, will select people with interesting facial features and take a silicon mold from their faces. They'll do a positive cast, and then create a special transparent negative cast from it. Flatten it out, put it into some kind of liquid, put it on top of a scanner. Now you have a nice unwrapped displacement map looking stuff. Use it in Mari on your character model.
They certainly did this for Tintin, I guess it was part of the Hobbit workflow as well.
They also used one of the programmers who looked like Tintin to shoot all kinds of reference. Weta Workshop made some 300 costumes to find out how to make the CG versions lifelike, so they could also dress the guy up.
Anyway, they used some giant fans to see how he looks like in the wind. Then they had him lie in a sandbox for the desert shots. Then they got an inflatable pool for kids, and filled it with water for wet stuff. There were photos of the programmer lying in the small pool outside in like the parking lot.
The guy does not work at Weta anymore, BTW, but they said that all these trials had nothing to do with it...
I do agree with MM on the cleanup aspect of it. Stitching together individual raw scan data into something usefull is beyond tedious.
Perhaps things have changed slightly since you guys used scanned data last? IR's system is single shot. It's a volumetric based reconstruction system. There is no stitching. You sometimes need to do some refinement and cleanup, adding in extra details. Which is useful if you have good anatomy and sculpting background.
MM: business is apart of all this, money is after all one of the reasons why we work. A client really wont give a rats ass if the artist prefers to hand build things out of nostalgia or melancholy. Creating a matte painting, using only a keyboard, a mouse and MS paint for example! just because!
If they want speed and realism, then they will take the path of least resistance. Simple as that.
I find this whole discussion pretty silly.
First, if you didn't make the concept for your 3d model, you didn't do anything creative to begin with, the majority of 3D artists are not artists at all, they are glorified carpenters working off an artists blueprint. .
this is a silly thing to say. are traditional sculptors or painters not artists because the subject they capture already exist in the real world?
Where`s that spark that got you doing this in the first place?
I think this is the core of the question. I would think that most, if not all of us who got into this field did so because deep down there is still that inner child imagining monsters and building lego spaceships - quite the creative stuff. Portfolio pieces can be quite creative too, in the sense that most CG artists make their own dream characters/environments for their folio pieces, inevitably imagining backstories and maybe a whole universe behind each piece.
But when it comes to being hired as a character modeler, I'll have to agree with Arsh : besides a few exceptions (pre-production work, a small studio environment, or some atypical cases like Valve maybe), it's all about accuracy and execution. The skills required for the job are certainly complex and artistic (good interpretation of anatomy can only come from countless hours of studies, for instance) but at the end of the day the reality of the job should be pretty obvious.
this is a silly thing to say. are traditional sculptors or painters not artists because the subject they capture already exist in the real world?
This is a great way to look at the issue, actually. I would personally say that the quality of a painting doesn't come from the accuracy of it compared to the real world, but rather, what is left out, how the frame is being composed, and what is the intent behind the piece. Of course execution is what ties it all together, but I don't think this is what gives the value to an art piece.
Using this analogy, to me, the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer is a painting ; the female character model is just one part of the source materials, and being disappointed by the model being a scan is a bit like dismissing a great painting just because the artist used a real life model to paint from...
Perhaps things have changed slightly since you guys used scanned data last? IR's system is single shot. It's a volumetric based reconstruction system. There is no stitching. You sometimes need to do some refinement and cleanup, adding in extra details. Which is useful if you have good anatomy and sculpting background.
MM: business is apart of all this, money is after all one of the reasons why we work. A client really wont give a rats ass if the artist prefers to hand build things out of nostalgia or melancholy. Creating a matte painting, using only a keyboard, a mouse and MS paint for example! just because!
If they want speed and realism, then they will take the path of least resistance. Simple as that.
the last time i had to "stitch" partial scans was more than 4 years ago if i remember correctly.
couple of full body scans i have worked with were fully assembled scan with a preliminary cleanup already done to remove hair parts and seams/wholes etc.
anyways, either i suck at english or you suck at understanding simple logic.
i am not really talking about the justifiability of using scan data for a project.
i am just saying that a character model derived mostly out of scan data does not have half the merit of an equally impressive hand crafted model.
this is a silly thing to say. are traditional sculptors or painters not artists because the subject they capture already exist in the real world?
just copying something from the real world doesn't make you an artist. if that is so, every first year drawing student would have work in the Met. Artists do more than copy something, boiling it down to that is a pretty simplistic view. but it sounds like to me what you are really asking is for a definition of art, and i am pretty sure that is different for everyone regardless of what it says in the dictionary. I would say art is something very subjective, but i would say what we do is not so much. people tend to agree for the most part when a game looks good or bad. there are always a few who don't, but for the most part when a game looks great its not a controversial topic, it either does or doesn't. But something like Picasso, or Mondrian you will have those that see the merits and some who don't.
just copying something from the real world doesn't make you an artist.
by your definition Michelangelo was not an artist.
anything and everything created by any artists is based on some combination of elements from his/her visual library based on this he/she saw in real life. nothing is original in that sense. so lets not get into the discussion of what it art and what isnt.
we are talking about craftsmanship here and that is what every artists strives to improve on.
the last time i had to "stitch" partial scans was more than 4 years ago if i remember correctly.
couple of full body scans i have worked with were fully assembled scan with a preliminary cleanup already done to remove hair parts and seams/wholes etc.
anyways, either i suck at english or you suck at understanding simple logic.
i am not really talking about the justifiability of using scan data for a project.
i am just saying that a character model derived mostly out of scan data does not have half the merit of an equally impressive hand crafted model.
Perhaps it's my English and you suck at simple logic
You beat me MM. You're right, there is no merit to using this type of scanned data. All you do is plug something in and press a button. Voila!
FYI:
crafts·man
/'kraf(t)sm?n/
Noun
A person who is skilled in a particular craft or art.
Synonyms
artisan - handicraftsman - artificer - mechanic - artist
You beat me MM. You're right, there is no merit to using this type of scanned data. All you do is plug something in and press a button. Voila! (maybe with an Artec scanner )
FYI:
crafts·man
/'kraf(t)sm?n/
Noun
A person who is skilled in a particular craft or art.
Synonyms
artisan - handicraftsman - artificer - mechanic - artist
yet again you fail at understanding. go back and read my posts again.
i never said there is NO merit to 3d scanning. it requires a good scanning technician to output clean scans and it has its own use and purpose, like it is great for learning and reference in general. also in this case it is cheaper and faster to get good results and makes sense for production. but none of that has anything to do with merit of it.
compared to hand crafted model it does not measure up to the same merit level.
take this work for example - hand crafted likeness - more merit than 3d scanned likeness.
Hehe yeah discussing "what is art " could take a while
What I find interesting is that some of us expressed disapointement regarding the Cyberpunk trailer after learning that it was not all hand made. I really don't understand that sentiment - since when where complex special FX supposed to be used just for the sake of it ? Would it be even more disappointing if they used, *gasp*, real slomo footage of the actress without 3D at all ?
Perhaps it's my English and you suck at simple logic
You beat me MM. You're right, there is no merit to using this type of scanned data. All you do is plug something in and press a button. Voila!
No one is saying its just push a button though. You cannot argue that scanning gives incredible results.
You also cannot argue that it takes much more skill and time to develop the talent to create it from scratch and that the ability to do so should be held in higher esteem, purely from a craft perspective.
Sure for production who cares, I'm sure if you could just push a button and make a beautiful game everyone would do that with no qualms, but that is not what he's talking about.
Perhaps things have changed slightly since you guys used scanned data last? IR's system is single shot. It's a volumetric based reconstruction system. There is no stitching. You sometimes need to do some refinement and cleanup, adding in extra details. Which is useful if you have good anatomy and sculpting background.
Its been about 2 months since the last scan I worked with. I haven't worked with the actual hardware so I don't really know the specifics but it's a portable LiDar system with a little rotating pedestal for the actors to stand on on set. Whoever does the actual scan (this varies since it's whoever is available to go to the set) typically does most of the stitching at the same time. In this particular case I was just clesning up the scan, so taking the stitched version and filling in holes + recreating geo for area's that didn't come over in the scan. Usually this is things like accessories and fingers, where large chunks of the hand are missing or it's a closed fist and they need an open hand. That IR system makes me sad.
Some scans are better than others but something like this would be about medium quality:
i have to agree with pior. and i might be way off base, but it seams experience is playing a role in this conversation. I know pior, and EQ and I have all been making games for close to or more than a decade. This might have something to do with how we are thinking about this. I can say for a fact that i would be arguing with myself from 10 years ago when i started, and even me from 5 years ago when i was just a lead character artist. As time goes by your view of the industry and of your job changes.
yet again you fail at understanding. go back and read my posts again.
i never said there is NO merit to 3d scanning. it requires a good scanning technician to output clean scans and it has its own use and purpose, like it is great for learning and reference in general. also in this case it is cheaper and faster to get good results and makes sense for production. but none of that has anything to do with merit of it.
compared to hand crafted model it does not measure up to the same merit level.
take this work for example - hand crafted likeness - more merit than 3d scanned likeness.
Yes I know Luc, I know that thread I remember his previous work. It looks good from the front, just like his previous portrait render. It also takes him a looong time to do. If there is merit in the length and dedication of time, there is no doubt.
Its been about 2 months since the last scan I worked with. I haven't worked with the actual hardware so I don't really know the specifics but it's a portable LiDar system with a little rotating pedestal for the actors to stand on on set. Whoever does the actual scan (this varies since it's whoever is available to go to the set) typically does most of the stitching at the same time. In this particular case I was just clesning up the scan, so taking the stitched version and filling in holes + recreating geo for area's that didn't come over in the scan. Usually this is things like accessories and fingers, where large chunks of the hand are missing or it's a closed fist and they need an open hand. That IR system makes me sad.
Some scans are better than others but something like this would be about medium quality:
Yeah that's pretty nasty. I could imagine that becoming a laborious clean up job.
The thing with this system is it gets art directors excited because there are minimal restrictions. They can come in and take 100's of shots, light how they want and spend time carefully dressing the talent with clothes, makeup, style etc All it really is, is a fancy reference capture session, like studios do in 2d for most actors when in costume and ready for set to be cloned as digital doubles. It's just this is in 3D.
Yes I know Luc, I know that thread I remember his previous work. It looks good from the front, just like his previous portrait render. It also takes him a looong time to do. If there is merit in the length and dedication of time, there is no doubt.
spoken like a true business man and there is nothing wrong with that either.
most artists care more about personal skill development, hand crafting etc etc. business men care only about the end result.
No one is saying its just push a button though. You cannot argue that scanning gives incredible results.
You also cannot argue that it takes much more skill and time to develop the talent to create it from scratch and that the ability to do so should be held in higher esteem, purely from a craft perspective.
I guess it find it hard to relate to that argument because I built this system myself over years. So in my mind I have effectively already spent the time building all these people I am scanning because of the ground work I put into developing the system.
Plus I've already spent the time developing those artistic skill sets already before I had the system, doing it old school, so I've done that part of the slog. But in a way yes I can see some of it, just with not as much hostility and worry as MM.
spoken like a true business man and there is nothing wrong with that either.
most artists care more about personal skill development, hand crafting etc etc. business men care only about the end result.
You've got no idea of my background have you MM? I've already done that "most artists care more about personal skill development, hand crafting etc etc." and I gave up the fancy notion a long time ago. For personal weekend projects sure, it's fun and easy to do.
i have to agree with pior. and i might be way off base, but it seams experience is playing a role in this conversation. I know pior, and EQ and I have all been making games for close to or more than a decade. This might have something to do with how we are thinking about this. I can say for a fact that i would be arguing with myself from 10 years ago when i started, and even me from 5 years ago when i was just a lead character artist. As time goes by your view of the industry and of your job changes.
Holy crap that's depressing. It sounds like you're saying that you used to have passion for this, but then 10 years in this industry has completely crushed it. Now you're in a "Get the job Done" mode.
Not that there's anything wrong with getting shit done. It's just that doing cool shit is why I'm even doing this. If I thought I'd never be able to do cool shit again, I'd quit right now.
Holy crap that's depressing. It sounds like you're saying that you used to have passion for this, but then 10 years in this industry has completely crushed it. Now you're in a "Get the job Done" mode.
Not that there's anything wrong with getting shit done. It's just that doing cool shit is why I'm even doing this. If I thought I'd never be able to do cool shit again, I'd quit right now.
not at all what i am saying. if anything i would say that my passion went from making characters to making games. i like what i do and never said i did't, i just lost my ego when it comes to my certain job and put it in the context of the bigger more important picture. i love my job and have fun everyday working with some of the best people in the industry making amazing games. i just don't put my role in front of or beyond the final goal. i think some of you are really taking what i am saying out of context.
I think the attitude of , this tool is better than this tool, or this way of doing something, or this job is more important, is very destructive to a team. its fine if your contractor with no real connection to a team or product, or an indie working in your basement, but for large scale games its a shitty attitude. the worst experiences i have had on a team are with people that think their job is so fucking important that put it over the rest of the departments and force shitty decisions on other people.
like for instance, a programmer that tells an artist something is too hard, because they think they are somehow above them , or a designer wanting to make something look shitty cause its somehow good for gameplay. If you get rid of your ego everyone can work together to make something bigger and better than one person or one position.
Sam, you are also making wrong assumptions here about what we are expressing. hand crafting a model 100% from scratch is not more important than 3d scanning or vise versa. it has nothing to do with ego or self importance.
hand crafting a equivalent photo realistic likeness just requires more skill than it would if you were provided a full scan data with color and highpoly mostly there for you to work from. that is all there to it.
one method requires more skill, the other method requires less skill since the scanning machine does lot of it.
also hand carving marble columns takes more skill than having a machine do it. how does that in turn make the final building with the column in it less impressive of a piece of architecture? i am responding to the sentiment in this thread that somehow because they used scan data in the trailer it has no artistic merit as a trailer. when i believe the process that was used to make the character model has no impact on the merit or artistry of the trailer.
also hand carving marble columns takes more skill than having a machine do it. how does that in turn make the final building with the column in it less impressive of a piece of architecture?
of course, taj mahal is impressive because it was all done by hand.
hand crafted work will always be more impressive and usually more valuable $$$ what ever the medium is.
however, it is a totally different question whether hand crafted work is feasible or justifiable for a project and i am not gonna argue about that.
I find myself in a really bizzare state of mind after reading through this thread haha.
I can feel where MM is coming from, but I also agree with what Pior & Arshlevon are saying, the more I stand back and look at my past 'working for company x' experiences - Arshlevon has got it spot on.
If your a creative / driven artistic person (key phrase), working in-house doing non creative jobs / tasks because it your job and some other guy above you said you have to do it that way, it ultimately gets monotonous and boring, it destroys your passion and its that process that eventually whittles you down into a cog. I've been able to watch this transition in a few people so far and its really sad to see a brilliant artist reduced to a dude that really doesnt give a shit about what hes doing, 9 to 5, clock in clock out.
Thats where I think MM's 'merit' side of this is super important. Being a creative person and being put in a position where your input as an artist is valued and able to expressed or added to a model, is always going to make that artist feel like they are contributing a part of the artistic sum of themselves into it, as opposed to simply doing something that most people could be trained to do fairly easily ( ie cleaning up scan data ) Its not a tough job, but it sure is boring and requires much more technical skill than artistic training to conquer - Im sure if you could get a big list of top artists together and ask them about what they would like to master as an artist, cleaning up scan data would not be one of them.
For me, its also a question of the company recognising and acknowledging your skill as an artisan, and hiring you for what you do, and allowing you to do that, instead of hiring you to stand on an assembly line, and press the art button - like hiring Kolby to clean up scan data - lol.
Question for MM - If you were in a position where you HAD to use scan data for a project, but your role was to dress / accessorise / pose / light and the direct the actors / scans, right down to the level of choosing fabrics and colors etc. So the end result on screen was a culmination of a teams efforts to realise YOUR vision - would you still feel the end result had less artistic merit for you ?
RE this movie, I totally loved it. I actually like that they used scan data for this, I want to see more of it used tbh, I dont think any less of anyone who worked on it either. If Battlefield 4 ( or any other games company obviously going for absolute realism ) doesnt use scan data for their characters I would be extremely surprised.
Thats the awesome thing about our industry, there are many more styles and genres of games out there and companies working on stuff that cannot be scanned and still require the hands of skilled artisans to complete. As long as people still have imaginations I dont think thats going to go away any time soon
Question for MM - If you were in a position where you HAD to use scan data for a project, but your role was to dress / accessorise / pose / light and the direct the actors / scans, right down to the level of choosing fabrics and colors etc. So the end result on screen was a culmination of a teams efforts to realise YOUR vision - would you still feel the end result had less artistic merit for you ?
from a modeling/texturing(artists) stand point - yes - less merit
from a director/producer(non-artists) stand point - no - more merit
Interesting discussion and one which I can see both sides of, both personally and professionally.
I'm recently coming off a project where all the characters were scanned and I was in charge of the pipeline, from initial research, through to final cleanup and subsequent lowpoly assets, as well as creating assets from this data myself. I've got to say that, initially I was pretty sceptical about it all and felt that, as a character artist, it would remove all that was fun about the job. Looking back on the experience now, I can see that it simply moved where this fun came from. having a hand in casting, clothing choices, styling on the day of the shoot, arranging hairstylists, models, makeup artists and photographers let me have a stronger role in the creative process than if I was just given a really tight concept that had already been iterated on 20 times, signed off by the AD, and asked to reproduce it exactly in 3D.
I was also pretty surprised to see how much artistry was still needed to take good, high-res scan data and hundreds of high-res photographs to a finished, "low-poly" in-game cinematic model. Even with all of this data which you'd think would leave no room for error, even really good, production trained artists, still needed a fair bit of directing and feedback to get the likeness spot on. Granted, this was with just pure geometry scan data, and, as far as I'm aware 8Infinite8 - your guys system captures both geometry AND colour data, so there will be less room for error, but, I can imagine how much work was needed by artists to really push the scan data to the models we see in the shot.
If I was in charge of characters on a game where likenesses and photo-realism was paramount I wouldn't hesitate to use scan data again... something I never thought I'd say 5 years ago. However, if I was one of the artists tasked with the cleanup and lowpoly generation of the assets, I can definitely see how the job wouldn't be as artistically fulfilling as creating everything from scratch.
well i don´t mean to be offensive to anyone.
but everyone always teaches aspiring artists to be humble and industrious and shit.
but frequently i encounter this arrogance among artists of all kind.
i would advise everyone to practise what they preach.
and embracing and adapting to new technology is beeing preached a lot around theese parts.
Replies
thank god i or most artists in general cant replicate 100% realism or likeness by hand sculpting or else all 3d scanning shops would go out of business. LOL
I agree with you on the concept being bad, then there's not much you can do to save it but in my experience I have no problem giving suggestions to improve it and its something I know alot of art directors like. Sometimes the end product evolves so far away from the concept art its unrecognisable. My job is essentially to evolve the design and make it as bad ass as possible whilst still being in style and on budget etc.
I know I don't actually need to explain any of this but what you wrote just struck me as very strange.
In an production art, be it games, movies, product design, whatever, its all about the end result.
This doesn't make the individual contributors disposable, replaceable monkeys. In fact it makes it even more important to have capable artists and / or tech guys in all the separate roles.
Case in point, the best character concepts of all time can be turned into crap by modelers without a good eye and experience. Has everyone already seen it happen at his job, or do I have to dig up images?
Absolutely, which I don't think is a counter point to what Arsh was saying at all.
To get a solid end result you need good work everywhere along the line. The important thing is that the work is good, not how the work was done, I think that is the main point.
So no matter how well or "artistic" one small element of the process was done, it doesn't mean anything if it falls apart somewhere else down the line.
No matter how "cheap" or "machine generated" or "technical" or "with no artistic integrity" something was done, as long as it fits into the pipe and keeps the standard of quality high, the method used to create it has no relevance.
No studio is going to pay for tailors and prop makers so they can make scans which they then need to clean up.
This just looks like a way of speeding up hyper real character creation.
You do know how some of the monsters in the original Doom were done, right?
thats epic!
Its a valid point though, the further you are down the chain(or the more specialized your tasks are) the less artistic freedom you're going to have in your work. There is a big difference between doing some personal work in your spare time, where you design, concept, model, texture, and light the entire asset, and simply doing one of those stages yourself, which is very common in production.
It really depends on the studio, and your position at the studio though, you may have a very small, or a huge impact on the overall artistic choices for your project.
AS for working with scan data, it's been my experience that while, yes a lot the work is done for you, much of the important/fine detail like the eye's and ears still needs to be done by hand. This will vary based on the quality of the scan but I've yet to work with a single scan where all I had to was retop and project to call it done. I disagree that there's no merit to it since I've seen plenty of people fail to actually get a useable model out of the scan but I do agree with MM on the cleanup aspect of it. Stitching together individual raw scan data into something usefull is beyond tedious.
if end result is all you care about then why be in this line of work to begin with ?
most of the fun is in the process of creating something whether you designed it or not you are still responsible for majority of hand crafting.
that is the main point Blaizer brought up about merit of the work.
what the studio needs to do from a business/production stand point has no relevance to what we are talking about.
when i say things like get over yourself, i don't mean it in a condescending "your worthless" tone, i mean there are so many other factors to concern yourself within a multi-million dollar production, the merit of the artisans and craftsman is the last thing to worry about. Your ego and personal ideals should never come before the end goal.
And more OT
Loving the trailer and the making of, i would love to work with 3d scandata in the future. i bet theres a lot i could learn from doing cleanup work.
Nowadays they have a completely crazy workflow at Weta for skin textures.
Gino Acevedo, the lead texture guy, will select people with interesting facial features and take a silicon mold from their faces. They'll do a positive cast, and then create a special transparent negative cast from it. Flatten it out, put it into some kind of liquid, put it on top of a scanner. Now you have a nice unwrapped displacement map looking stuff. Use it in Mari on your character model.
They certainly did this for Tintin, I guess it was part of the Hobbit workflow as well.
They also used one of the programmers who looked like Tintin to shoot all kinds of reference. Weta Workshop made some 300 costumes to find out how to make the CG versions lifelike, so they could also dress the guy up.
Anyway, they used some giant fans to see how he looks like in the wind. Then they had him lie in a sandbox for the desert shots. Then they got an inflatable pool for kids, and filled it with water for wet stuff. There were photos of the programmer lying in the small pool outside in like the parking lot.
The guy does not work at Weta anymore, BTW, but they said that all these trials had nothing to do with it...
Perhaps things have changed slightly since you guys used scanned data last? IR's system is single shot. It's a volumetric based reconstruction system. There is no stitching. You sometimes need to do some refinement and cleanup, adding in extra details. Which is useful if you have good anatomy and sculpting background.
MM: business is apart of all this, money is after all one of the reasons why we work. A client really wont give a rats ass if the artist prefers to hand build things out of nostalgia or melancholy. Creating a matte painting, using only a keyboard, a mouse and MS paint for example! just because!
If they want speed and realism, then they will take the path of least resistance. Simple as that.
this is a silly thing to say. are traditional sculptors or painters not artists because the subject they capture already exist in the real world?
I think this is the core of the question. I would think that most, if not all of us who got into this field did so because deep down there is still that inner child imagining monsters and building lego spaceships - quite the creative stuff. Portfolio pieces can be quite creative too, in the sense that most CG artists make their own dream characters/environments for their folio pieces, inevitably imagining backstories and maybe a whole universe behind each piece.
But when it comes to being hired as a character modeler, I'll have to agree with Arsh : besides a few exceptions (pre-production work, a small studio environment, or some atypical cases like Valve maybe), it's all about accuracy and execution. The skills required for the job are certainly complex and artistic (good interpretation of anatomy can only come from countless hours of studies, for instance) but at the end of the day the reality of the job should be pretty obvious.
This is a great way to look at the issue, actually. I would personally say that the quality of a painting doesn't come from the accuracy of it compared to the real world, but rather, what is left out, how the frame is being composed, and what is the intent behind the piece. Of course execution is what ties it all together, but I don't think this is what gives the value to an art piece.
Using this analogy, to me, the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer is a painting ; the female character model is just one part of the source materials, and being disappointed by the model being a scan is a bit like dismissing a great painting just because the artist used a real life model to paint from...
the last time i had to "stitch" partial scans was more than 4 years ago if i remember correctly.
couple of full body scans i have worked with were fully assembled scan with a preliminary cleanup already done to remove hair parts and seams/wholes etc.
anyways, either i suck at english or you suck at understanding simple logic.
i am not really talking about the justifiability of using scan data for a project.
i am just saying that a character model derived mostly out of scan data does not have half the merit of an equally impressive hand crafted model.
just copying something from the real world doesn't make you an artist. if that is so, every first year drawing student would have work in the Met. Artists do more than copy something, boiling it down to that is a pretty simplistic view. but it sounds like to me what you are really asking is for a definition of art, and i am pretty sure that is different for everyone regardless of what it says in the dictionary. I would say art is something very subjective, but i would say what we do is not so much. people tend to agree for the most part when a game looks good or bad. there are always a few who don't, but for the most part when a game looks great its not a controversial topic, it either does or doesn't. But something like Picasso, or Mondrian you will have those that see the merits and some who don't.
by your definition Michelangelo was not an artist.
anything and everything created by any artists is based on some combination of elements from his/her visual library based on this he/she saw in real life. nothing is original in that sense. so lets not get into the discussion of what it art and what isnt.
we are talking about craftsmanship here and that is what every artists strives to improve on.
Perhaps it's my English and you suck at simple logic
You beat me MM. You're right, there is no merit to using this type of scanned data. All you do is plug something in and press a button. Voila!
FYI:
crafts·man
/'kraf(t)sm?n/
Noun
A person who is skilled in a particular craft or art.
Synonyms
artisan - handicraftsman - artificer - mechanic - artist
yet again you fail at understanding. go back and read my posts again.
i never said there is NO merit to 3d scanning. it requires a good scanning technician to output clean scans and it has its own use and purpose, like it is great for learning and reference in general. also in this case it is cheaper and faster to get good results and makes sense for production. but none of that has anything to do with merit of it.
compared to hand crafted model it does not measure up to the same merit level.
take this work for example - hand crafted likeness - more merit than 3d scanned likeness.
http://www.cgfeedback.com/cgfeedback/showthread.php?t=4092
What I find interesting is that some of us expressed disapointement regarding the Cyberpunk trailer after learning that it was not all hand made. I really don't understand that sentiment - since when where complex special FX supposed to be used just for the sake of it ? Would it be even more disappointing if they used, *gasp*, real slomo footage of the actress without 3D at all ?
No one is saying its just push a button though. You cannot argue that scanning gives incredible results.
You also cannot argue that it takes much more skill and time to develop the talent to create it from scratch and that the ability to do so should be held in higher esteem, purely from a craft perspective.
Sure for production who cares, I'm sure if you could just push a button and make a beautiful game everyone would do that with no qualms, but that is not what he's talking about.
Its been about 2 months since the last scan I worked with. I haven't worked with the actual hardware so I don't really know the specifics but it's a portable LiDar system with a little rotating pedestal for the actors to stand on on set. Whoever does the actual scan (this varies since it's whoever is available to go to the set) typically does most of the stitching at the same time. In this particular case I was just clesning up the scan, so taking the stitched version and filling in holes + recreating geo for area's that didn't come over in the scan. Usually this is things like accessories and fingers, where large chunks of the hand are missing or it's a closed fist and they need an open hand. That IR system makes me sad.
Some scans are better than others but something like this would be about medium quality:
You have an obsession with Merit MM.
Yes I know Luc, I know that thread I remember his previous work. It looks good from the front, just like his previous portrait render. It also takes him a looong time to do. If there is merit in the length and dedication of time, there is no doubt.
Yeah that's pretty nasty. I could imagine that becoming a laborious clean up job.
The thing with this system is it gets art directors excited because there are minimal restrictions. They can come in and take 100's of shots, light how they want and spend time carefully dressing the talent with clothes, makeup, style etc All it really is, is a fancy reference capture session, like studios do in 2d for most actors when in costume and ready for set to be cloned as digital doubles. It's just this is in 3D.
spoken like a true business man and there is nothing wrong with that either.
most artists care more about personal skill development, hand crafting etc etc. business men care only about the end result.
I guess it find it hard to relate to that argument because I built this system myself over years. So in my mind I have effectively already spent the time building all these people I am scanning because of the ground work I put into developing the system.
Plus I've already spent the time developing those artistic skill sets already before I had the system, doing it old school, so I've done that part of the slog. But in a way yes I can see some of it, just with not as much hostility and worry as MM.
You've got no idea of my background have you MM? I've already done that "most artists care more about personal skill development, hand crafting etc etc." and I gave up the fancy notion a long time ago. For personal weekend projects sure, it's fun and easy to do.
I joined the discussion to put right some peoples ass'umptions. I'm not at all jaded. I prefer to live in the future, rather than the past
Unless your artist is the director and he doesn't care how the assets he puts in his movie are done
And you could argue that in the case of a cinematic or a movie, the director is the one ultimately making the artistic choices.
Holy crap that's depressing. It sounds like you're saying that you used to have passion for this, but then 10 years in this industry has completely crushed it. Now you're in a "Get the job Done" mode.
Not that there's anything wrong with getting shit done. It's just that doing cool shit is why I'm even doing this. If I thought I'd never be able to do cool shit again, I'd quit right now.
QFT
true. i loved the teaser quite a bit no matter how it was created. excited about the game art!
not at all what i am saying. if anything i would say that my passion went from making characters to making games. i like what i do and never said i did't, i just lost my ego when it comes to my certain job and put it in the context of the bigger more important picture. i love my job and have fun everyday working with some of the best people in the industry making amazing games. i just don't put my role in front of or beyond the final goal. i think some of you are really taking what i am saying out of context.
I think the attitude of , this tool is better than this tool, or this way of doing something, or this job is more important, is very destructive to a team. its fine if your contractor with no real connection to a team or product, or an indie working in your basement, but for large scale games its a shitty attitude. the worst experiences i have had on a team are with people that think their job is so fucking important that put it over the rest of the departments and force shitty decisions on other people.
like for instance, a programmer that tells an artist something is too hard, because they think they are somehow above them , or a designer wanting to make something look shitty cause its somehow good for gameplay. If you get rid of your ego everyone can work together to make something bigger and better than one person or one position.
hand crafting a equivalent photo realistic likeness just requires more skill than it would if you were provided a full scan data with color and highpoly mostly there for you to work from. that is all there to it.
one method requires more skill, the other method requires less skill since the scanning machine does lot of it.
is that so difficult to grasp ?
of course, taj mahal is impressive because it was all done by hand.
hand crafted work will always be more impressive and usually more valuable $$$ what ever the medium is.
however, it is a totally different question whether hand crafted work is feasible or justifiable for a project and i am not gonna argue about that.
I can feel where MM is coming from, but I also agree with what Pior & Arshlevon are saying, the more I stand back and look at my past 'working for company x' experiences - Arshlevon has got it spot on.
If your a creative / driven artistic person (key phrase), working in-house doing non creative jobs / tasks because it your job and some other guy above you said you have to do it that way, it ultimately gets monotonous and boring, it destroys your passion and its that process that eventually whittles you down into a cog. I've been able to watch this transition in a few people so far and its really sad to see a brilliant artist reduced to a dude that really doesnt give a shit about what hes doing, 9 to 5, clock in clock out.
Thats where I think MM's 'merit' side of this is super important. Being a creative person and being put in a position where your input as an artist is valued and able to expressed or added to a model, is always going to make that artist feel like they are contributing a part of the artistic sum of themselves into it, as opposed to simply doing something that most people could be trained to do fairly easily ( ie cleaning up scan data ) Its not a tough job, but it sure is boring and requires much more technical skill than artistic training to conquer - Im sure if you could get a big list of top artists together and ask them about what they would like to master as an artist, cleaning up scan data would not be one of them.
For me, its also a question of the company recognising and acknowledging your skill as an artisan, and hiring you for what you do, and allowing you to do that, instead of hiring you to stand on an assembly line, and press the art button - like hiring Kolby to clean up scan data - lol.
Question for MM - If you were in a position where you HAD to use scan data for a project, but your role was to dress / accessorise / pose / light and the direct the actors / scans, right down to the level of choosing fabrics and colors etc. So the end result on screen was a culmination of a teams efforts to realise YOUR vision - would you still feel the end result had less artistic merit for you ?
RE this movie, I totally loved it. I actually like that they used scan data for this, I want to see more of it used tbh, I dont think any less of anyone who worked on it either. If Battlefield 4 ( or any other games company obviously going for absolute realism ) doesnt use scan data for their characters I would be extremely surprised.
Thats the awesome thing about our industry, there are many more styles and genres of games out there and companies working on stuff that cannot be scanned and still require the hands of skilled artisans to complete. As long as people still have imaginations I dont think thats going to go away any time soon
from a modeling/texturing(artists) stand point - yes - less merit
from a director/producer(non-artists) stand point - no - more merit
I'm recently coming off a project where all the characters were scanned and I was in charge of the pipeline, from initial research, through to final cleanup and subsequent lowpoly assets, as well as creating assets from this data myself. I've got to say that, initially I was pretty sceptical about it all and felt that, as a character artist, it would remove all that was fun about the job. Looking back on the experience now, I can see that it simply moved where this fun came from. having a hand in casting, clothing choices, styling on the day of the shoot, arranging hairstylists, models, makeup artists and photographers let me have a stronger role in the creative process than if I was just given a really tight concept that had already been iterated on 20 times, signed off by the AD, and asked to reproduce it exactly in 3D.
I was also pretty surprised to see how much artistry was still needed to take good, high-res scan data and hundreds of high-res photographs to a finished, "low-poly" in-game cinematic model. Even with all of this data which you'd think would leave no room for error, even really good, production trained artists, still needed a fair bit of directing and feedback to get the likeness spot on. Granted, this was with just pure geometry scan data, and, as far as I'm aware 8Infinite8 - your guys system captures both geometry AND colour data, so there will be less room for error, but, I can imagine how much work was needed by artists to really push the scan data to the models we see in the shot.
If I was in charge of characters on a game where likenesses and photo-realism was paramount I wouldn't hesitate to use scan data again... something I never thought I'd say 5 years ago. However, if I was one of the artists tasked with the cleanup and lowpoly generation of the assets, I can definitely see how the job wouldn't be as artistically fulfilling as creating everything from scratch.
but everyone always teaches aspiring artists to be humble and industrious and shit.
but frequently i encounter this arrogance among artists of all kind.
i would advise everyone to practise what they preach.
and embracing and adapting to new technology is beeing preached a lot around theese parts.