Asset flipping and using 3d asset from quixel bridge okay for 3d portfolio?
polycounter lvl 6
I have recently seen a video from Thomas Brush on his resident evil maiden remake using Unity Engine and paid assets from the Unity Store. He talked about asset flipping and how a lot of artists try to avoid using other people's assets or downloading free assets or even downloading the assets and modifying them. I'm kind of the same way. I feel like I have to make everything 100% myself or else I will never get a job or that it's dishonest. I'm starting to see Thomas point, it's like making a movie about some haunted house. You wouldn't build a haunted house, would you? YOu would find a house to rent and take videos of it and make it look creepy. You wouldn't build a car from scratch, you would rent a car instead. So my question is, I'm in this situation where I'm having a very hard time creating wood textures and wood beam assets in Blender, Photoshop, and/or Quixel Mixer. My Wacom pen is broken so sculpting is not easy anymore. I can't get 4K wood textures for free without paying and I have no money at all or a job. I want to get a job in the gaming industry really badly and make money. I'm currently working on my portfolio and in the middle of a brand new project that is a horror-themed attic environment using Blender, Quixel Suite, Photoshop CC, and Unreal Engine 4 (I will be posting it on this forum soon when I'm ready to show it for feedback and suggestions). Is it okay to use quite 3d assets and modifying them to make them your own? Quixel got some neat wood beam assets that look very realistic. I could also use the wood plank texture and make it my own by changing a few things and use that for my wood planks assets which are very simple rectangle box meshes duplicated multiple times in the level. What do you guys think? It seems to me that the industry while sculpting and making assets from scratch is definitely still going to be a thing but photogrammetry is becoming more standard and using photo-scanned assets for games which are getting even bigger and much harder to make for artist and programmers all around as gaming graphics gets better and better.
Replies
but if you always use asset store assets when it's too difficult to make them you'll never learn how to do it yourself. An artist is often trying to make their game look unique and just using assets from the asset store won't always achieve this.
If that's the case, I don't see any issue with using assets you haven't made yourself. If you want to be an environment artist, I'm of the mind that you should model everything yourself. As Sprunghunt mentioned, you'll need to learn how to do it anyway. Using textures made from Quixel VS ones made from say Designer is a whole other can of worms, but I don't see any issue with using textures made with either to texture your assets.
Why do you need 4k wood textures anyway? From what I understand, 4K textures are rarely used in a game engine, if at all. Don't be afraid to look at sites like textures.com or CC0 textures, texture haven etc to find some good free textures you can use.
If you DO use assets you have not made yourself, be sure to mention what you didn't make in your portfolio post.
4K is standard now. Heck, 8K and 16K are going to be a lot more common in the next few years. All new games like Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, Resident Evil 2/3/7/Village, Doom Eternal, etc. They all use 4K textures for the majority. Smaller objects use 2K or 1K textures now (maybe 256 or 512 for sprites or tiny objects). If your work looks dated or low-resolution. That's NOT a good look for the employer looking to hire someone. We even got ray-tracing now. Graphics cards can handle 4K 60-120 fps like it's nothing. Textures and polygon don't really matter now. Look at UE5 that's coming out soon.
Will do.
just to clear this up
you're wrong / highly optimistic
here's some numbers
at runtime...
a 4k texture set will use 60-80mb
a 8k texture set will use 240-320 mb
a 16k texture set will use 960-1280mb
Since the new fanciest xbox only has about 11gb of GPU memory you're not getting 16k maps in your console games this generation (or the next).
I think you also underestimate how much can be done with 1024s, even 512s. If you can achieve the fidelity/texel density without much repetition with a lower resolution texture, you're golden. No need to have 4ks. Only instance of 4k's ive ever seen in the couple of titles I worked on were just source textures sitting at 4k - being immediately downrezed in engine.
Texel Density is definitely more important. I have this project that I'm working on which is a wooden attic environment and I have all these wood planks debris. I tried to use a single 4K texture with shared UV for each different plank type and the texel density is much worse. I decided to go with a 2K and 1K texture and just have the UV be singular but move it around and just use the same material. Performance-wise, it's the same, if not, better while also looking a lot crisper. Before I did that, it looked really low res like a PS2 game.
Granted, I don't work in the industry yet but I talk to a lot of people that do in my hunt for knowledge. Textures are one of (if not the biggest?) memory hogs in games, everything can't have 4K textures surely. (I'm happy to be proved wrong, I'm always learning after all)
Yup textures are big memory hogs. It seems to also matter what the size of the object is going to be. Like you wouldn't texture a large object or character with a 1K or lower resolution. The resolution is far more noticeable. Unless you're far away like in an isometric top-down game or mobile game.
With that said, asset flipping becomes a problem if you do so without permission from the original authors of the source material, you are reliant on it as a crutch for everything or that the asset library you chose is easily recognized due to over use. The latter point largely depends on the sophistication of your audience. A typical consumer won't care provided the gameplay, the most important element, is decent. A veteran game dev will be more discriminating. Who is your target audience?
The most precious thing in the world is time. You are always racing against it. Cheating is highly encouraged when faced with a looming deadline. If photogrammetry or acquired store assets provide you with what you need while saving you many days of production, use them and modify as required.
If on the other hand, the piece you're producing is primarily for the purpose of flexing on social media, then by all means, you do you.