next Gen + hand painted possible?
polycounter lvl 18
I'm curious. I'm under the impression that assets involving sculpting, baking, high end materials etc just don't work with hand painted textures? Whenever I see hand painted textures it's usually on rather flat surfaces. Are there any examples where these two worlds can combine beautifully?
Rime for PS4. Like many hand painted looking games just doesn't use fancy normals. Is it possible to keep that style AND add fancy normals/materials?
http://images.pushsquare.com/news/2014/02/ps4_exclusive_rime_almost_ended_up_on_the_xbox_one/attachment/0/original.jpg
Rime for PS4. Like many hand painted looking games just doesn't use fancy normals. Is it possible to keep that style AND add fancy normals/materials?
http://images.pushsquare.com/news/2014/02/ps4_exclusive_rime_almost_ended_up_on_the_xbox_one/attachment/0/original.jpg
Replies
Also Insomniac is working on Sunset Overdrive:
I think skylebones brings up a great point too. Feature animation keeps getting better and better. I think a lot of that is attributed to better rendering solutions. For example, I read somewhere that Monsters University was the first time Pixar fully implemented GI into their lighting pipeline. However something to note with that too though is it seems a lot of stylized work in feature film seems to be going in the direction of irregular/cartoony proportions w/ realistic textures/lighting/shading (ex: How to train your dragon). Although, if you take some of the disney films like Wreck it Ralph or even Frozen, there's still an in between there.
Also due to the flexibility of a lot of these next-gen engines, I'm really excited to see the way developers pick and choose what they'd like to keep and leave behind in terms of grounding everything in a physical reality. I think there's a lot of potential in there to come up with some pretty awesome stuff
Also, there's no rule that says you have to normal map everything. A character's face could be left flat/hand painted whereas the rest of the body has bumped mapped detail (or vice versa).
I think the reason we don't see the two often is because hand painted games usually have low budgets or their target platforms don't leave a lot room for power.
I don't know that I agree with this as you can quickly iterate a sculpt and make sweeping changes. If you're hand painting on a low poly model, it's tough to make large changes after you've laid out your UVs, whereas with a sculpt you can quickly iterate large changes with different subtools. Once you bake down the ao, cavity and prtP, most of your value work is done for you. For me at least, I've noticed I work faster when I have that information to go off of then if I'm trying to lay out all my color information from scratch. May be just different strokes for different folks.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=62779
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1674251#post1674251
On the other hand, if you're mearly refering to stylized games, the answer is yes, absolutely you can do stylized games with current tech, and you've got lots of differenct resources to do so.
I think Pixar's movies are a great example of this, they are generally highly stylized, but also using much more sophisticated rendering tech than what is available today in games. Does all that tech mean Pixar can't make something stylized or give it a unique look? Absolutely not. Even with stylized games, you still generally want your lighting and materials to make some sort of sense, so it fits in perfectly with current gen stuff like PBR.
You can also use non photo real shaders to give a painterly look to the entire game, in motion, if you don't want to go for more realistic rendering.
Back to "hand painted". Is a highpoly sculpt that is created entirely by hand any less "hand painted" than a flat diffuse texture? I wouldn't say so. Its just a matter of shifting where the work is done. Previously you would spend a lot of time building up your base shading in 2d, now that work is done in 3d. Sculpting takes time, but when you have a high poly base, you spend a lot less time on the textures.
It's not as high-tech as UE4, but still.
I'd go so far as to say conventional 'handpainted' is pretty much the antithesis of what PBR is trying to achieve.
But if a developer wanted to drop PBR/next-gen lighting/post-processing, and just go with handpainted, I'm sure nothing is stopping them.
^ 100%
i was gonna say "how is hand sculpting any different from hand painting" and then i saw your post.
also regarding PBR, i have done several projects with 80% hand painting while using PBR. it is just a rendering idea. as long as you dont put too much lighting information into your albedo then all your hand painted textures should render just fine in PBR under all lighting conditions.
I find sculpting kind of blah and boring compared to painting. Maybe it will grow on me.
Project Copernicus had a next-gen hand-painted style, there was plenty of normal mapping going on in there.
http://www.keenandgraev.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/copernicus_jottun.png
http://www.keenandgraev.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/copernicus_almain.png
As far as pbr/PBL goes you can still go stylised the tech dosnt limit you at all, in fact it can help you a lot of stylzation will be in your sculpting and painting.
Also other great things to look at are BioShock games and dishounered, they got realistic materials, but very uqnune environments that are grounded in the desgin of a certain time peiord with some altered dimensions. I think both game franchies pulled it off very well.
The character team on COP relied much more on sculpting, just with very defined edging work to help with the stylization. With the environments we often *painted* the normal map by hand using a facet palette for reference. It solved some very specific project pipeline issues and ended up being quite a bit of fun. It was pretty wild:
:: SOUND OF RECORD SCRATCHING TO A HALT ::
I wanna see that workflow, and the reason behind deciding to go walking in such a dark place...
Lately I've been combining the two where I paint my base detail mask onto a sculpt in polypaint (so it's not beholden to UVs) and then baking that out with the rest before bringing it into nDo and fine tuning it. Again, a little getting used to but it's a nice workflow.
Yeah I feel like they also wanted to very specifically paint certain angles/slops, which you can do if you understand what the various colors in a normal map represent.
Oh, I've edited normals manually to clean up bake errors and add details. I just mentally pictured these folks starting from a blank Photoshop document and painting tangent-space normals from scratch by hand with nothing but a Wacom, and I'm thinking to myself "I can do it, but that is not what I would call fun." :poly142:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1745478&postcount=5
Anyone have experience using nDo2's sculpt mode? Can you edit it after converting, like to fine-tune some shapes, or do you have to start over each time? Haven't really played with it enough.
1: having a large pool of talented painters (concept/diffuse people) who lacked tons of 3d experience but knew photoshop well & were supposed to drive the look of environments
2: having a large pool of pre-existing painterly diffuse maps
3: having a *very* distinct style-goal in mind
4: having a heavy reliance on tiling--which was a pain in zbrush (2.5? irrc) and had too much haloing/subpar results in the other alternatives (Crazybump/Nvidia filter/etc).
The only alternative that seemed compelling would have been nDo, but that came along way later.
It would take us about 20 mins to explain the process to the painter, and then perhaps a half-day's work for them to get used to visualizing facets/angles. We designated one artist to be in charge of making sure all others matched their calibration and had shaders set up with strength/angle bias scalars to help tune things in engine. It was all pretty straightforward, actually. Was it accurate? Only roughly--but it did the trick.
Once trained, these painters could rock out normal map stuff *super* quick. I like to think it actually improved their diffuse work too, since artists were constantly thinking in terms of planear surfaces and angles/lighting.
However, I also made sure to tell the painters that they would likely never use the technique anywhere else, nor would it give them results anywhere near baking's accuracy (especially on more organic objects--this was pretty much a strictly-modular-env art solution). However the stylistic results were very hard to argue with. It was pretty successful at getting non-technical people (i.e., strict painters) comfortable with exactly what a normal map was: (essentially a relative-angle-lookup map).
edit: oh! Eric just posted that old thread. I think I say the same stuff in there.
I hate dead projects. :poly118:
First... absolutely amazing work! Love the out of box thinking for art pipeline solutions. Just goes to show ya that it's all about the artist and not fancy tech these days as much as people are worried about that being the case.
In your post from the old thread you said you might have a video laying around that shows the process. Do you happen to still have it laying around?!
Strange that the official site's pics wont load... luckily we have a sweet interview right here on polycount that showcases some awesome art and a little bit of the process.
http://www.polycount.com/2013/06/03/wildstar-behind-the-scenes/
This is great! I was getting worried with everyone drooling over next gen titles that were just gritty brown & grey that we would have to slog through another few years of boring games before we rediscovered color and style.
I know for example that in the past people could tell from your diffuse whether you could draw / paint nicely or not. PBR kind of doesn't let you do this anymore, because it takes lighting info away from your Albedo. Any new thoughts on this matter?
Thanks!
I don't think it's not an option at all?
You know what i'd like to see? Filtered PBR to look more like a painting instead of just a blur
It would probably require a very high spec engine but it is a dream of mine.
I've always been more drawn towards the hand painted / stylized look and I`m wondering whether it is worth it creating this kind of art with PBR or not. Portfolio is important as everyone knows and before starting new projects I`d like to know if it's worth it doing Warcraft style stuff with PBR or not.
You have THIS small diorama here. Alex did a wonderful job on it, but how common is this workflow// or will be... at studios?
I will read up on the Dota 2 shader in the meanwhile. Thanks a bunch!
iadagraca: Yep, I agree. When people look at your diffuse texture, they can kind of tell whether you have nice drawing / painting skills or not. Obviously the whole end result is what matters, but studios specifically look for people with good draftsman skills. Textures can speak to them, but when working with PBR, since you don't have to put lighting / shading info into the Albedo (or maybe very little), you are not able to "show off" your painting skills anymore. I`m interested in this matter from a recruiting point of view as well, because I know I've landed my job because the Lead Artist could tell I could paint textures up to his expectations. PBR kind of "hides" this a bit...
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And while there are very few games right now that do PBR + stylzed sadly, don't just limit yourself to games. Recall that Pixar and Disney makes high end CG films with stylzed art. Monster's University, Inside Out and Big Hero 6 are all 100% PBR.
I'd say don't try to theorize it too much.
An engine with the most realistic material support could very well be used to create a game with very brightly lit environments with a lot of ambient lighting, which in turn would require the albedo texture to compensate a lot. (That's the case of Dota2, which *does* support a rather advanced material system ; but in practice, artists doing assets for it tend to focus a lot on diffuse painting, because it ends up playing such a huge part in the end).
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, a very "stylized" looking game could very well be made using a very technical approach to texturing (like the new Ratchet and Clank mentioned above).
My advice would simply be to try your hand at both approaches, understand them both well, and apply the knowledge to your next piece
theres no reason you can not do meshes with great silhouette and normals to improve the shapes combined with hand painting , its just that usually hand painting involves a lot of faked geometry and shadows but nobody forces you to use it like that
Arena of Fate from Crytek have really sweet shaders that work very well with their hand painted models too, quick screengrab:
Just thought I'd clarify things a little
Because handpaint is all about FAKING those lights,shadow and reflection.
There's a bunch of big games that still use just diffuse but isn't it only a matter of time before they switch to current/next gen stuff?
Gamers who are attached to diffuse-only aesthetic are probably just a small fraction, I bet that majority wouldn't mind or care if games like WoW started using normal and specular maps.
As was posted before, read up on Valve's hero shader for DOTA2. While it's not strictly using PBR maps and values, the principles behind the use of their masks and shader features is absolutely applicable to a PBR workflow.
http://media.steampowered.com/apps/dota2/workshop/Dota2ShaderMaskGuide.pdf
LoL sure use a high to low workflow thats clear. Hard to make out if they use normals + diffuse or diffuse only with higher polycount but likely diffuse only as you said, yes
(As I thought both use normals, that would have implied Dota2 uses normals too - aka what I said)
Dota2 uses normal / spec / fresnel etc the full spectrum, theres also a handy PDF somewhere explaining it all. (edit, even posted above, nice) Its not as much hand painted but it depends on the creator. You can see a lot of differently made assets on the store, some involve a lot of hand painting some not so much and mainly use bake information, id recommend checking out the store as its free.
The crytek AOF heroes shaders look clearly superior tho, they probably use a classical albedo/gloss/n etc setup that is energy conserving unlike the kind of retro Dota2 approach and with more accurate fresnel and they look great, but well there are many ways to do things.
I put a fair amount of hand painted or baked detail into my wolverine albedo and roughness as I was going for a comic book over saturated and slightly inked look so I didnt follow all the pbr "rules" perfectly. check it out with the marmoset viewer on my Artstation to see the albedo pass https://www.artstation.com/artwork/savage-wolverine-fan-art-3d-viewer
oops just saw some seams
http://www.gamersyde.com/hqstream_everspace_kickstarter_trailer-35318_en.html