Games that use Vertex Painting

fayesmith

Hi all, I'm doing a paper on vertex painting and was wondering if someone could spare a minute to help me? (:

For the paper I'm going to do an experiment basically asking which is better, vertex painting or custom textures.

I need some examples of games that use vertex painting, at the moment I have Uncharted 2 and Skyrim.
I can sort of tell from looking at screenshots if a game utilises vertex painting but other than that it's quite difficult finding information about it!


Thanks a lot

Rick Stirling

Lots of games use vertex data for various things - baking in AO, colouring meshes etc.

Jason Young

All of them.

fayesmith

Sorry I should have been more specific, it's in regard to environments and adding details to modular assets/terrain.



It's hard to tell some times if something is a unique texture or if it has been painted on. But things like the floors in U2 and Skyrim it's easy to see.

McGreed

If you have large surfaces, such as landscapes or walls etc, you almost always want to use vertex paint to break up the tiling and add things like dirt. If you had to make a unique texture for all those, the texture size will end up being huge, meaning using lot more memory then needed.

fayesmith

Yes I agree, my paper will definitely be pointing out all the pros of using vertex painting for adding small details as well as breaking up large surfaces.

fayesmith

The problem I'm having is looking at a game and I think it's using vertex painting, but not being able to confirm it. I don't want to get it wrong and then I hand it in and someone says "well, actually that's a custom texture." You know?

Any concrete examples would be super appreciated!

Isaiah Sherman

Infamous 2 had vert painting on almost everything you saw in the environments.

Rurouni Strife

Crysis 2 I think, and more than likely Crysis 3. Uncharted Golden Abyss as well as Uncharted 3...anything that has a terrain system...

I think Skyrim used more decals than vertex painting but I could be wrong. It's been a while since I've been in the game.

Autocon

Uncharted 3 - Almost every single thing was vertex painted

PixelMasher

i would say 99% of games released in the last few years have used it extensively. almost all environment work I have done has used tiling textures, trim textures and vert blending on most objects ive made. Space marine, sleeping dogs, socom and splinter cell have all used it heavily. haha just relasized almost every game ive worked on starts with an S.

fayesmith

Thanks a lot!

PixelMasher - I've played all of those games! :poly111: wow

praetus

Based off your original question are you asking what games make use of vertex data or which games use vertex coloring for base colors? Some early 3D games made use of vertex painting for diffuse coloring. Now we can use vertex color channels to bake basic AO or to drive more complex materials.

passerby

ya almost all modern games use it for driving texture blends, and if you look at older games such as crash bandicoot games for ps1 they used ot for diffuse coloring as opposed to textures in a lot of cases.

like the main character in it is actually all vert paint, with decals for spots on his back.

if you look at source games, all displacmeants use a vertex blend, and most meshes use the vertex colour channels to store lighting information.

take a peek at the sample maps in UDK also, heavy use of vertex blends there, and even some more advanced tricks for adding variation such as the flowers that change colour based on there postion in the game world.

uncharted games, really heavy use of vertex blending on textures, and even some vector blending for having snow blend in on the top of things automatically.

shrogg

I'm actually working on an environment that relies on vertex colors to drive the look of the map, which without vertex colors is flat shaded with hard normals.

Its honestly a really fun way to model as you can spit out hundreds of models a day and they will all look somewhat acceptable

Progg

We used vertex data for many things on Darksiders 2. Just about all of the shaders had some form of vertex information utilized for blending or overlay.

FicWill

This is like asking "what's better, pliers or screwdrivers?" Both are tools and you bring them out for different problems.

Game tech is a constant tightrope walk of approximation, making things look as good as possible while staying within (sometimes criminally restrictive) boundaries of performance, which could mean anything from disk space to memory to bandwidth to vert count to shader model to the number of hours in the day of your technical artists and graphics programmers.

Vertex painting happens to be a pretty elegant example of technical and aesthetic priorities in action. If you can spare the vertex cost, it's a fairly coarse (but freeingly independent) arbitrarily configurable hardware interpolated channel of information you can use to drive pretty well whatever pixel shader parameters you want. That's provided you don't mind the coarseness of data that's piggybacking on vertex positions, which technically isn't 'designed' to do that in the traditional sense.

Is vertex painting better than using unique maps? The only true answer is that it depends on the problem you want to solve and an understanding of the tools available to solve it.

cupsster

Just to point out as soon as you paint vertex colors it is not instance anymore cause it is unique.. Depends on engine as well ofc.

fayesmith

Thanks for the responses, they're helpful.

I have been Googling it haha, that's why I came here to ask people with knowledge, after not finding the information I needed.

The "better" will be in terms of workflow, performance and general visual differences.

Sandro

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=QfvBIHFex9Y#t=1681s

This might be helpful, or interesting to watch at least.

fayesmith

That was an interesting watch, thank you (: