Article: Game Art Art

SimonT · Jan 2013

Hi friends! Not sure if i'm correct here, but my issue is heavily technical - but of course about game art. Anyway this is pure self-advertisment. I write an articles about...

"Fakes & Tricks of games which impressed me"

It goes about crazy ideas or awesome tech fakes which made an cool effect. I write about this in my blog and collected everyting i can remember. Feel free to comment about my stuff, explain what i didn't understood or tell me about what stuff impressed you.

01 Fallout 3 - Edges
02 Teleglitch - Viewcones
03 Teleglitch - RGB Flickering
04 Diablo 3 - 2.5D Trees
05 Warcraft 3 - Billboards
06 Divine Divinity - 2D Reflexion
07 Cell Shading
08 Deus Ex - Occlusion
09 Deus Ex 3 - Folds
10 Deus Ex - Scan Lines
11 World of Warcraft - Balloon
12 Assassins Creed 3 - Windows
13 Assassins Creed 3 - LoD Blending
14 Kid Icarus - Tricks
15 Left 4 Dead - Puke
16 Sacred 2 - Crystal Reflexion
17 Sacred 2 - Pulse Shader
18 Battlefield Bad Company 2 - Smoke Column
19 Battlefield 2 - Flag Pole
20 Sacred 2 - Burning Map
21 Assassins Creed 3 - Bouncing Light
22 Airborn - Trees
23 1943- Retro Shadows
24 Metal Gear Rising - Slicing
25 Dead Space 3 - Diffuse Reflections
26 Homeworld 2 - Backgrounds
26.2 Homeworld 2 - Backgrounds.Tech
27 Diablo 3 - Resource Bubbles
28 007 Legends - The World
29 Homeworld 2 - Engines
30 Homeworld 2 - Hyperspace
31 Bioshock - Glossiness
32 Starcraft 2 - Localization
33 Doom 3 - Volumetric Glow
34 Doom 3 - HDUI
35 Scribble Cel
36 Lego Batman - Crawler
37 Dungeon Keeper 2 - Walls
38 Lego - Studs
39 1nsane Carpet 2 - Repetitive Worlds
40 The Binding of Isaac - Composition
41 Company of Heroes - Shaded Smoke
42 Company of Heroes - Flamethrower
43 World of Torch Siege - Blended Trunks
44 Oblivion Territory – Tree vs Palm
45 Handmade Normal Map
46 Tomb Raider - Laras Hot Secrets
47 Don’t starve, Diablo – Parallax 7
48 Windows - AC/Row/Infinite
49 Render Hell 2.0
50 Zelda Wind Waker - Hyrule Travel Guide
51 Rei Ayanami – Inner eyes
52 Sacred 2 – Fake Mirror
53 X:Rebirth – Geometric Lensflares
54 Fallout 4 - Wasteland Eyes
55 What is Color Banding? And what is it not?
56 Fallout 4 - The Mushroom Case
57 Diablo III - The sacred spiderweb
58 Alpha1 - My Top 5 usescases
59 Blubb! - Fish Tanks in Games
60 Diablo III - Wings of Angels
61 Dark Maus - Top Down Trees
62 Alien vs Wolfenstein – Cutting Torch
63 The Joy of VFX – Pin Table
64 Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag – Waterplane

65 Stylized VFX in RIME

68 The Bling-Bling Offset

69 River 2k19 Edition

70 GTA V - The Wormy Fountain

71 Mafia II - Hair vs Hat

To give you some hints whats that all about, here some of the pictures i made for the article:

SimonT · Feb 2016

New Game Art Trick

Article:
Dark Maus – Top Down Trees

Youtube Video:

https://youtu.be/2jsmlYNhzFs 

SimonT · Mar 2016

New Game Art Trick

Article:
Alien vs Wolfenstein – Cutting Torch

Youtube Video:

https://youtu.be/NpRr2W0p9hs

SimonT · Jul 2016

New Game Art Trick

Article:
The Joy of VFX - Pin Table

Youtube Video:

https://youtu.be/Ld_peIKWE3A

Obscura · Jul 2016

Cool! The vertex shader is indeed an interesting thing. Similar techniques can be used to apply wind on vegetation for example. During my experimentations, I encountered a problem which i still wasn't able to solve, and it was about the calculation of the new normals. The DDX DDY method works only if you are fine with hard normals. Do you know a way in Unreal to make smooth normals from the vertex offset?

SimonT · Jul 2016

Hm ... to be honest, no. Are you in the Unreal Slackers Slack? I'm sure there someone knows if this is possible.

Obscura · Jul 2016

No. I'll take a look. Thanks!

parag · Jul 2016

Amazing info. Thanks alot

Tomiajayi · Aug 2016

Cool

SimonT · Dec 2016

New Game Art Trick

Article:
Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag – Waterplane

Youtube Video:

https://youtu.be/euQw6IYe6Nw

kyrzon · Dec 2016

Really nice info, thank you

Justo · Dec 2016

Great editing with the video Simon, and a very educational watch. Thanks!

SimonT · Dec 2016

glad that you like it. thanks

Dash-POWER · Dec 2016

Thank you.

Very interesting.

SimonT · Jun 2017

New Game Art Trick

Article:
Stylized VFX in RIME

Youtube Video:

https://youtu.be/lAYIF0lwy60

SimonT · May 2018

New Game Art Trick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYZEmaQUrAo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FIDBeF_4SI

SimonT · Jun 2018

New Game Art Trick

https://youtu.be/FEMqR7ggSwE

Alex_J · Jun 2018

bookmarked and shared with everybody I know. A real gem.

splicer · Jun 2018

Some great tips and insight here! Thank you for sharing!

SimonT · Jan 2019

New Game Art Trick

https://youtu.be/OklvMqMCkc4

Finnn · Jan 2019

that's some mighty automation stuff. Really cool to see Houdini working so flawlessly with UE4

Nars · Jan 2019

Really nice tutorial! thanks!

SimonT · Mar 2020

New Game Art Trick

Also availiable as article: https://simonschreibt.de/gat/gta-v-wormy-fountain/

https://youtu.be/axqzP69GSsE

m00k · Mar 2020

subscribed !

Eric Chadwick · Mar 2020

"Come on! It's just water!"

Chev · Mar 2020

The whole video/article is pretty interesting but the final experiment is nothing short of wonderful!

Polynaught · Apr 2020

Looking great, thanks for putting this together. I wonder how this might be done inside Maya - alembic cache blending of some sorts?

Finnn · Apr 2020

educational and funny series, thats a good combination!

I like the part with the reference, but please... dont film your monitor with a camera, use obs or another screen capturing software.

IceWolve · Apr 2020

Not sure if these were mentioned. But growing up, and still to this day, vagrant story. All of it... the special effects of spells and special "art" moves. The facial animations and "blood" effects in the beginning when sidney was hit with an arrow. The way the Lighting cast shadows on the characters during scenes. Very impress by this game overall for its time and system.

MGS3, the animation of his bdu's when jumping out of the plane in the beginning. Other effects impressed me as well in this game.

IceWolve · Apr 2020

Unreal Tournament 3 with its animated textures and effects. When i first watched it with those giant tentacle pillars and saw how it was "flowing" was pretty cool. The way they did the legs of the machines with tentacles were badass too. and the smoke pillars.

https://youtu.be/6rKiuMOIUlg

Call of duty 2 explosions and bullet effects during the beach landing and in general were pretty good.

sacboi · Apr 2020

Lol...dig'n the Alien v Wolfenstein cutting torch comparo, overall a both hilarious and informative thread, like your style - duly bookmarked!

Dash-POWER · Apr 2020

Interesting render tech talk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whyJzrVEgVc

IceWolve · Apr 2020

Watching the ff7 remake, i just notice part in the environment where theres tons of 'pipes' for scaffolding and railing. But its instead of cylinders, its actually squares, but the way the edges were textured, gives it a rounded appearance from an angle. Kind of like your fallout cement edge optical illusions. I think the use for optical illusions in games provide for neat tricks and performance enhancements. Older games used this much more i believe to some extent.

I think japanese game titles were better at this even back in the day. I feel they had more fancy 2d art talent to pull it off. While other game companies were trying to force use of 3d models. Also companies like square enix seem to take a lot of pride in their work and push to perfection. While now a days we have companies like EA, Bethesda etc who don't really care and just want to push things out fast for a quick buck hoping that it will "just work" and "oh its got 16x the detail".

IceWolve · Apr 2020

My comments about the artwork though is more towards the management pushing timelines and standards though, not against the artists or coders. They do the best they can with the time and constraints they have to work with.

SimonT · Apr 2020

@Finnn Thank for the nice works and the feedback!

@Dash-POWER yeah the video is super cool! astonnishing how much cool tech they put into this game.

@IceWolve sounds interesting! do you have a pic/video about these pipes? i didn't play ff7 yet. yeah i have also the impression that many japanese games have a very strong understanding of art but i think it should be noted that we here in the wester areas only see the creme de la creme of those games and all the crap stays in japan as it's never published here i guess _D

IceWolve · Apr 2020

So some of them appear to be hex, but not fully. Taken from this youtube video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCY8V_dmev8

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/e7/sctw480xdexx.png

IceWolve · Apr 2020

Oh man going back and looking at games that impressed me for the time. Out wars. One of the first games you could move and aim independently. Basically just a bunch of blocks. But they used planes and transparencies to make it look like other things. example. The second picture, if you aren't moving and just looking at him directly behind, his waist has a curve and looks human instead of boxy. If you look at him from the side, same thing. Though the magic disappears and breaks when he is moving and you see it at an angle. For back in 1998, i think the model and animations were really nice and well done compared to some other games. The map felt huge and open worldly.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/64/0yu600xfja9r.png

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/om/q4tzdih0vdhm.png

Here is the video i grabbed the screens from:

https://youtu.be/d-v-HcuTC0U

IceWolve · Apr 2020

Vagrant story again with the shadows and animations of hair etc.... They really brought these characters to life with as low budget specs they had.

https://youtu.be/GiZduGodAmE

SimonT · Apr 2020

@IceWolve Thanks for the video/screenshot. I think the railings are "just" square/hexagons and the smooth shading lets them appear round which is of course very nice and the textures black hole at the beginning/end of the rail increases the effect of making a round impression.

This outwars game is really interesting. it looks almost like layers of 2d sprites to give depth to the character. nowaways sometimes i see things like that in 2d animation when they put different 2d elements on differnt 3d layers like for example here:

https://twitter.com/dedouze_/status/1195766867396300801