odd terminology in game art circles
polycounter lvl 17
Hey folks!
I was just thinking today about some of the things you can hear in game dev offices which you don't hear in other places. It got me then thinking about how much clarity we have in nomenclature of technical terms, types of texture map, types of model, different parts of workflows etc. Or how varied it can be.
The sort of thing I mean is like cavity map, curvature map, crevice map, depth map - I have heard all these terms applied to different sorts of processed normal map texture used to add normal map related information to diffuse and specular textures for example.
Similarly I've heard cubemap, fresnel, reflection all referring to the cubemap environment reflection layer in a realtime shader.
Anyone got any corkers or particularly odd/specific naming convention or terminology in their workflow?
I was just thinking today about some of the things you can hear in game dev offices which you don't hear in other places. It got me then thinking about how much clarity we have in nomenclature of technical terms, types of texture map, types of model, different parts of workflows etc. Or how varied it can be.
The sort of thing I mean is like cavity map, curvature map, crevice map, depth map - I have heard all these terms applied to different sorts of processed normal map texture used to add normal map related information to diffuse and specular textures for example.
Similarly I've heard cubemap, fresnel, reflection all referring to the cubemap environment reflection layer in a realtime shader.
Anyone got any corkers or particularly odd/specific naming convention or terminology in their workflow?
Replies
Flow map and tangent map don't seem to have standard names yet.
I've found that artists who use different terms from 'standard' are often the guys who've been doing it since before there was an accepted word for it.
Baking and Generating maps were used sparingly with confusing results.
"normal map ripping" (in reference to baking)
"polish maps" (in reference to gloss maps)
some more i cant remember
wait... what? why would they call it edge highlighting. a cavity map is just that, it darkens all of the cavities of a map.
if you're refering to the grayscale map that you would get from something like say... crazybump, with the really crisp highlighted edges, then that's not a cavity map at all, and actually you can get that map from the diffuse, specular, cavity, and occlusion map outputs within crazybump if you use the right settings.
this, to me, is a cavity map:
it's almost entirely white, with the cavities darkened. this would allow you to multiply it over a texture and have just the cavities affected.
anyway, dumb terminology wise:
Unity, telling me that Glossiness = specularity, and Specularity = Glossiness.
looks like metal studs or something?
I think most artists would just call that ambient occlusion because dark areas arent neccesarily cavities, they can just be shadows from objects close to one another.
For example, imagine you had a model of a brick well with the inside modelled out, it would be dark inside but you wouldnt want to use that black as a mask for brick cavity dirt, it just happens to be dark in there.
You can also just grab it from the normal map in Photoshop in about 2 seconds.
the difference here, is that AO is a global shadowing technique, and cavity would (like i said) be mostly white, with darkened cavities.
here's a better example. one of polycounts own, Joseph March provided me with his AO map and Normalmap. i used a super top secret program which is currently in closed beta to generate a cavity map.
you can very clearly see the difference here:
AO
Cavity
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=730186
"inbetweens" in reference to transition animations
my mind was blown both times and I had to pause for a second
I certainly hope you're joking. :poly124:
- Gloss Map / Specular Exponent Map/ Specular Power Map / Polish Map
- Cube Map / Reflection Map / Environment Map (And often confused with Reflection MASK)
- Normal Map / Bump Map / Normal Bump
- Diffuse Map / Color Map / Diffuse Reflection
Then there's arguments over the differences in Ambient Occlusion Bakes, and Skylight Bakes.
The other thing I hate is how we use the term HDR in games to mean what is actually considered to be a LOW dynamic Range.
Gives you a lot more control, not sure if that's the case for everyone, would be curious to know?
But as far as odd terminology I haven't heard anything too weird, just the standards, diffuse vs colour, env map vs cubemap.
The Cavity is just the white with the Back lines, and the Edge Map is Black with White lines.
(Both derived from the Curvature map.. playing with Levels).
Huh, I did not know that, interesting.
This shit right here.
+1 for that - I definitely think there is a disconnect between different eras of game development, and between the disciplines.
A great one I often get from outside the art team - folks refer to different skins as if we are in the Q3 days, especially with regard to just knocking one up quickly ;-)
The computer games one is correct and match the way your eyes see. HDR photos do not have a high dynamic range. They have the same range as any other photo. HDR games have more data and display it dynamically based on camera position in the world.
Honestly?
A hackimamied simulation of human pupil response.
Not really, what you're thinking of is tone mapping.
HDR is simply high dynamic range. You can have HDR images, you can have HDR rendering, it really only refers to your bit depth. An HDR image will have 16 or 32 bits per channel, while an LDR image has 8. HDR files allow you to store much more information in your images without clipping shadows or highlights.
HDR is not tone mapping, tone mapping is something you do to compress HDR source content to a LDR 8 bit per channel display.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_dynamic_range_imaging
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_mapping
Ironically enough, someone attempting to explain HDR confuses it with tone mapping, seems perfect for this thread.
Heres a real world example: Marmoset toolbag uses HDR images to store the sky lighting content. This allows you to make drastic changes to the exposure without introducing nasty banding artifacts, it also allows you to have certain content (ie: the sun) much, much brighter than a LDR format would give you. This has nothing to do with tone mapping though.
Generally, when your entire rendering pipeline is in HDR, you have to tone-map it(ie compress the details from 16/32bpc down to 8 )to display it on standard 8 bit monitors.
Now, the auto-tone-map stuff you see in certain games, that is trying to simulate the human pupil response. IE: dynamically altering the tone mapping to account for dramatic changes in light levels.
This goes wayyy back to the days of quake1 replacement textures being called "skins" and the act of creating them "skinning".
rough model = Proxy = whiteboxing = blockout
also, SKINS 4 LIFE
I am guilty of this on occasion but eh Ive gotten better as the months go on.
nope - Animatics are super rough animation mock ups
1) Calling 3d animation "anime"
2) Referring to texturing as "texturizing"
So settle this for me....
Is LODs pronouced "Lods" or "El Oh Dees"?
you have a skeleton,
the mesh is its muscles that define its form,
you put a skin on top of it to define its appearance.
that doesn't mean i don't think it's the wrong term to use, but it still made sense.
lod - I have always said lodd, but I sometimes inadvertently slip into el-oh-dee territory if I speak with someone who says it that way. ;-) same with zed-brush zee-brush.
playblast was a new one to me in the last 18 months too, not having used maya before. great word! not completely descriptive, but awesome sounding nonetheless!
What the.. 'Moving Hold' meaning idle animations?
I've heard people call transition animations 'inbetweens' though. A bit weird, but I guess you could see where they're coming from in this case. The animation inbetween animation A and B.
But calling an idle animation a 'moving hold' is a bit of a reach really...
Agreed. This is in the scope of video game animations yes? I don't even know how someone could think to use those phrases. They don't mean the same thing at all. Technically an inbetween are the frames 'inbetween' key frames. Game cycles don't necessarily even have key frames if we are using the same definition of key frame as in traditional animation. Moving holds and inbetweens don't even happen in video games(aside from cinematics), they're pretty much cinematic animation terms.
depends on the time of the day... but El Oh Dee seems more appropriate since it's an acronym. At least this way I can still be angry at the folks who call SQL "sequel".
The real debate is are decals pronounced
"day-cals"
"dee-cals"
or if you insist on being really wrong "deccles"
?
Proxies are completely different to whiteboxing/blockouts. So they were wrong there. Proxies are usually done AFTER the finished assets are completed, not before.
There's no reason why you can't have moving holds in any animation. Animation without moving holds looks significantly different in any sequence whether it's a reload, idle, jump, or a walk animation.