Oblivion xbox360
polycounter lvl 19
dunno who the environment artists are... but they are gods, behold!:
I'm not too fussed to play the game but would enjoy to watch it being played.
I'm not too fussed to play the game but would enjoy to watch it being played.
Replies
Still looks hot, though
Lets hear it for photo-textures and SpeedTree, they do make for a hot looking game.
Its pretty much very generic to me. Nothing really special if you ask me. At least they could have added some color varaitions to the textures and some intersting shape to the trees. I am more impressed by HyPers (oh god!) project EON treework.
if it turns out it is not speed tree then i apologize, but if it is, i still say LAZY FUCKS
Speed tree is a tool. It is just like Deeppaint or 3dsmax. You can completely change the textures, alter all of the geometry, whether the leaves are billboards that always face, or permanent geometry. You can add color variation at the vertex level to the leaves, or just use multiple textures. I have seen some speedtrees and speedgrass that look amazing, and it's because the artist who used it really spent their time making something cool. Using speedtree is no more lazy than someone using max instead of notebook to model things.
I'm nearly positive that Oblivion uses speedtree, and it looks like they mostly used out of the box settings, or didn't tweak them heavily if at all. However these are still frames, and the game looks much MUCH better in motion.
Still though, it's always interesting to see a bunch of amateurs rag on the hard work of a team of professionals, when they know absolutely nothing about the background of the product.
It's the story and gameplay that made me love Morrowind - even though the character art was pretty poor on balance, I didn't care, since it was so fun to play. So hey, even if the graphics aren't as pixel-perfect wonderful as all you guys can do in your sleep, evidently, that doesn't stop it being a great gameplay experience.
nice to be called an amateur by some one of your lofty stature
Next you'll be telling me you bake your own bread and roll your own pasta because it's more of an art form than going to the store and buying it. Bakers and pasta-makers everywhere are spinning in their graves.
The 'how' of gameart creation really is just the man behind the curtain and there's a redundant want often here to award points only to certain methods which I think is a mistake.
r.
I for one think it looks neat, and more importantly fun. I don't mind the bloom so much. Sometimes its appropriate, othertimes, not so much.
i think that calling speed tree a "tool just like max and deep paint" is complete lunacy, speed tree is not a program to allow you to create trees for your game more easily, its a program to allow you to select from a library of pre made trees and adjust a few sliders"
i may not bake my own bread but i don't go and buy a loaf of bread, and then claim that buying a loaf of bread was exactly the same as baking my own, cause its not.
and yes i would personaly choose to make my own forrest if i was making a game, because i don't see enviroment art as a throw away part of a game that does not require thought,
i have had experience with speed tree, and its far from making art,
notice in the first post hawken stated the enviroment artists were gods, then you look.. the only enviroment objects we see that were made by the games enviroment artists are one ruined building and a rock
....speed tree is not a program to allow you to create trees for your game more easily, its a program to allow you to select from a library of pre made trees and adjust a few sliders..."
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That made sense, right?.......
In the perfect world, every enviornment artist wants to make their own work. You will not find a single one who would disagree. The fact is that time almost NEVER permits it. Period.
You can try and refuse to use SpeedTree, and make your own. I'd love to see you hand-make that same quality of forest in the amount of the time it took that artist to use Speed Tree. No really, please try.
Ror - exactly right. Creating game art is smoke and mirrors. You use what you have to use, to get the job done. If you're told to make 200 unique trees in two days, hand creation isn't really an option, now is it?
/bah
Even if the actual trees might be pretty generic it is still quite a bit of work to assembly a good looking (big) forest/level out of single trees!
Oh and saying the trees look horrible is pretty harsh criticism of the mighty fine work of the Speedtree artists.
"10,000 jobs outsourced to Speedtree"
and i was against it the whole time we used it.
I've used Speedtree. In fact I think it's safe to say I used it before anyone else in this thread has, back in 2002 at my first job. I had to make most of the trees in the game, and I had very in depth knowledge of it and have kept up with it. It is not a pick from predefined trees type of program. You can start from predifined trees, but you can also start from scratch, and it allows as much modification as you can desire, while still maintaining all the benefits that this program allows. Mainly infinate variation, built in skeletons and wind, LOD's, placement tools, as well as drag and drop code to implement it all. Maybe one of the reasons you don't like it at Mythic, is because their editor has stripped out every advantage that using speedtree has. If it actually had coded in the support that makes speed tree worth using, instead of using it as a make tree button, you might not be so hostile towards using it.
There are benefits it can provide specific games, that you could never have from hand building everything. And, the great thing is, just because you use it for most of your trees, doesn't mean you can't have hand made trees thrown up in the mix as well.
In short, take some mydol, don't be so sensitive, and be less critical of peoples hard work.
The trees found in oblivion appear to be out of the box models, but the way they are used to make a whole forest is pretty damn cool. Im sure the developers wanted to achieve an almost true forest type environment, thought about how long it would take to make such a thing, realized that a handcrafted forest will take too long, brainstormed about other solutions to solve the problem, and ultimately came up with a very generic but ultimately beautiful looking procedural forest. Even then, do ont forget that it does take time to even create a system in order to create all of those procedural trees effectively (the making of vids I saw has the devs stating that the forests were researched anyway-someone else already mentioned that too) If it looks good and offers something to the gameplay, then that is fine by me.
It irks me to find people talk about the need for creative and fun games that have generic or blah looking game art but are first to criticize a game for its awfully identical looking trees, especially when the focus is more on making a FUN game experience, and lets not forget that the dev team has to make a product with the most bang for buck within the allotted time constraints, etc. I dont know much about the game [oblivion] personally, except for what I have read online and in magazines (and thats probably as much as most of you guys know too), but I would still want to play a fun game regardless of whether or not the trees and grass are procedural objects in the world.
Oh, and speed tree is more of a resource that artists can pull from. 3ds Max is a tool that is used to create art. I think that is rhino/mojo's argument...
That is all...
I don't really understand why anyone truly cares *exactly* how the trees were made. ( although perhaps hypocritically I do agree with some comments that the characters in this game look weird and 'poser-esque' ) Could I make a nice looking forest from scratch without the use of an aid like Speedtree? Probably yeah. Would I want to? Nah.
r.
would you feel like you are making art?
I like being an enviroment artist, and i take the creation of the enviroments just as seriously as you may take creating characters, to me, making a Tree is just as much art as you making your james bond.. that may be hard for you to realized, but its true.
daz you are a character artist, i am an enviroment artist, if you went into work tommorow and they said hey we have this new auto character software we are going to be using, you make a human template, then you use sliders to change its height and weight, and then you select the outfir for it to wear,
would you feel like you are making art?
I like being an enviroment artist, and i take the creation of the enviroments just as seriously as you may take creating characters, to me, making a Tree is just as much art as you making your james bond.. that may be hard for you to realized, but its true.
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I never meant to belittle the job of being an environment artist, and I don't believe I did. No, it isn't "hard for me to realize" that you have passion for what you do, and no! I don't have any passion for making James Bond thanks very much. All I was merely suggesting is that there isn't necessarily inherent danger in trying to automate some of the immense amount of work we have to do to make videogames. I don't make a character model from scratch every time, I have templates. Although granted, I made them
Let's not have the developer gurning contest to see who takes their job most seriously because you'll all end up having a wet shite through tensing too much.
r.
It comes down to use or abuse.
Rhinokey has a brilliant point that i would like to redirect a tad with what Ben said: If you invest in this spreedtree option and don't take full advantage of the procedural nature then yeah...it sucks. You are abusing the advantages of this sort of asset creation.
To elaborate and expand on Bens excellent insight; if you shift your focus from polygon/pixel creation for your foliage and leverage the power of the tool you can arrange a unique Forrest with more features and invest artists time in that.
I bet that if you gave all of us the same speedtree assets that we could all make drastically unique variations with per-pixel lighting, arrangement, foliage density, ect ect.
The reality of per pixel lighting is that you have this huge bloat in asset production and layers upon layers of new responsibility for the content creation staff. Leveraging tech like this isnt simply 'replacing' custom trees with procedurally generated trees from a library, but when properly wielded it redirects the creativity from sculpting unique tress to sculpting an entire Forrest with new interactive features that would be almost impossible.
Think of how Peter Jackson exploited massive and what did for the battle scenes in LOTR's.
The key is to understand your tools and leverage their strengths. This is the future of certain types of asset creation...trees are a perfect example.
-R
As for the 'other' topic here. The first rule a game artist should learn and rememeber about their art is that the customer doesn't give a damn how you made it.
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I got the feeling some people around here fear that their jobs will be replaced by Speedtree soon???
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Hey i was doing freelance for s2games making trees and i was replaced with speedtree. So yes i fear speedtree, the bastard is sneaky that way. So what if i was one of the many people telling them to use speedtree... that has nothing to do with this...rite?
Speedtree makes trees, hey if i was ever asked to make a forest of next gen trees i sure as hell wouldnt be making them by hand if i didnt have to.
what i am arguing here and everyone keeps overlooking, is when ben compaired it to being a tool just like max and deep paint, because it is not a tool like those, it is not making your own art, it would not be propper to render out a bunch of trees with speed tree and put it in your portfolio as trees you have made,
speed tree can be an excellent way to cut corners if your studio or producers are either too lazy or stingy to allow time or money needed to make an entire game.
i think the oblivion shots look great, but i think they would look better with trees made by artists, if not better it would at least look difrent than other games made using speed tree, it was easy to just look at this game and go "oh thats speedtreee" cause despite the tweaking and slider moving, "most" speed trees look... like speedtrees,
i keep getting replies like i'm fighting against ways to slim down game design when under tight budget / time constraints, but what i am arguing against is the notion that making a tree in speedtree is art in the same manner as making a tree in max and photoshop.
and the comment i made to daz was if he were to start making characters using sliders tommorow, would he consider that "art" but again i get a reply back about how sometimes we have to automate the proccess, which is far from the point that i am arguing,
i really don't know why i am arguing here, but its something i'm passionate about. if you have to cut corners to ship, then use speed tree or poser or whatever, cause like nitzmof mentioned the player doesnt care how its made. but when doing it don't tell yourself that its just the same as if it was your art you made yourself,