Getting back into 3d Art

Rexxigar

Recently I have gotten back into doing some art work, but eventually ran into the issue that I was making my low poly meshes that were too low compared to what is now an industry standard. So my question to you guys and gals, are there any write ups out there that can get me back up to speed on what is standard in the Industry? Also any tips on how to get my self up to speed again will be appreciated.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Not really, nothing as large scaped as you're imagining.

I think big things right now are:

Most games are moving into Physically Based Rendering techniques for the graphics rendering.
Feel free to push higher the ceiling for polycounts.
Substance Designer and Painter are becoming more and more industry standard for game asset texturing.

Kevin Albers

When in doubt, add enough polygons so that there are almost no faceted silhouettes on anything. Ideally, the untextured low poly model should look pretty good, even without things like normal maps (use face-weighted modeling and add little bevels fairly often etc).   If a small prop that might have been 200 polys last decade is now 1500 polys, fine.  If your new small prop is now 20k polys, you are probably freaking out and going overboard.

Extra polygons are cheaper than dramatically increased texture memory usage. If you use 4k textures for everything in a game, it ain't gonna load into memory, unless it's a game w/small numbers of assets.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Sometiems if you've bought the tool, simplygon or something similar can help you optimize fro count after the fact!  Just did that for a bunch of assets last week because I made them higher than necessary, since I wasn't sure st what scale or exact context they'd be used in. 

driftprincess_z

Hey, I'm also getting back into 3d art and I made a post about the workflow if it changed. I will message you anything useful and if you can send me anything you find.

Thanks