post effects on beauty shots, (cheating)
polycounter lvl 12
Does anyone do this? for example putting some levels on the final render shot or some slight color adjustment brightness, contrast just for and extra pop.
Replies
Don't forget we also have the Gamma corrections issue from render to final, as well lack of 'Glow' for lights in some of them, so it easier generally to add them in your Post if the engine or renderer has blurring size issues such as those of UDK on high rez sized images.
So like it or not, you kinda have to make a small pass in your Photoshop. Besides, we're making artwork, it's part of the job, we're not serving undercooked chicken in a restaurant.
I didn't know post-process was cheating... well, i don't use it. Crysis 3 has a lot of pot-process and it looks superb.
If you want to compete in this league, learn to "cheat" lol
But don't use the clone/stamp tools to get rid of seams or artifacts or such things. That would be cheating indeed.
this is what i thought you meant. doing a paintover on it
Bloom
Sharpen
Vignette
Film grain
Depth of Field
Chromatic aberration
These are all common post effects that you will see in actual games. You can do most of it in photoshop, or you can do it with the post effect editors in Toolbag, UDK, etc.
Now, repainting lighting, touching up seams or other artifacts and things like that would be what I would consider "cheating" even if this is very common for marketing material screenshots.
At the end of the day, unless you are cheating with photoshop to remove certain parts that honestly you should fix yourself, you need to make your work stand out and Photoshop is the best way to do it. You can't really hide poor artwork behind photoshop filters. You can make the poo look a better brown but its still poo sort of thing.
Considering how many movie studios still hand paint things frame by frame to fix rendering errors, I don't see anything wrong with touching things up in Photoshop, from a little bit to a lot. As long as you don't try to hide this fact, there's nothing wrong--you're showing that you have the taste to tell how the end result should look, and you're choosing the most time efficient way to make it look right.
Movies are not games, with painting you can easily hide your skill level. And painting out errors is not possible in a games engine like it is in a movies.
Agreed. I don't think bullshotting portfolio pieces is a good idea. Earthquake's got it right.
Game dev is about fudging things and getting the end result to look right no matter what. That can be done in the model, texture, post processing or whatever--get the pixels on the screen the color you want is the name of the game, and do it in the most efficient way possible.
I hire "hacker" artists. They don't make excuses, they just make it look good.
except that we also waste our HR's and AD's time, that we paid for relocation and what not and that we have to begin the candidate search anew. Guess that's where art tests come in...
If you're tweaking things that are not possible in an engine, they are not possible in a game. Simple as that.
Here's a good example of what I mean:
All the explosions in the top are obviously photoshopped in, as the pixels of the restof the scene are clearly visible. This is cheating. This is not possible in a real-time rendering. This is something you should not do on a portfolio piece.
If it's just about the final still image, why even bother making it in 3D? Or baking normalmaps? Just throw down a lit blockout in Photoshop and paint everything, or paint over a sculpt. Make a very nice painting if you just want a still-shot.
The idea of a 3D game portfolio is showing how your work would look in a game. Therefore, every post effect you use should be realistically doable or mimicable (gaussian blur imitating DOF, or some sort of lens flare) in an engine. Otherwise you're just lieing about your potential.