Article: Game Art Art

SimonT

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

allaze-eroler
Thanks for the link!

ALL
I added the "day time" answer for Matty6666 at the end of the article.

fatihG_

Argh.. I am having allot of trouble making a decent video file.
Some apps simply dont take in the files, other export em all wrong..

Anyone got any tips for free and decent video editing software?

Edit-

Managed to finally get it working.
http://youtu.be/Q-LzYnuEpOk

I have put descriptions of what I think is going on in the models in the description of the video.

Also.. what is the bb code for youtube stuff on these forums?

KrazyTaco

Maaan this needs to be a sticky as of now I was looking for something like this, well explained good reference investigation. OMG I think you are my hero!!!. Is there any chance you are taking some requests about the topics you cover? The Technical part of the Massive Worlds and the engineering to accomplish such things have always intrigued me. Efficient Texturing and Rendering of Massive Lanscapes, Weather Systems, Fauna, etc. in games such as Skyrim, Guild Wars 2, WOW.

Neox

allaze-eroler wrote: »

very true, recently, i did some investigation about other game who use that kind of art style, apparently there are few game like "tale of graces F" and other "tales of" serie as well other game on psp. i hope this hint will help you to decypher these games by the way, you can check this video for yourself and sorry if it's french.

Tales of Graces f : Playthrough / Gameplay #01 - Une fille myst

allaze-eroler

ah ? it's really weird because dragon saga did have that sort of technique, i'm very surprised and intrigued by this such technique beside, i did played this game some year ago, i did noticed how their face is totally flat but we can clearly see the interior moving. i will edit the post once i managed to find that such thing.

edit : ok, after some hours of download on this game dragonica (it's the original name) i managed to take some screenshot and look how it did work



as you might noticed, his month is very smooth and don't use actual 3D model of mouth, my guess is that it's the same basis with cubemap trick ! other game actually use this trick too but can't remember exactly which games....

the big difference from the usual way to make a full 3D mouth is that it have a visible polygones unlike the screenshot i posted here which you can clearly see it's actual texture.

well, i hope you will find out how these thing work really.

nascent

this is so helpful !! thanks a lot SimonT!!

fatihG_

The mounth simply looks like it is hollow check the side view. For the smooth/not faceted look they could have simpky covered the mouth with an alpha mapped piece.

Kratilim

I have a question about the Fallout 3 / cryengine edge technique. I was reading the article on crydev.net (This one), And I think understand the whole procces, the only part I'm not getting is how do you prevent zfighting in the area's with the decal on it, I assume the decal geometry is snaped to the geometry of the parent model. But that would cause zfighting wouldn't it? Or am I missing a piece of the puzzle here?

Thanks!

divi

you generally have to offset any sort of decal thingie from the surface to avoid z-fighting. can be a tiny amount, so it won't really be noticed.

warby

@divi you dont always have to do that manually shaders ususally have z bias property ( in most engines ) also sometimes engines have a dedicated decal rendering pass that comes after the opaque but before transparent particles and hair stuff ... in that case you dont need to offset them either



if anyone needs an actual real ingame implementation of that interior mapping technique check out the first crackdown ! (cant find a video on youtube sorry)

SimonT

New Article
#13 Assassins Creed 3 - LoD Blending

Simon says
1. Please don't oversee, that I answered everyone on in the last post of page 2. I don't want that people think i didn't noticed them.
2. Thank you so much for all the comments. I'm really happy that you guys like what i write. Most times people weren't really impressed when i talked about such stuff. But maybe this was because talking without example pictures is a but hard.

I'll answer you guys in the next post. No it's not that i want to push the thread, i just like to separate some stuff sometimes

Ged

good articles, Ive been playing darksiders 2 and they have hard edged particle effects on the evil goo and the lava with no visible pixelation at all, just wondered if thats something everyone but me already knows how to do?... or is it something special like a masking algorithm?

SimonT

bb0x

I use Windows Movie Maker Live (not the old one) and VirtualDub or Video Editing.

Man, first of all, thanks for making this video! Soo cool! And the tricks are awesome. The tank tracks are just UV...i'm not sure. I mean the look pretty sharp when they stand still, but when they're moving, they get blurry. Like it!

If you allow me, i would just take this video and you text and pack all this together into an article. Of course writing that you're the writer of this article

KrazyTaco
Glad that you like the stuff. Yes, sometimes its hard to understand what tech people saying when to try to explain something
Thanks for suggesting stuff to have a look at. I have to see. Because normally i try to capture the "little" tricks. But of course you*re right, This massive stuff is also realy interesting.

allaze-eroler
I'm not sure if I understand correctly. For me it looks like a 3D mouth...

nascent
Thanks for reading the stuff

Kratilim
Good question and i asked the same! I asked a Crytek guy and he said 3 things. 1. you do a small "push" to have the offset 2. decals have a different material ID which maybe lets the engine prioritize? (my guess) 3. they delete the decal in the LoD meshes so the disappear when they are far away

divi
Yeah Thanks for the comment. I wrote the same hehe.

warby
hi warby, nice to see you here. thanks for the comment. i really have to checkout the modern engines Oh and this tip with crackdown is good! i have to chck this out!

SimonT

Ged wrote: »

good articles, Ive been playing darksiders 2 and they have hard edged particle effects on the evil goo and the lava with no visible pixelation at all, just wondered if thats something everyone but me already knows how to do?... or is it something special like a masking algorithm?

These cool effects i saw also in gears of war 3. I'm not sure how they do it but i would guess its an animated alpha1 texture. A question i also have in mind about this is: when i have an alpha1 shader i would expect that this shader would ignore any pixels which aren't white. So it would only paint the white pixels and mask the rest out. If you save you texture with or without antialiasing it wouldn't make a difference. Thats what i thought but i was wrong. Here a small UDK test. I just changed the texture, not the blendmode (blend_masked).

Ged

SimonT wrote: »

These cool effects i saw also in gears of war 3. I'm not sure how they do it but i would guess its an animated alpha1 texture. A question i also have in mind about this is: when i have an alpha1 shader i would expect that this shader would ignore any pixels which aren't white. So it would only paint the white pixels and mask the rest out. If you save you texture with or without antialiasing it wouldn't make a difference. Thats what i thought but i was wrong. Here a small UDK test. I just changed the texture, not the blendmode (blend_masked).

hmmm yeah it does look like alpha1 textures were used, maybe they use 2 alpha1 textures, 1 texture scrolling up and one texture scrolling down as a mask of texture1? or something like that?

SimonT

Ged wrote: »

hmmm yeah it does look like alpha1 textures were used, maybe they use 2 alpha1 textures, 1 texture scrolling up and one texture scrolling down as a mask of texture1? or something like that?

Hard to say without moving pictures...hm another question: Is your nickname come from the Earthsea Chronicle? There is an character named Ged.

fatihG_

hey Ged, they probably used vertex colors multiplied by some random greyscale texture(maybe a clouds filter.. dunno) and clamped it so they get only blacks and whites.



Hey Simon, yeah maybe they are blending with a blurry version or a lower mipmap level while it is spinning really fast.
And sure go ahead and make an article of it =].

Eric Chadwick

SimonT wrote: »

A question i also have in mind about this is: when i have an alpha1 shader i would expect that this shader would ignore any pixels which aren't white. So it would only paint the white pixels and mask the rest out. If you save you texture with or without antialiasing it wouldn't make a difference. Thats what i thought but i was wrong. Here a small UDK test. I just changed the texture, not the blendmode (blend_masked).

This happens because the alpha is tested for every screen pixel. When the AA'd alpha is filtered, you get a nice blobby shape. Then it's clipped using a bias value... screen pixels that have an alpha value that is darker than the bias value are clipped, the rest are not.

We have some good links for graphics/rendering tricks here
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryWhitepapers

Ged

SimonT wrote: »

Hard to say without moving pictures...hm another question: Is your nickname come from the Earthsea Chronicle? There is an character named Ged.

No its actually not very original haha, its just my initials G.E.D yeah sorry I dont have a video of it. fast forward to about 5min30 sec in this video to see some of the lava with this 1bit alpha effect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj4kgql0VVQ

BBox I think you might be right as it seems so random when its in motion.

SimonT

NEW
Thanks to bb0x!
#14 Kid Icarus - Tricks

Update
#1 Fallout 3 - Edges

allaze-eroler

just a little gift for you simonT !


someone have been posted an article about ditching diffuse : http://artisaverb.info/DitchingDiffuse.html



for moment, i managed to know how to extract the models from dragonica but i don't know yet how to convert these dat file into actual obj files ^^; i will investigate more tomorrow !

SimonT

UPDATE
I investigated the Deus Ex 3 Folds a bit more and here are my results.
#9 Deus Ex 3 - Folds



allaze-eroler
Thank you for the link. Will read this later!
Oh sounds good that you grabbed the models Hm....no idea how to convert dat to obj

Eric Chadwick
Thank you for the link! I'll have a deeper look later.

allaze-eroler

you're welcome simonT !

after many hours of investigation, i managed to get a good software which it can directly extract Dat file into too many files !

once i do mess around after some hours, i did realised one thing that i was right about it but someone on this thread was right about 3D mouth because of somethine none of both were didn't have though :

the base model don't have any mouth or eyes ! however, we can indeed find the "face" item that you can actually override the base with it ! now, there the question : how they did disapear the base mesh for to see the inside mouth ?

there what i did managed to get :



now you can see how interesting this trick could be !

passerby

@SimonT that isnt a object space normal, it is just a plain normalmap with no blue channel, since the blue channel can be re-made on the go from the data of the red and green in the shader.

fatihG_

Actually about the folds of DuesEx..
Could they be using the BW folds image as an additional bump and masking that with the noise, while using the noise for parallax?

Because when I saw that for the first time in game it looked like the folds sometimes disappeared, or became less noticeable.

Aaaalso... isn't reverse engineering illegal? =P I remember some notices about that..

passerby

extracting and distributing assets is illegal bb0x, simply trying to figure out methods used in a game isnt.

Kurt Russell Fan Club

It never used to be illegal and there were civil copyright cases that found that reverse engineering was okay.

But since DMCA reverse engineering is more restricted and potentially illegal (as in, not just get sued but perhaps go to jail). You're allowed to reverse engineer but they basically only allow it so you can get games working with your system (e.g. driver/windows conflicts, making games work in future/alternative OSes) There are "civil remedies and criminal penalties". Be careful.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/anticircumvention/faq.cgi
http://www.jthtl.org/content/articles/V3I1/JTHTLv3i1_Linhoff.PDF

Ace-Angel

Yep, it's the process of sharing files is the one that is illegal publicly.

There is reason why all those models being downloaded on DA, GMod, etc always carry this statement "By downloading this model, you're acknowledging that your have access to the original model or copy of the game, etc, and will be removed is the original author deems it so", it's kinda like a little loophole to avoid any penalties basically, as to how 'in stone' it is, I have no idea.

As for Deus Ex, yep, it's a scrolling mask that is lerped between the basic Nrm map and a tiled noise ontop of the nrm map or a noisy nrm, since you can control how strong you want something, you can get that nice middle 'blended' normal look, even going to double values for the recess for the normal map.

Not sure how expensive it would be.

allaze-eroler

very true but i do never download any models from the game dragonica since i only downloaded the software who can extract the model from the game that i already downloaded (dragonica is a free to play game so, it's legal) which i only do that for my knownledge purpose ! ^^

so, it's enough legal to do that way but like you say, some game companies did not allow everyone do that for some reason. look at the game planetside 2 which the gamers who like to mod are not allowed to change the files of the game because they will get banned as soon as sony noticed it. and not only that, sony will litterally hunt family people who do the mods... kind of creepy ^^;

passerby

ya that is stupid of SOE, Modding adds so much life to games, look at warcarft, 3 like 8 years after release people were still buying it for dota.

than look at quake and half-life.

i think more companies should include mod tools and editor like epic and valve do.

fatihG_

allaze-eroler wrote: »

how they did disapear the base mesh for to see the inside mouth ?

They probably simply gave the face a zdepth thats different from the face manually, making it so it always renders after the head.

But if you look at the side view you can not see anything of the simple head, maybe they just use the simple head model as an LOD or something?

System

normal map panning plus bump offset plus a mask makes a even better effect. (check out borderlands 1 if you have it)

SimonT

Sorry for writing so late. I'm a bit sick and of course, i thought about this Reverse E. stuff - i mean in the legal way. On the one hand i'm not in USA so the DMCA shouldn't be valid for me. But of course we here in germany have our own laws and i found a nice book where i want to have a look into.

allaze-eroler
Great how much time you invest to find this stuff out. I have no idea what they do with the face...maybe switch the face part completely?

passerby
Hehe the good old trick. Sometimes i just wonder because if you reconstruct the third color channel you have to invest time. But maybe this is totally cool. At least you have 1/3 of texturespace. We used this in Sacred 2 where we used the Blue channel for saving the specular. But this was only true for the ground textures.

bb0x
I'm not sure what they're doing exactly. Maybe i should try to re-create this shader in UDK. Oh you bastard, since you mentioned that with the RE i always think about if its illegal.

Would be totally sad. Because its a lot of fun to investigate all this cool stuff and learn from it. Also the response from you guys is great and in the last weeks i learned more about tech then ever before. I hope i can find out thats RE is OK for research.

Kurt Russell Fan Club
I read the second of your links and this is a very good text. It seems the since the DMCA all got hard. Thanks for posting this!

Ace-Angel
I hope you're right.

ChrisPerr
Do you have an example video or picture of what you exactly mean?

SimonT

NEU
#15 Left 4 Dead - Puke

fatihG_

"When i worked on Sacred 2,we tried to make some eyes (growing at the ground, it was a spooky forest) look at you. The idea was to add a bone and let them always point at the player. This never did it into the game. It was too complicated to put this feature into the renderer for the short amount of time we had left."

Wouldn't it be kinda easy to just make them all point at the camera or player without any bones at all? A simple look at script thingy?
I used something similar in Unity once, and the code for it wasn't complicated at all.

Shudrum

Maybe this isn't the right place.

But Kid Icarius second character with flames was juste amazing. And you say it use cross planes and uv scroll, have you some example of this trick ?

Thank you !

SimonT

bb0x
That's what i thought. But it turned out it was complicated. Also you have to have some limits. Because you don't want the eye ball rotate too much...i don't know. I'm not a coder, i have no idea how much work something like this takes In my case, it was too much.

Shudrum
I like it too!

Neox

SimonT wrote: »

bb0x
That's what i thought. But it turned out it was complicated. Also you have to have some limits. Because you don't want the eye ball rotate too much...i don't know. I'm not a coder, i have no idea how much work something like this takes In my case, it was too much.

Shudrum
I like it too!

in unity? 5-10 minutes without prior coding experience, with coding experience not beeing able to do it is just a lame excuse for not wanting to.

SimonT

I just added a small positive example

But on the other side, we made it possible pretty fast to destroy these eyes. Then, a new eyeball spawned but this time with physic. This means you could play football with it. This example shows, that sometimes it is easy to implement stuff.

fatihG_

Shudrum wrote: »

Maybe this isn't the right place.

But Kid Icarius second character with flames was juste amazing. And you say it use cross planes and uv scroll, have you some example of this trick ?

Thank you !

Its really simple.





Notice how I scaled some uv's to add in a bit more randomness. I dont think the KI team did this, but they have smaller flames and "floating ones" as well as varying width's for the cross planes.

Note that the uv scrolling will be needed to be done through a shader. What you see in the .gif is just to demonstrate.

Shudrum

Mother of explanation Oo Thank you so much !

I'm impressed that this technique is, in fact, a modern vision of the "two planes crossed" for showing trees on old games.

I think I would never found such a configuration for made this. This will be usefull !

Thank you bb0x !

SimonT

UPDATE
I've added the explanation about the flaming bones. @bb0x, i hope this is ok for you?
#14 Kid Icarus - Tricks
I added two GIFs to show the Sacred 2 eyes and the big one which has a eyeball you can play football with.
#15 Left 4 Dead - Puke

NEU
#16 Sacred 2 - Crystal Reflexion

SimonT

These are just some personal words :,) Nothing official.
♥♥♥ Polycount ♥♥♥

fatihG_

Haha, awesome.

Actually about the "reflections", it just looks like refractions, how they make water. But they increase the distortion amount way more than you would usually do for water.

If you look at the static image you showed, where you point out the "reflections" you can obviously see they are pointing in the wrong direction. The crystal on the left points to the right, yet it is "reflecting" the lamp on the left.
And the crystal on the right is pointing towards the camera, but the character that is being "relfected" is to the right of the crystal.

So yeah calling this reflecting and occasionally refracting is kinda misleading. It is fake refraction. Dummo, maybe I am just antfucking here.

Also a side note.. You could increase the quality of your blog by making sure you aren't making any spelling mistakes. For example you are using reflexion instead of reflection.

niic

SimonT: Thanks for the cool blog. Interesting read!

SimonT

NEU
#17 Sacred 2 - Pulse Shader



niic
Thank you very much!

bb0x
Hehe good point. I started to be a reflection but the technical approach made it a refraction. Anyway, i like the result. But you're right. It's important to don't mess up all the tech words.

Of course i have to check the spelling. In case of the "reflexion" i didn't see a correction notice and because of that i checked the dict: Reflexion is possible but rarely used in British English. Of course i knew that and used it to make sure everyone gets that i'm super awesome in english Just kidding, i'll replace it. Thanks for mentioning!

fatihG_

Ah I didn't know that about "reflexion". Since I don't see it often it looks like internet talk to me =P

Hmm..
Last technique sounds like it is more complicated that is should be. You could replace this whole thing by simply having a scrolling gradient shader and a mask to mask off the lights. You would need to make a secondary uv channel though to control where and when the light should be on.

But with the method used in Sacred 2, you seem to have more control, without messing with secondary uv channels, on where and when something should be on or off.

cptSwing

Loving all these posts, SimonT! It's great to read the results of all your digging

SimonT

cptSwing
Thanks man!

bb0x
Hehe i dind't knew the difference between "reflection" and "reflexion" neither. What a thread, here you can learn tech & language

Yes the method is not really cheap but the control of the blinking areas is awesome. I'll look for more examples. Also we did the UV animation on other assets. Maybe i can find examples for this too.

SimonT

NEU
#18 Battlefield Bad Company 2 - Smoke Column