MGS4 art making-of articles @ softimage.jp

Eric Chadwick

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.softimage.jp%2Fuser_case%2Fmgs4%2Findex.html&sl=ja&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Sorry for the machine translation, softimage says an English translation is on the way. It's a two-parter, hit that link at the bottom.

MoP

Cool, thanks for the link...

Haha, I notice that Google didn't translate "FEISHARUANIMESHON" ... but I know what it is

Also another couple of good ones - "ROREZOMODERU" and "HAIREZOMODERU"... priceless!

Joao Sapiro

thanks for the find !!

TheSplash

English translation will be nice. It's not often you get to see into the production of Japanese games, a lot of which are ahead in terms of art and design.

Waz

Yeah looking forward to the English translation. Always love seeing XSI in use and seeing how the Japanese put together some of their amazing work.

Eric Chadwick

In case this hasn't been put up yet...

http://www.chrisevans3d.com/pub_blog/?p=31
http://www.chrisevans3d.com/pub_blog/?p=33

English translations, by Mike Evans. Posted over on tech-artists.org awhile back.

Michael Knubben

Haha Mop. Those took me a good while to figure out. At first I had you pegged as a total otaku for knowing them, but then I cottoned on.

Eric Chadwick

That is really funny, phonetical translation is hilarious!

Rox

Oh god. SABUDIBIJONSAFISU and KURASUTAKONSUTOREIN took me a while to figure out. I feel smart now, though!

Now to actually read the articles...

Eric Chadwick

Full translation is now available.
http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/customer_stories/metal_gear_4/

MoP

The full article is really good, well worth a read. They use some clever tricks and interesting techniques.

almighty_gir

awesome read, but low res images = fail.

Joshua Stubbles

Umm -> http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=55740

ElysiumGX

this thread is better.

what's softimage?

Waz

I can't believe they only used 512x512 textures on the characters. Also I like there modeling and photographing references process. Would be killer to have that kind of setup and access to those kinds of resources.

MoP

I'd be very interested to see the flat textures for the characters. I know the article says "512x512 for an entire character", but I'm having trouble believing that, especially given all the unique details shown on a lot of them.

Then again, Japanese game artists do tend to really pack stuff into their UV maps like nobody's business. The FFXI flats I saw a while back were insane. 256x256 never looked so good.

However, that section of the article was mainly talking about head models and textures, so I feel like maybe the translation was a bit dodgy and they actually meant 512x512 per character head/face, rather than the entire character?

TheSplash

yeah although I'd like to believe a whole character is 512x512 but the more i look at screenshots the more I have to say it's just not plausible... even with elite UVs and mirroring and texturing.

I have done my fair share of snooping around japanese games textures and it's pretty interesting comparing them with western textures. For example if you look at gears of war or whatever, a characters hand will be all splayed out and pelt-mapish but you look at a japanese characters hand and its shaped int a rectangle and all the fingers are side by side.

killingpeople

i hate the snake model in MGS4. he's so mad his headband is frowny. i love articles like these.

Eric Chadwick

His smile says happy, but his headband disagrees.

Flynny

Yeah that article rocked, wish more studios would find the light and atleast dabble with xsi for animation
But damn I love Maya and its script/bits so its a tie for me now ;p

SouL

They did mention they use "sub-normalmaps" in conjunction with regular normal maps.
It's plausible they can achieve medium level details with the normal map in a 512 texture... then have another 512 texture that has all the high level details all mapped to a separate UV set. So all the perforation, fabric texture, etc on Snake would be on a separate texture assigned to a different UV set.

Crysis does this, correct?

I doubt their UVs are structured like in the previous generation of games. Wouldn't the bake-out of the normals break because it tries to compensate for the stretching in the UVs by altering the pixels in the output texture? I don't think there's any way programs would know which pixels to make perfectly straight.

Eric Chadwick

Instead of a separate UV set, you could simply tile the detail map in the shader, so there isn't any vertex duplication caused by a 2nd UV set. This looks like what Crysis does.

(clicky)

I don't think there's any damage to the normals from stretched pixels, the final per-pixel normals are interpolated just like they always are, just stretched out a bit more if the UVs are stretched. Tangent basis is still the same. Only problem I see is the one they've already tackled, extreme smearing can cause the texture to down-sample to a lower detail (calling a smaller mip).