3D for games.
polycounter lvl 17
As of now I am still trying to get my foot through the door of the gaming industry with modeling. I have hit a few roadblocks due to the fact that I do not know how much detail I should be adding into a world reel. I was wondering if I could throw out a few questions about in game models and get some answers back.
1. When you model a building for a city should you use extrude face on windows to give a sense of depth or should it be done solely with textures?
2. How much is too much? For poly count (I know this is more broad based on the system) what is an average limit for world meshes? ie. is 500 for a building in a city too much or too little? (I'm not talking about making an entire city but maybe a smaller section).
3. When it comes to UV mapping should I stay below 5% wasted space on UV's or are there exceptions where I can get away with more?
4. Textures; sizes and how many? What sizes are appropriate for which meshes? 256x256 for a garbage can or less? And how many textures can I put on one mesh? can I do a texture pack w/ alpha plus a diffuse? or am I limited to just a texture pack?
5. I know part of an answer to this one but I want to hit the nail on the head. When it comes down to quads must I have everything as a quad or is it acceptable to use tri's as well when quads would cause too much detail to be added?
Thanks in advance,
ACU.
1. When you model a building for a city should you use extrude face on windows to give a sense of depth or should it be done solely with textures?
2. How much is too much? For poly count (I know this is more broad based on the system) what is an average limit for world meshes? ie. is 500 for a building in a city too much or too little? (I'm not talking about making an entire city but maybe a smaller section).
3. When it comes to UV mapping should I stay below 5% wasted space on UV's or are there exceptions where I can get away with more?
4. Textures; sizes and how many? What sizes are appropriate for which meshes? 256x256 for a garbage can or less? And how many textures can I put on one mesh? can I do a texture pack w/ alpha plus a diffuse? or am I limited to just a texture pack?
5. I know part of an answer to this one but I want to hit the nail on the head. When it comes down to quads must I have everything as a quad or is it acceptable to use tri's as well when quads would cause too much detail to be added?
Thanks in advance,
ACU.
Replies
The cities we build for GTA on the PS2/Xbox/PC are different from the ones built for the PSP. The cities in Project Gotham Racing are different again, as are the ones in Battlefield 2.
so:
1. It depends on the game and the platform
2. It depends on the game and the platform
3. It depends on the game and the platform
4. It depends on the game and the platform
5. All games use Tris, but quads are easier to work with.
A lot of the answers depend on the type of game and for what platform. For example, a realtime strategy game with the camera high above the characters/environment will use less than a first person shooter which allows the use to control the camera and walk right up to everything. Also, a PC or Xbox360 game will use much larger textures and tricount versus a PSP or DS game.
1. For lower end (farther camera), you'd want these on a texture or used as a decal map (alpha texture of window on a polygon). For the case of closer, you can extrude the details out. Another popular method is instanced geometry. What you'd do here is a fairly detailed window model that you place on the building. It would fade out at a distance and possibly have level-of-detail meshes (LOD). This is when you have a model at 3-4 different amounts of detail (1000, 500, 100, flat), that changes to a lower detail mesh at a distance. It may be worth your wild to practice making high to low detail meshes of your object that seamless change at a distance.
2. Again, I have to go back to the how this changes based on the system and type of game. I've done environments where the entire area was less than 10,000 triangles, and others that were much more detailed based on using instanced geometry.
3. You want to try and use as little wasted space as possible with as little distortion. Also, with environments, textures are usually tiled, which can lead to pretty much no wasted space.
4. Textures are based on how much texture ram you have available to the scene. For example, you could get as little as a handful of 128s or several 2048s.
5. When going game art, it's all about efficient use of triangles. There are situations where quads are important, and when working on a new mesh I like to keep the quads I can just so the mesh appears cleaner. There hasn't been a game I worked on where I didn't have to triangulate the mesh before importing it to the game. Keeping a model in quads usually only deals with subd modeling or setting up a mesh to import to zbrush. To summarize, use triangles.
I had to generalize a lot of my answers there. If you'd like more detailed information, tell us what system and what type of game you want to create this art for.
What i'm working with is not for a specific game per-say but more of a new reel for myself to try to get into the industry. Low poly isn't an issue for me, I can easily do it, but what does stump me is how much detail I can add before it would be considered too much. More of a general sense of detail would be what i'm asking for as I know it would vary from genre to genre.
I can't tell you how much detail you reel needs, but perhaps you may want to take the approach that chris mentioned and do LODS - here is a 10,000 polygon builind with seps and gutters and windows and spec and normal maps. Here is 5,000 polygon version, here is a 1,000 poly version and a 300 poly version.
here is a useful tip for the ow poly ones. Make the high one, then render it from top/front/left/right etc and use each of those renders as the base for your low poly one.
Alka, one thing you may consider, with next-gen, the process works like this (can vary at different projects and companies) high detail modeling > low poly modeling > materials (normal, spec, color maps, etc) > lighting. That's just part of the artistic side, design, gameplay, etc is a whole other department (possibly). While it's good to be capable in those four steps, this is often broken down in to a small team handling each section. Many companies are looking for people who can present these skills.
/me tags out to Rick :P
Can you smell what the Rick is cookin'?
another thing that botheres me about portfolios is cluttering it stuff that is not awesome, portfolio is only as good as its weakest piece,
don't put a part done sketch in and label it "five minute character sketch," again if you have to make excuses for the art it probably should not be in your portfolio, (now if you are one of the few people who can produce a fucking rocking concept in 5 minutes, feel free to include it.
heres my advice on some of your questions
1. like said depends on what game engine and type og game, but for pure portfolio, i would go hl2 quality at least, model windows and doors, and even a bit of good trim work. make it look as awesome as you can with it still being possible real time art
2. this is a lot harder to answer, cause of difrent type of building, but say for a
3, use as littel wasted space as possible, tho i don't know anyone anymore who actualy calculates wasted space.
4. verry subjective, but on portfolios i would shoot higher, 512's or 1024's smaller objects liek a trash can a 256 could probably do, tho its a pet peeve of mine when someone puts a tiny texture on an object, like 128x128 then renders a shot of the model for their portfolio at a huge size so its ULTRA pixalated, again the portfolio is to wow people with your work, use as few textures as it takes to complete your object
5. tris are all that model for in engine game models, only reason to quad up is it makes it easier to work in, don't blow your objects poly count up just because you want ot keep quads.