I think everyone was just already of the opinion that the only thing that really matters to the look of any game is the art direction and the quality of artists working on it... if both of those are good then the game will look great regardless of the platform or technology it's based on.
Nobody needs to "defend" any side of this supposed argument, because it's a non-issue. If the next game I work on calls for vibrant hand-painted diffuse-only work, then that's what I'll do. If it's a gritty normal-mapped realism game then I'll be sculpting, doing hard surface work and baking normals.
If people aren't able to adapt to requirements then I don't think they're really a well-rounded artist, from a production point of view.
(I'm leaving fine art out of this because that would be a whole different thread).
This is solid, - this is the kind of oppinion I was looking for, especially from an oldschooler.
I guess I just asked for it in a dumbass kind of way :P
to throw fuel on the fire.....and not that I believe this exactly but it's worth mentioning...
perhaps there IS an increased blandness of art direction nowadays versus older days due to ballooning development costs, there's a big difference between a team of 10 people over 1-2 years versus a team of 30 over 3-4 years. And 30 would be a small studio by today's standards.
Funding would then have to be secured from big entities, with a lot of discretionary income...but those guys like to play it safe with their investments and are surely going to want to have a say in the look of the product...in fact, they'll have whole focus groups crying out about the popularity of a new favorite shooter or and they'll assume that the art style is a contributing factor to the sales (which is might or might not be) and might want to mimic the "proven look", thus downplaying any significant chance for unique art direction.
Wow, I depressed myself there. To counter myself, I think the big guys are wising up to that. Games like Mirror's Edge and Borderlands stick out like shining examples of what can be done with the same underlying technology, in regards to drastically different stylized art direction. brings a tear to mah eye!
I think you can apply the same stylistic choices artists used to make to the new shaders/maps and come up with some amazing art that isn't realistic but upholds the old style guides. You might not paint the spec highlight into the diffuse but you'll make sure that it gets properly masked/painted into the spec map.
I think it comes from strong flexible workers and very strong art direction.
I think its easier to enforce a real world style guide where you wash out all the colors using post fx, than it is to try and get half a dozen talented artists to match a particular style. Also blazing a new style is risky...
Sorry man, I missed your response earlier, totally agree with this too as well as your other post.
I was just talking with a few fellas on MSN and it seems the way ive worded my 'argument' came out as way too 'anti normal map' and not enough anti bland art direction. I fucked up.
Im 100% for seeing more TF2, More Brink, more Prince of Persia and more Airborne, ie engines, shaders, tech used in ways to bring new artistic styles to our screens.
The longer/more money an asset takes to create, the harder it is to art direct. Take it this way : With a simple oldschool asset, you can cut out geo out like crazy, repaint the diffuse easily, and all that.
With a current normalmapped asset, every step becomes locked-in and harder to edit. If its not matching the Art Dir right from the start you basically have to restart the sculpt, rebake and so on. And then it's 3 different textures + shaders interacting with each other. Nowadays an AD just can not sit down and tweak a texture to show how its supposed to be painted.
Now a great team of artists can pull it out with time and experience (Brink). But I can see there might be cases when it just becomes so hard to make everything fit. I think that's why I admire Japanese games. In some ways, FFXIII itself does not look too nextgenish to me. Just raw dense polygons to make stuff smooth - bridging th egab between old and current styles and tech very elegantly.
Makes me want to crank open deeppaint and do some oldschool stuff hehe.
the boards all funky on me, replies are taking forever...soz.
blankslatejoe: Thats interesting, not something I thought about but I think youve definately got a point. I think i was trying to find a reason for the blandness - and looking for answers in the wrong place ie the individual artist skill and the technology thats come about driving the 'style' and dictating what they should and shouldnt learn to be considered a well rounded artist for production. Rather than the overall production 'influences'.
pior: Totally true!! So with the budgets, the timelines, the new processes that we have to make stuff nowadays, you could say that its challenging to get something thats unique, because it costs more, takes up more time etc. Im going to put you on the spot :P your an oldschooler, from your career how do you feel about tech and the advancements in the tech, have they hindered your personal endeavours as an artist or helped them ?
So we have the art direction argument and one of the first negative points mentioned about current games was the "everything looks brown" look.
I can only speak for myself here, but how I see this is that those "oldschool" guys do the same they did for their diffuse textures back in the old days, minus the painted in lighting.
That fits to the example Earthquake gave with brink, their stuff isnt photosourced (at least I believe so)
Now I just argue that photosourced textures ruined todays games. Discuss.
I think its true though if you have a good grounding in traditional skills, its gonna help no matter what. There do seem to be a lot of folks coming through that don't know how to paint textures too well but might be ace at sculpting in zbrush/mudbox
personally, coming from a 2d illustration background, then doing flat hand painted textures for games I found the whole sculpting thing quite hard to get my head around and do still find my sculpting is the thing most likely to make me tear my hair out.
I would n't sculot a real clay head with a paintbrush now would I :0
I enjoy the texturing part the most still and just find that sculpting is a means to en end.
It takes a lot more than just a few overlays to make a good texture anyway. All of my stuff is polypainted in zbrush first meaning I have a good hand painted base with fairly rich colours to start from.
TBH most of the good artists I have worked with are good at most of it anyway.
I think for some companies having a consistent workflow that most members of team can use is important.
I realize that my hand painted style might be hard on those who have n't the same texturing skill as me so having more mechanical methods to produce assets, means that more of team can produce similar looking stuff
At the very least its a case of taking a high res photo for a face and wrapping it around a normal mapped head. No real texture skill required here apart from editing the face texture a bit.
Lets face it the separation of spec/diff disp or nomal etc has been happening in film for years, we are just catching up.
would you really want to to totally hand paint a 4096x4096 texture anyway
To me anything over a 512 for hand painting is not much fun:)
Quake 1 was brown / green
Quake 2 was brown / green with a bit of orange and red thrown in.
^ super bland games.
Heck Quake 4 was also brown / green.
Purely art direction etc.
And to say that today's current artists require less ability and knowledge is rubbish, if that were so, why is it that that the marketing people or the finance department isn't making the games?
New technology needs more knowledge, but the foundation of art will never change. I feel mop, blank and vig have articulated their arguments well.
This should explain that game graphics are only gui also, gui changes and has its styles
but if you compare photoshop and artweaver 0.3 which look similar too, you would prefer photoshop because its brush engine is better and the overall awesomeness of ps... etc blah blah
same comes with cames, good ui + dull story = dull game
dull ui + good story = flop-> CULT game (depends on gameplay)
good ui + good story could also completely flow when its simply unplayable
so stop whinig about game art its only a third of a good game
seems a bit of a nostalgia case to me. I think the skillset you need to make games these days is incredibly more complex than what artists were expected of back in the day, Thats not to say that hand painted artwork is crap, I love it too but give it a normal map and a good artist and they are going to make that model kick butt!!!!!! Also the texture work that goes into games these days has an incredible amount of hand painted work go into them. As others have said though, MONEY is all that matters, if the game isnt going to sell then the company isnt going to make it. Then art direction will start playing its part. Games have always been browned or greyed out but thats because we dont live in the world of teletubbies and 4 year olds are not a great market to aim your games at. I implore companies like vigil that give artists the chance to push a style and just go crazy. But imagine a company with a choice of making darksiders and making a bit of money but making something artistic or are they going to tap into the call of duty side of browness and make billions of dollars. Its not artists to blame for crap games. Like Mop said earlier, if the company decides to make a hand painted game then thats what you are going to do.
Personal artwork on these forums though is incredible and sure I would love to see them have their own games but end of the day we are just art monkeys!!!
And as for artists having less skill these days, Just think of a pipeline comparision of a typical character from now and then
Oldschool
reference
Concept
Mesh creation
UV Layout
Bake lighting(maybe)
Texture diffuse/alpha and maybe a spec
Rig and blend shapes
Implement
New School
reference
Concept
Base mesh
High Poly sculpt
Hard surface/accessory work
Low Poly/game mesh creation
UV layout
Bake and fix normal maps/AO/lighting/cavity
Texture diffuse, spec colour, spec power, alpha, emmisive, detail maps etc.
Rig (miles more complex)
Shaders (a discipline in its own right)
Implementation
for christ sake we have more in common with artists for films these days. sorry for the rant
Quake 1 was brown / green
Quake 2 was brown / green with a bit of orange and red thrown in.
^ super bland games.
Ahh, you beat me to it! I was just about to mention the Quake series. I remember when the first Unreal came out, and all the gaming magazines I read praised its art style over the super brownness that was Quake and Quake 2.
Going even further back, you could compare a game like Heretic to its "sequel" Hexen. Heretic is a relatively colorful game, while Hexen takes you to a one-way trip to desaturation land. Boils down to nothing more than what the artists thought would look cool, I bet.
And yes, even outside the foggy swamp level, Hexen stays looking pretty much like that. All the enemies are that shade of green, or a similarly desaturated brown. Basically, since the dawn of graphics, there have been games that try to look dark, brown and gritty.
That fits to the example Earthquake gave with brink, their stuff isnt photosourced (at least I believe so)
Now I just argue that photosourced textures ruined todays games. Discuss.
Well, i'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Are you talking heavily photosourced games like max payne? Because photosourcing has been, and always will be a very common practice in asset development. You can be damn sure the artists on brink hit up cgtextures.com more than a few times during development. There isnt any photosourcing= evil arguement, just like all things in art, you need to know how to execute it well.
Painting everything by hand does not guarantee better results, and 99% of the time all it means is that you can be sure to spend much more time on the asset than you would have otherwise.
I think its true though if you have a good grounding in traditional skills, its gonna help no matter what. There do seem to be a lot of folks coming through that don't know how to paint textures too well but might be ace at sculpting in zbrush/mudbox
personally, coming from a 2d illustration background, then doing flat hand painted textures for games I found the whole sculpting thing quite hard to get my head around and do still find my sculpting is the thing most likely to make me tear my hair out.
I would n't sculot a real clay head with a paintbrush now would I :0
I enjoy the texturing part the most still and just find that sculpting is a means to en end.
It takes a lot more than just a few overlays to make a good texture anyway. All of my stuff is polypainted in zbrush first meaning I have a good hand painted base with fairly rich colours to start from.
TBH most of the good artists I have worked with are good at most of it anyway.
I think for some companies having a consistent workflow that most members of team can use is important.
I realize that my hand painted style might be hard on those who have n't the same texturing skill as me so having more mechanical methods to produce assets, means that more of team can produce similar looking stuff
At the very least its a case of taking a high res photo for a face and wrapping it around a normal mapped head. No real texture skill required here apart from editing the face texture a bit.
Lets face it the separation of spec/diff disp or nomal etc has been happening in film for years, we are just catching up.
would you really want to to totally hand paint a 4096x4096 texture anyway
To me anything over a 512 for hand painting is not much fun:)
I'm a programmer, but I also come from a 2D illustration background, making the move to 3D modelling.
A highly detailed 2D vector illustration I could do daydreaming, but yep, the whole sculpting is hard to get my head around.
What did you find was the best way of learning?
I feel like I want to "draw" a 3D model the same way I would an illustration in AI, just with the pen tool, but it seems like that's not how it's done, and you instead start with a shape and just sort of sculpt it into a body part etc.
So we have the art direction argument and one of the first negative points mentioned about current games was the "everything looks brown" look.
I can only speak for myself here, but how I see this is that those "oldschool" guys do the same they did for their diffuse textures back in the old days, minus the painted in lighting.
That fits to the example Earthquake gave with brink, their stuff isnt photosourced (at least I believe so)
Now I just argue that photosourced textures ruined todays games. Discuss.
You think Brink isn't photosourced?
As I said before, it does have the bright, superreal arcade look, but it's very detailed, and at least halfway realistic.
I find it very hard to believe those textures aren't at least hand drawn from photos.
Well, i'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Are you talking heavily photosourced games like max payne? Because photosourcing has been, and always will be a very common practice in asset development. You can be damn sure the artists on brink hit up cgtextures.com more than a few times during development. There isnt any photosourcing= evil arguement, just like all things in art, you need to know how to execute it well.
Painting everything by hand does not guarantee better results, and 99% of the time all it means is that you can be sure to spend much more time on the asset than you would have otherwise.
Starcraft 2 is hand painted and normal mapped and looks amazing.
Imagine if you told a sculpture they weren't an artist because they couldn't paint, that's what this thread is basically saying.
Some game artists can "get away with" using sculpting to add details they can't paint in. Plus sculpting can add details you couldn't never hand paint.
Nonsense. Find me a film like the Bourne Identity that matches the colour palette used in Viva Pinata.
The Long Kiss Goodnight comes pretty close.
I also think that Viva Pinata and color palette probably shouldn't be used in the same sentence. What I've seen from that game it looks like the kid who always eats the crayons finally had to puke.
To me we are at a time where the Industry of gaming is now at terms with itself upon a mantle that says "let's compete with film".
To some extent, I believe over the many years of games evolution in artistic development. Games has taken a rep for being a childs alternative fantasy/ play realm to escape to. While as technology grew ever so more abruptly (mainly in the shooter genre). I could tell from a personal/internal level from designers/artists/programmers that they wanted to take this built up reputation of gaming to a new level for everyone.
With what Hazardous has mentioned about artistic style and talent being of a tromendous loss over the years that has surpassed. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the level of artistic ability has been compromised. I would just say the Industry is right now in the mid/ late phase of this new "Realistic" gaming realm of design+development.
I know for a fact the traditional digital art methods are still being used. Much more heavily in Asian based studios (Japan, South Korea, China) which have their own large mass of titles that aren't imported. Even the next-gen titles. They tend to use it heavily over what we Western based game studios would choose.
It's really down to a matter of mass consumer markets. I mean as the newer technology grows more expandable, and functional for a fully breathing living world. The more "realism" will die down from the every day norm in the games we play today.
Just like movies, for a while we got a lot of cartoon animated films. Then came Horror+Action flicks. After that came Comedy+Drama phases. That's all this is, is just one BIG phase
Michelangelo? Sculptures actually have an advantage when it comes to drawing since they have a better understanding of forum and can visualize things in 3D. But most people are better at one of the things, sculpting or painting, and I kinda feel the same about 3D, some people are naturally better at painting, others sculpting.
Starcraft 2 is hand painted and normal mapped and looks amazing.
Imagine if you told a sculpture they weren't an artist because they couldn't paint, that's what this thread is basically saying.
Some game artists can "get away with" using sculpting to add details they can't paint in. Plus sculpting can add details you couldn't never hand paint.
Sorry mate youve got it 100% completely wrong. I never said someone who is a digital sculptour is not an artist, if anything im saying its a new breed of 'artist'
I am one of these 'DIGITAL SCULPTOURS' that I'm talking about, I came straight in doing normal maps and high res models back in 2004 using kaldera and programs like that. And now I'm having trouble learning to hand paint stuff at all. I've simply lost count of how many WW2 soldiers and meatheats that I've built and photo textured in the last 6 years. And hell yeah im sick of them. Doesnt mean I hate the games, But im an 'artist', and would like to evolve beyond creating the green and brown meathead... with guns.
When the time came for me to do something vibrant, something hand painted, was like woah.... im screwed. And im finding it pretty damned tough to get a good grasp of.
So I guess all this stemed from using my very own situation and somehow thinking... hey have i been caught up in whatever was going on, just making bland photo shite when I should have been working on being a better more well rounded artist ? Probably!
Nostalgia, maybe there is a bit of it in there but only from being an oldschool gamer, but I didnt come from this hand painting era so im not pining for the 'good-old-days-of-when-i-used-to-do-that'
I dont think youll ever convince one side of the other sides merits or whos better and what skillset is more complex. And its not about doing that anyway, neither is it about whether you were oldschool coming to next gen, or you were next gen going to oldschool they both show up artistical weaknesses in a different way. Like Mop and a couple of others said good art is good art, doesnt really matter what style it is.
What i was looking for was for other folks to share whether or not they had been caught up in the flow of the way things were going, instead of developing themselves out as a good production artist, and whether or not they thought that with the way technology has evolved have the projects they worked on, pushed them down one way or the other, AND do they think that is detrimental to their advancement as an artist.
I know my first post doesnt read like that HAHA apologies it came out a bit fucked up.
Yes there are bland games out there, weve established that its come down to poor art direction, and this quite possibly is more related to the fact that studios are squeezed into a paticular direction by the money men at the top. Cant really change that.
I hope we get to see more TF2's, Brinks, mirrors edges, more darksiders and airborne Mod's I cant cheer hard enough for these kinds of explorations of melding artistic style and technology in a way that actually gives meaning to those rediculous words - 'next-gen'
Now to only get the game designers understanding that word :P
oh adn jsut for kaptainkernals thsi sentnace is fro yuo buddy!
Im 100% for seeing more TF2, More Brink, more Prince of Persia and more Airborne, ie engines, shaders, tech used in ways to bring new artistic styles to our screens.
It doesn't sound like you want more styles. It sounds like you just want more cartoon style games. Just because something has a painted or colourful look doesn't make it innovative.
Sprung, you gonna have to explain to me how yuo manage to see anything 'cartoon style' in Brink! Even the latest PoP. It reminds me of how everything was labelled 'Cel Shaded' last year hehe :P
I don't fear the changes, but adapting can be difficult for some. Like me. All my learning for game art revolved around traditional 3d asset creation without normal maps. Sure I still don't have great fundamentals like many of you pros are talking about here and thus why I may be considered a bad artist.
I would say though that I must have got into learning this at just the wrong time. As soon as I was taught all the traditional methods, and then BAM! Normal maps: The Renaissance. Just last year I taught myself how to use zbrush so I could sculpt a fancy hi-res, but I was taught to create something that works in a game first and then make it look pretty. And that's why my latest model doesn't look pretty. I created base mesh vert by vert and then when after I used it as a reference for my "sculpted vision" it doesn't quite match.
I suppose what makes me a poor artist is that this makes me sad, rather than making me leap out of bed to re-learn new ways of making old things, but better.
rumblesushi - its a big topic to cover, but basically a question of using good reference, so you have multiple viewpoints. i always use a good base mesh form max or maya, none of that sculpting from a sphere molarkey. yeah that and just tons of practice. everyone works different, so its just a case of working to a methods that suits you.
2d is optical illusion from one viewpoint, 3d is WYSIWYG and you need to cover all angle. thats why its painful
I've skimmed through most of the thread so if any of this is running over old territory, I'm sorry.
I have to agree with a number of people that your original post kinda runs all over the place. You seem to be making quite a few different arguments at once which are all rather independent of each other.
But from what I gather, your biggest grievance seems to be that control gets taken out of the artists' hands and given to the engine as to what becomes the final product. That is in many senses true.
But it is not like this control just gets taken from the 'artist' and thrown up on the dart board to be decided by chance. The final result for the look of the game just becomes that much more of a collaboration of the team of artists. And artists now is not just who paints the textures and who sculpts the meshes: but it is also who writes the shaders and who codes the engine. All of them have to have an understanding of lighting, color and basic art principles far beyond " Value is black, white and everything in between". As people have said, good art direction leads to good art. Nowadays there are just a lot more people involved in it.
And you are right, this is much less control then any individual artist had before. In a way, with less technology, the texture an artist paints would be almost exactly the final product. The UV would be his canvas and the mesh would just be a means to deform and animate his work on a screen. In a somewhat poetic sense, we are watching dancing paintings.
Now with so much more going into any given game asset though, it is hard to ever say "this is a single persons work". Even if they made all of the physical assets, they are almost guaranteed to not have written the engine which displays there work very uniquely to that code.
So does this mean that we all suffer as individual artists because we all work on very small pieces of a very large puzzles? Maybe. But that has little bearing on why game art as a whole suffers or looks the same, but that is a different subject. Just my two cents, keep in mind I have never worked in game art before.
Sprung, you gonna have to explain to me how yuo manage to see anything 'cartoon style' in Brink! Even the latest PoP. It reminds me of how everything was labelled 'Cel Shaded' last year hehe :P
Well brink is an exception in that list. But there does seem a strong bias towards labeling anything cartoony and colourful, specifically something done in a anime style, as innovative.
I don't find these styles innovative. They're just a style that doesn't get much exposure because it doesn't suit the mood of most games. But they still get made quite regularily.
For example I haven' t seen any mention of mass effect. I consider this game to be quite innovative since it captures the look of science fiction illustration from the 60's and seventies very well and I haven't seen anyone else make a game that looks like it.
I haven't ready everything in here, but I kind of see where Hazardous is going with this.
I have a friend who worked at Rhythm and Hues on Narnia, and spent 4.5 months painting the FUR on the lion..... I believe he was one of 3 artists that worked on the 'surfacing' for the lion.
His work was then then handed over to 14 hair/physics programmers/technical artists, for hair simulation, and physics, light refractory properties etc.
At what point in time does this stuff cease to be artistic, and more about technology, because I almost honestly felt completely detached from anything artistic when painting what I felt to be scientific/anatomical diagrams/texture sheets.
And IMO what DX9 has done, is take a step towards detatching the artistry involved with creating game-art, and trying to make things more procedural (such as hazardous pointed out, the understanding and practice of actually painting lighting, shade, form, and material properties, while replacing them with realtime shaders).
Wait until nobody is Zbrushing folds and wrinkles, but relying on realtime per-poly-collision cloth simluation, to further illustrate Haz's point. And nobody is painting or modelling hair or fur anymore, but we have realtime hair simulation.
Will that stuff look cool in game? I'm sure it will be. Would you consider it an artistic endeavor, I'm not completely sure I would.
I loved the visuals in trine! that was some seriously nice work on all the chars and environments, and the whole progression through the level themes was awesome. great example
Sande, if I could ask a favour as an aside, could you punch in the nuts whoever designed the end boss level? (sorry if it was you )
At what point in time does this stuff cease to be artistic, and more about technology, because I almost honestly felt completely detached from anything artistic when painting what I felt to be scientific/anatomical diagrams/texture sheets.
And IMO what DX9 has done, is take a step towards detatching the artistry involved with creating game-art, and trying to make things more procedural (such as hazardous pointed out, the understanding and practice of actually painting lighting, shade, form, and material properties, while replacing them with realtime shaders).
.
There's something artistic about being detached from your art.
chuck closes entire art style is based upon being detached from the subject, paint, and canvas and being pure techinque.
I myself don't have any hangups concerning the craft aspect of making game art. It is manipulating things in a virtual world anyway! cloth simulation is just another tool.
I haven't ready everything in here, but I kind of see where Hazardous is going with this.
I have a friend who worked at Rhythm and Hues on Narnia, and spent 4.5 months painting the FUR on the lion..... I believe he was one of 3 artists that worked on the 'surfacing' for the lion.
His work was then then handed over to 14 hair/physics programmers/technical artists, for hair simulation, and physics, light refractory properties etc.
At what point in time does this stuff cease to be artistic, and more about technology, because I almost honestly felt completely detached from anything artistic when painting what I felt to be scientific/anatomical diagrams/texture sheets.
And IMO what DX9 has done, is take a step towards detatching the artistry involved with creating game-art, and trying to make things more procedural (such as hazardous pointed out, the understanding and practice of actually painting lighting, shade, form, and material properties, while replacing them with realtime shaders).
Wait until nobody is Zbrushing folds and wrinkles, but relying on realtime per-poly-collision cloth simluation, to further illustrate Haz's point. And nobody is painting or modelling hair or fur anymore, but we have realtime hair simulation.
Will that stuff look cool in game? I'm sure it will be. Would you consider it an artistic endeavor, I'm not completely sure I would.
You complete me man!! *bats eyelashes*
Snacuum: Damn straight its tough!! Maybe im just having a bleet and moan :P, I'm trying my guts out to be able to hand paint stuff, outside of my day job, which consisted of normal mapping / photosourced characters up until a few months ago. Both for my own artistic development, and to give myself the greatest opportunities I figured, 'you know i better get a move on!' Luckily now im working on a project that is definately not what im used to so i get a whole boat load of practice. But it all helps!
TheBoss: Some good observations in there - you pretty much summed it up
SerialKiller: Normal maps = No gameplay ? HAHA dude youd best sew yourself a flame retardant suit, thems fightin words.
I think it's incredibly monochromatic, and the forms aren't even that interesting. While it is a splendidly showcased thread, the work does not strike me as particularly "OMG BEST GAME EVER"; in fact, I feel most the textures in Dragon Age are dull and wonky. Rusty teeth? edit: Sigh, I feel like a jerk for this post.
Anyway, I just had that bone to pick. Thread looked like the right place to rant. As a programmer named David Rosen was once paraphrased, "There's a difference between photo-sourced and photo-realistic." I think this is the problem.
Sprunghunt: Just to clarify, I wasnt saying that I want more duplicates of brink, or duplicates of TF2 or mirrors edge - in fact i hope that there isnt any. I do consider the art directions of those games unique, and innovative- Why ? Because they simply stand out from the throng of whats out there now. And by that you only need to check all the games on the shelf at your local games store and see that the majority of the mainstream 'next gen AAA blockbusters' are samey looking. If you had to create 2 stacks, 1 that had dark, gritty, photo styled desaturated realism, brown / green palettes + apocalyptic skyboxes, and the other stack contained anything DIDNT fall into this - I think it would look like taipei 101 versus orc peon hovel. Of course that too is really in the eye of the beholder.....
Suprore: ROFL!
Vrav: I know what you mean man, Dragon age for me, wasnt a graphical masterpiece at all. Far from it, actually its been more forgettable to me than neverwinter nights was artistically.
But Ryan Lim is a brilliant artist - I have no doubt he could adapt to whatever art direction was thrown his way!
Hey nice example Vrav. I guess from that point on, we can even make further distinctions : the actual rendered/zbrush matcapped source sculpt (and texture), compared to the end result in the game.
The most striking example of this problem is Assassins Creed 2.
You get OMG YOURE A ZMASTER comments at the sculpted character busts rendered in Z (and rightfully so : They look good, not fantastic, but good!), yet the end result in game is absolutely terrible.
Because their pipeline was (likely) built around one senior artist sculpting the faces, and other lower level guys crunching out lowpoly meshes and baking, while being asked to "remove these polygons because normalmaps maps will fake them anyways".
So on top of the initial topic about the different though processes/skills behind painted VS sculpted, there is also the problem of, sometimes, a lesser understanding of what make a realtime asset look good. If there is a nice, elegant sharp edge on the highpoly, 4 edges on the low would never play well. Also, if the source is rendered with matcaps and AO, but the final asset is a Blinn with just normals and a photo slapped on top, you get Assassins Creed 2 crap...
Now you could say, who cares about the comments on ZBC, we know when game art looks good or not. The problem is, with higher 'fidelity' source assets (sculpts, beauty renders, and so on) there is a very strong chances of iterations taking longer, and also, a strong emphasis on 'getting that one step just right before moving to the lowpoly stage'. In the end you get crappy stuff, or even weird proportions on facial features (Uncharted2, Heavy Rain, same thing) - even tho the source assets looked great at first glance and were signed off to be lowpolyed next. (Yeah thats a great sculpt and render!! We're good to go!)
In the end, all these extra steps make the AD job even harder and less direct than input that could be given on a simple 5000tris mesh+diffuse. So no, in itself new tech does not force a certain dull look ; but all the extra necessary tweaks and steps make iterations much harder for both the artists or the AD.
(on a side note : thats why early test bakes on any kind of nextgen asset, are so important!!!)
But anyway, The colour palette doesn't bother me so much in those renders, but the obvious mirroring does. Look at the magma monster's stomach. Hideous. It made me, honestly, laugh a bit. I figured professional artists knew better than that.
It's a delicate balance, creating a pipeline that many artists can contribute to, and creating groundbreaking graphics. Most companies these days just tweak a few things in their lighting engine to bake in their own style, or just throw some cell shading on, they do something that'll work with any environment. As a business model, you don't want to rock the boat, take a gamble. Team fortress 2 was in developement for what, 10 years? You look at what's profitable, throw a few more polys on it, extend the dialogue a little, and basically rehash the old with 10% more. In the end it's far less work to make sequal after sequal with more stuff than the last because you're building on what works and you're establishing your brand while increasing customer loyalty. It's gauranteed profit and this is the norm in the game industry... for better or worse.
As art hobbyists or artists on the outside I think this leaves a unique opportunity for us to push the envelope and try new stuff with shaders and game environments. Come up with a new style and you'd be a big asset to a studio looking to create their own "brand" of art, or just enjoy the thrill of creating stuff that hasn't really been done before.
You guys are very right. The passing of an asset to another artist's hands can have a massive effect on the final look, as I assume a lot of the subtle aspects of form and detail composition perfected by one artist may be vulnerable to not even being noticed by another artist (for example, an exacting hardsurface modeler being assigned to retopologize a human body)... it's not even a matter of skill, it is a difference of vision.
This is probably why a lot of stuff posted by the hotshots in P&P is so amazing, and you wonder why things in games can't be so good. The art being shown off on the forum is usually done by one person, who can follow their own vision to the end... and this is why, I feel, it is immensely valuable for digital artists to round out all relevant skills in what they do.
Even if you are only going to sculpt things in zbrush on the job, when it comes to creating digital artwork, knowing how to model your own basemesh can be as valuable as the knowing the fundamentals of drawing and sculpture beforehand. While it is totally awesome an artist can work 100% in zb from start to finish, ease placed on the process should never permit ignorance in how computer graphics function.
joopson: lol, I hope not. The mirroring does look pretty obvious, but I am willing to make a stretch and attribute that to Microsoft placing a stranglehold (or is it a supportive grasp?) on games via a mass-popularized, "mainstream" console market; developers want to make their art look higher-resolution, but the 360 still has the same hardware, etc... isn't there another thread going on about that? Maybe I should read it.
Check out Shepard's rorschach'd pauldron in this ME2 screen. It's obvious they are having to push optimization to make things look new and improved... which is fine, since it probably only bugs us artist-types who notice this stuff, anyway.
But sort of goes with the old 'put some normal maps on an ugly model, instant beautification' method. Oblivion looked amazing when it first came out, so did Morrowind, but then a couple years pass and the faces appear mediocre in comparison. I'm not trying to insult my fellow artists here... but there's a balance between making stuff look modern and creating art that's timeless, too.
Kind of tangential, though, since for me there is a certain timelessness to implementing efficiency with the hardware of the times. At the same time, isn't it possible to take efficiency too far?
Actually what you guys are saying with regards to the characters look worse than the enviro's brings another damn good point up.
I've been noticing that alot more now as well. White Knight Chronicles comes to mind instantly.
I expected more from Level 5. I played Rogue Galaxy, Dark cloud, Dark Chronicle and I thought the art in those where brilliant for their times ( ok maybe not dark cloud LOL ), not for being the latest and greatest but for being overall consistant. At very least, the characters and environments went together well with the effects and whatnot.
But in the opening sequence of White Knight, I saw some brilliant stuff, and some downright ugly stuff standing right next to one another.
Check the helmet / armour of the guy on the right compared with the one of the main cast on the left... wtf ?
DANG!
Some of the characters looked so mismatched. Like the heads where done by someone completely diffferent to the armour on the characters body.
However once I ran outside the town into the countryside the enviros looked fantastic the and the creatures look great as well.
Environments > Characters.
Pior i think this may well be another case of what your touching on regarding just how important it is to get things right on assets that require normal maps, and whether or not your pipeline is engineered in away that can compensate for iterative progression on this kind of asset.
Any other games out there that are mismatched from enviros and characters that you guys can think of ?
Wait until nobody is Zbrushing folds and wrinkles, but relying on realtime per-poly-collision cloth simluation, to further illustrate Haz's point. And nobody is painting or modelling hair or fur anymore, but we have realtime hair simulation.
Will that stuff look cool in game? I'm sure it will be. Would you consider it an artistic endeavor, I'm not completely sure I would.
at that point, artists will need to have qualifications in fashion design and hair styling on their resume :P
Replies
This is solid, - this is the kind of oppinion I was looking for, especially from an oldschooler.
I guess I just asked for it in a dumbass kind of way :P
perhaps there IS an increased blandness of art direction nowadays versus older days due to ballooning development costs, there's a big difference between a team of 10 people over 1-2 years versus a team of 30 over 3-4 years. And 30 would be a small studio by today's standards.
Funding would then have to be secured from big entities, with a lot of discretionary income...but those guys like to play it safe with their investments and are surely going to want to have a say in the look of the product...in fact, they'll have whole focus groups crying out about the popularity of a new favorite shooter or and they'll assume that the art style is a contributing factor to the sales (which is might or might not be) and might want to mimic the "proven look", thus downplaying any significant chance for unique art direction.
Wow, I depressed myself there. To counter myself, I think the big guys are wising up to that. Games like Mirror's Edge and Borderlands stick out like shining examples of what can be done with the same underlying technology, in regards to drastically different stylized art direction. brings a tear to mah eye!
Sorry man, I missed your response earlier, totally agree with this too as well as your other post.
I was just talking with a few fellas on MSN and it seems the way ive worded my 'argument' came out as way too 'anti normal map' and not enough anti bland art direction. I fucked up.
Im 100% for seeing more TF2, More Brink, more Prince of Persia and more Airborne, ie engines, shaders, tech used in ways to bring new artistic styles to our screens.
The longer/more money an asset takes to create, the harder it is to art direct. Take it this way : With a simple oldschool asset, you can cut out geo out like crazy, repaint the diffuse easily, and all that.
With a current normalmapped asset, every step becomes locked-in and harder to edit. If its not matching the Art Dir right from the start you basically have to restart the sculpt, rebake and so on. And then it's 3 different textures + shaders interacting with each other. Nowadays an AD just can not sit down and tweak a texture to show how its supposed to be painted.
Now a great team of artists can pull it out with time and experience (Brink). But I can see there might be cases when it just becomes so hard to make everything fit. I think that's why I admire Japanese games. In some ways, FFXIII itself does not look too nextgenish to me. Just raw dense polygons to make stuff smooth - bridging th egab between old and current styles and tech very elegantly.
Makes me want to crank open deeppaint and do some oldschool stuff hehe.
blankslatejoe: Thats interesting, not something I thought about but I think youve definately got a point. I think i was trying to find a reason for the blandness - and looking for answers in the wrong place ie the individual artist skill and the technology thats come about driving the 'style' and dictating what they should and shouldnt learn to be considered a well rounded artist for production. Rather than the overall production 'influences'.
pior: Totally true!! So with the budgets, the timelines, the new processes that we have to make stuff nowadays, you could say that its challenging to get something thats unique, because it costs more, takes up more time etc. Im going to put you on the spot :P your an oldschooler, from your career how do you feel about tech and the advancements in the tech, have they hindered your personal endeavours as an artist or helped them ?
I can only speak for myself here, but how I see this is that those "oldschool" guys do the same they did for their diffuse textures back in the old days, minus the painted in lighting.
That fits to the example Earthquake gave with brink, their stuff isnt photosourced (at least I believe so)
Now I just argue that photosourced textures ruined todays games. Discuss.
b1ll - Ben Regimbal has done this Bush character...
personally, coming from a 2d illustration background, then doing flat hand painted textures for games I found the whole sculpting thing quite hard to get my head around and do still find my sculpting is the thing most likely to make me tear my hair out.
I would n't sculot a real clay head with a paintbrush now would I :0
I enjoy the texturing part the most still and just find that sculpting is a means to en end.
It takes a lot more than just a few overlays to make a good texture anyway. All of my stuff is polypainted in zbrush first meaning I have a good hand painted base with fairly rich colours to start from.
TBH most of the good artists I have worked with are good at most of it anyway.
I think for some companies having a consistent workflow that most members of team can use is important.
I realize that my hand painted style might be hard on those who have n't the same texturing skill as me so having more mechanical methods to produce assets, means that more of team can produce similar looking stuff
At the very least its a case of taking a high res photo for a face and wrapping it around a normal mapped head. No real texture skill required here apart from editing the face texture a bit.
Lets face it the separation of spec/diff disp or nomal etc has been happening in film for years, we are just catching up.
would you really want to to totally hand paint a 4096x4096 texture anyway
To me anything over a 512 for hand painting is not much fun:)
Quake 2 was brown / green with a bit of orange and red thrown in.
^ super bland games.
Heck Quake 4 was also brown / green.
Purely art direction etc.
And to say that today's current artists require less ability and knowledge is rubbish, if that were so, why is it that that the marketing people or the finance department isn't making the games?
New technology needs more knowledge, but the foundation of art will never change. I feel mop, blank and vig have articulated their arguments well.
PS firefox has a spelling checker hazard
This should explain that game graphics are only gui also, gui changes and has its styles
but if you compare photoshop and artweaver 0.3 which look similar too, you would prefer photoshop because its brush engine is better and the overall awesomeness of ps... etc blah blah
same comes with cames, good ui + dull story = dull game
dull ui + good story = flop-> CULT game (depends on gameplay)
good ui + good story could also completely flow when its simply unplayable
so stop whinig about game art its only a third of a good game
what i tried to say is :
game isnt half as importand as you might think
game consist of art, story, gameplay and playability (the nonexistence of bugs)
and these four are equally importand
Personal artwork on these forums though is incredible and sure I would love to see them have their own games but end of the day we are just art monkeys!!!
And as for artists having less skill these days, Just think of a pipeline comparision of a typical character from now and then
Oldschool
reference
Concept
Mesh creation
UV Layout
Bake lighting(maybe)
Texture diffuse/alpha and maybe a spec
Rig and blend shapes
Implement
New School
reference
Concept
Base mesh
High Poly sculpt
Hard surface/accessory work
Low Poly/game mesh creation
UV layout
Bake and fix normal maps/AO/lighting/cavity
Texture diffuse, spec colour, spec power, alpha, emmisive, detail maps etc.
Rig (miles more complex)
Shaders (a discipline in its own right)
Implementation
for christ sake we have more in common with artists for films these days. sorry for the rant
Going even further back, you could compare a game like Heretic to its "sequel" Hexen. Heretic is a relatively colorful game, while Hexen takes you to a one-way trip to desaturation land. Boils down to nothing more than what the artists thought would look cool, I bet.
And yes, even outside the foggy swamp level, Hexen stays looking pretty much like that. All the enemies are that shade of green, or a similarly desaturated brown. Basically, since the dawn of graphics, there have been games that try to look dark, brown and gritty.
Well, i'm not exactly sure what you're saying here. Are you talking heavily photosourced games like max payne? Because photosourcing has been, and always will be a very common practice in asset development. You can be damn sure the artists on brink hit up cgtextures.com more than a few times during development. There isnt any photosourcing= evil arguement, just like all things in art, you need to know how to execute it well.
Painting everything by hand does not guarantee better results, and 99% of the time all it means is that you can be sure to spend much more time on the asset than you would have otherwise.
I'm a programmer, but I also come from a 2D illustration background, making the move to 3D modelling.
A highly detailed 2D vector illustration I could do daydreaming, but yep, the whole sculpting is hard to get my head around.
What did you find was the best way of learning?
I feel like I want to "draw" a 3D model the same way I would an illustration in AI, just with the pen tool, but it seems like that's not how it's done, and you instead start with a shape and just sort of sculpt it into a body part etc.
You think Brink isn't photosourced?
As I said before, it does have the bright, superreal arcade look, but it's very detailed, and at least halfway realistic.
I find it very hard to believe those textures aren't at least hand drawn from photos.
Point taken, guess you're right with this^^.
Imagine if you told a sculpture they weren't an artist because they couldn't paint, that's what this thread is basically saying.
Some game artists can "get away with" using sculpting to add details they can't paint in. Plus sculpting can add details you couldn't never hand paint.
The Long Kiss Goodnight comes pretty close.
I also think that Viva Pinata and color palette probably shouldn't be used in the same sentence. What I've seen from that game it looks like the kid who always eats the crayons finally had to puke.
To some extent, I believe over the many years of games evolution in artistic development. Games has taken a rep for being a childs alternative fantasy/ play realm to escape to. While as technology grew ever so more abruptly (mainly in the shooter genre). I could tell from a personal/internal level from designers/artists/programmers that they wanted to take this built up reputation of gaming to a new level for everyone.
With what Hazardous has mentioned about artistic style and talent being of a tromendous loss over the years that has surpassed. I wouldn't go as far as to say that the level of artistic ability has been compromised. I would just say the Industry is right now in the mid/ late phase of this new "Realistic" gaming realm of design+development.
I know for a fact the traditional digital art methods are still being used. Much more heavily in Asian based studios (Japan, South Korea, China) which have their own large mass of titles that aren't imported. Even the next-gen titles. They tend to use it heavily over what we Western based game studios would choose.
It's really down to a matter of mass consumer markets. I mean as the newer technology grows more expandable, and functional for a fully breathing living world. The more "realism" will die down from the every day norm in the games we play today.
Just like movies, for a while we got a lot of cartoon animated films. Then came Horror+Action flicks. After that came Comedy+Drama phases. That's all this is, is just one BIG phase
Sorry mate youve got it 100% completely wrong. I never said someone who is a digital sculptour is not an artist, if anything im saying its a new breed of 'artist'
I am one of these 'DIGITAL SCULPTOURS' that I'm talking about, I came straight in doing normal maps and high res models back in 2004 using kaldera and programs like that. And now I'm having trouble learning to hand paint stuff at all. I've simply lost count of how many WW2 soldiers and meatheats that I've built and photo textured in the last 6 years. And hell yeah im sick of them. Doesnt mean I hate the games, But im an 'artist', and would like to evolve beyond creating the green and brown meathead... with guns.
When the time came for me to do something vibrant, something hand painted, was like woah.... im screwed. And im finding it pretty damned tough to get a good grasp of.
So I guess all this stemed from using my very own situation and somehow thinking... hey have i been caught up in whatever was going on, just making bland photo shite when I should have been working on being a better more well rounded artist ? Probably!
Nostalgia, maybe there is a bit of it in there but only from being an oldschool gamer, but I didnt come from this hand painting era so im not pining for the 'good-old-days-of-when-i-used-to-do-that'
I dont think youll ever convince one side of the other sides merits or whos better and what skillset is more complex. And its not about doing that anyway, neither is it about whether you were oldschool coming to next gen, or you were next gen going to oldschool they both show up artistical weaknesses in a different way. Like Mop and a couple of others said good art is good art, doesnt really matter what style it is.
What i was looking for was for other folks to share whether or not they had been caught up in the flow of the way things were going, instead of developing themselves out as a good production artist, and whether or not they thought that with the way technology has evolved have the projects they worked on, pushed them down one way or the other, AND do they think that is detrimental to their advancement as an artist.
I know my first post doesnt read like that HAHA apologies it came out a bit fucked up.
Yes there are bland games out there, weve established that its come down to poor art direction, and this quite possibly is more related to the fact that studios are squeezed into a paticular direction by the money men at the top. Cant really change that.
I hope we get to see more TF2's, Brinks, mirrors edges, more darksiders and airborne Mod's I cant cheer hard enough for these kinds of explorations of melding artistic style and technology in a way that actually gives meaning to those rediculous words - 'next-gen'
Now to only get the game designers understanding that word :P
oh adn jsut for kaptainkernals thsi sentnace is fro yuo buddy!
It doesn't sound like you want more styles. It sounds like you just want more cartoon style games. Just because something has a painted or colourful look doesn't make it innovative.
Hahaha, makes me all warm and fuzzy inside
I would say though that I must have got into learning this at just the wrong time. As soon as I was taught all the traditional methods, and then BAM! Normal maps: The Renaissance. Just last year I taught myself how to use zbrush so I could sculpt a fancy hi-res, but I was taught to create something that works in a game first and then make it look pretty. And that's why my latest model doesn't look pretty. I created base mesh vert by vert and then when after I used it as a reference for my "sculpted vision" it doesn't quite match.
I suppose what makes me a poor artist is that this makes me sad, rather than making me leap out of bed to re-learn new ways of making old things, but better.
2d is optical illusion from one viewpoint, 3d is WYSIWYG
I have to agree with a number of people that your original post kinda runs all over the place. You seem to be making quite a few different arguments at once which are all rather independent of each other.
But from what I gather, your biggest grievance seems to be that control gets taken out of the artists' hands and given to the engine as to what becomes the final product. That is in many senses true.
But it is not like this control just gets taken from the 'artist' and thrown up on the dart board to be decided by chance. The final result for the look of the game just becomes that much more of a collaboration of the team of artists. And artists now is not just who paints the textures and who sculpts the meshes: but it is also who writes the shaders and who codes the engine. All of them have to have an understanding of lighting, color and basic art principles far beyond " Value is black, white and everything in between". As people have said, good art direction leads to good art. Nowadays there are just a lot more people involved in it.
And you are right, this is much less control then any individual artist had before. In a way, with less technology, the texture an artist paints would be almost exactly the final product. The UV would be his canvas and the mesh would just be a means to deform and animate his work on a screen. In a somewhat poetic sense, we are watching dancing paintings.
Now with so much more going into any given game asset though, it is hard to ever say "this is a single persons work". Even if they made all of the physical assets, they are almost guaranteed to not have written the engine which displays there work very uniquely to that code.
So does this mean that we all suffer as individual artists because we all work on very small pieces of a very large puzzles? Maybe. But that has little bearing on why game art as a whole suffers or looks the same, but that is a different subject. Just my two cents, keep in mind I have never worked in game art before.
Well brink is an exception in that list. But there does seem a strong bias towards labeling anything cartoony and colourful, specifically something done in a anime style, as innovative.
I don't find these styles innovative. They're just a style that doesn't get much exposure because it doesn't suit the mood of most games. But they still get made quite regularily.
For example I haven' t seen any mention of mass effect. I consider this game to be quite innovative since it captures the look of science fiction illustration from the 60's and seventies very well and I haven't seen anyone else make a game that looks like it.
you have tons of GB and 70€ software to play 5hours.
in the hexan example cmon at least it was challenging...
quake takes like weeks to finish. not to mention ps one\two games...
i think after that the game market is just plain interest whit EA´s and suchs..
but thats another thread ^^
I have a friend who worked at Rhythm and Hues on Narnia, and spent 4.5 months painting the FUR on the lion..... I believe he was one of 3 artists that worked on the 'surfacing' for the lion.
His work was then then handed over to 14 hair/physics programmers/technical artists, for hair simulation, and physics, light refractory properties etc.
At what point in time does this stuff cease to be artistic, and more about technology, because I almost honestly felt completely detached from anything artistic when painting what I felt to be scientific/anatomical diagrams/texture sheets.
And IMO what DX9 has done, is take a step towards detatching the artistry involved with creating game-art, and trying to make things more procedural (such as hazardous pointed out, the understanding and practice of actually painting lighting, shade, form, and material properties, while replacing them with realtime shaders).
Wait until nobody is Zbrushing folds and wrinkles, but relying on realtime per-poly-collision cloth simluation, to further illustrate Haz's point. And nobody is painting or modelling hair or fur anymore, but we have realtime hair simulation.
Will that stuff look cool in game? I'm sure it will be. Would you consider it an artistic endeavor, I'm not completely sure I would.
Thanks, glad you liked it. Just a minor correction though - Trine used our own in-house engine, not Unreal.
Sande, if I could ask a favour as an aside, could you punch in the nuts whoever designed the end boss level? (sorry if it was you
There's something artistic about being detached from your art.
look into the techniques of photorealism particularily chuck close
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close
or even frank stella (who uses assistants to actually do the painting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Stella
chuck closes entire art style is based upon being detached from the subject, paint, and canvas and being pure techinque.
I myself don't have any hangups concerning the craft aspect of making game art. It is manipulating things in a virtual world anyway! cloth simulation is just another tool.
You complete me man!! *bats eyelashes*
Snacuum: Damn straight its tough!! Maybe im just having a bleet and moan :P, I'm trying my guts out to be able to hand paint stuff, outside of my day job, which consisted of normal mapping / photosourced characters up until a few months ago. Both for my own artistic development, and to give myself the greatest opportunities I figured, 'you know i better get a move on!' Luckily now im working on a project that is definately not what im used to so i get a whole boat load of practice. But it all helps!
TheBoss: Some good observations in there - you pretty much summed it up
SerialKiller: Normal maps = No gameplay ? HAHA dude youd best sew yourself a flame retardant suit, thems fightin words.
this is mathematics.
I think it's incredibly monochromatic, and the forms aren't even that interesting. While it is a splendidly showcased thread, the work does not strike me as particularly "OMG BEST GAME EVER"; in fact, I feel most the textures in Dragon Age are dull and wonky. Rusty teeth? edit: Sigh, I feel like a jerk for this post.
Anyway, I just had that bone to pick. Thread looked like the right place to rant. As a programmer named David Rosen was once paraphrased, "There's a difference between photo-sourced and photo-realistic." I think this is the problem.
Suprore: ROFL!
Vrav: I know what you mean man, Dragon age for me, wasnt a graphical masterpiece at all. Far from it, actually its been more forgettable to me than neverwinter nights was artistically.
But Ryan Lim is a brilliant artist - I have no doubt he could adapt to whatever art direction was thrown his way!
The most striking example of this problem is Assassins Creed 2.
You get OMG YOURE A ZMASTER comments at the sculpted character busts rendered in Z (and rightfully so : They look good, not fantastic, but good!), yet the end result in game is absolutely terrible.
Because their pipeline was (likely) built around one senior artist sculpting the faces, and other lower level guys crunching out lowpoly meshes and baking, while being asked to "remove these polygons because normalmaps maps will fake them anyways".
So on top of the initial topic about the different though processes/skills behind painted VS sculpted, there is also the problem of, sometimes, a lesser understanding of what make a realtime asset look good. If there is a nice, elegant sharp edge on the highpoly, 4 edges on the low would never play well. Also, if the source is rendered with matcaps and AO, but the final asset is a Blinn with just normals and a photo slapped on top, you get Assassins Creed 2 crap...
Now you could say, who cares about the comments on ZBC, we know when game art looks good or not. The problem is, with higher 'fidelity' source assets (sculpts, beauty renders, and so on) there is a very strong chances of iterations taking longer, and also, a strong emphasis on 'getting that one step just right before moving to the lowpoly stage'. In the end you get crappy stuff, or even weird proportions on facial features (Uncharted2, Heavy Rain, same thing) - even tho the source assets looked great at first glance and were signed off to be lowpolyed next. (Yeah thats a great sculpt and render!! We're good to go!)
In the end, all these extra steps make the AD job even harder and less direct than input that could be given on a simple 5000tris mesh+diffuse. So no, in itself new tech does not force a certain dull look ; but all the extra necessary tweaks and steps make iterations much harder for both the artists or the AD.
(on a side note : thats why early test bakes on any kind of nextgen asset, are so important!!!)
Anyways, just saying' !
He is crying in the corner now.
But anyway, The colour palette doesn't bother me so much in those renders, but the obvious mirroring does. Look at the magma monster's stomach. Hideous. It made me, honestly, laugh a bit. I figured professional artists knew better than that.
And yes, ok, it is a bit dull as well.
As art hobbyists or artists on the outside I think this leaves a unique opportunity for us to push the envelope and try new stuff with shaders and game environments. Come up with a new style and you'd be a big asset to a studio looking to create their own "brand" of art, or just enjoy the thrill of creating stuff that hasn't really been done before.
This is probably why a lot of stuff posted by the hotshots in P&P is so amazing, and you wonder why things in games can't be so good. The art being shown off on the forum is usually done by one person, who can follow their own vision to the end... and this is why, I feel, it is immensely valuable for digital artists to round out all relevant skills in what they do.
Even if you are only going to sculpt things in zbrush on the job, when it comes to creating digital artwork, knowing how to model your own basemesh can be as valuable as the knowing the fundamentals of drawing and sculpture beforehand. While it is totally awesome an artist can work 100% in zb from start to finish, ease placed on the process should never permit ignorance in how computer graphics function.
joopson: lol, I hope not. The mirroring does look pretty obvious, but I am willing to make a stretch and attribute that to Microsoft placing a stranglehold (or is it a supportive grasp?) on games via a mass-popularized, "mainstream" console market; developers want to make their art look higher-resolution, but the 360 still has the same hardware, etc... isn't there another thread going on about that? Maybe I should read it.
Check out Shepard's rorschach'd pauldron in this ME2 screen. It's obvious they are having to push optimization to make things look new and improved... which is fine, since it probably only bugs us artist-types who notice this stuff, anyway.
But sort of goes with the old 'put some normal maps on an ugly model, instant beautification' method. Oblivion looked amazing when it first came out, so did Morrowind, but then a couple years pass and the faces appear mediocre in comparison. I'm not trying to insult my fellow artists here... but there's a balance between making stuff look modern and creating art that's timeless, too.
Kind of tangential, though, since for me there is a certain timelessness to implementing efficiency with the hardware of the times. At the same time, isn't it possible to take efficiency too far?
compare this to a game that came out years earlier on the xbox1
I think you ment to post this:
(one of my favorite games, but I played the highres directorscut version on pc, which was likely the one in your screenshot)
(which was long before oblivion, and it looked sharp and great, so your point still holds up)
Still, I believe morrowind and oblivions faulty sides is the characters, if you'd remove all of them, you'd actually have a damn good looking game.
I've been noticing that alot more now as well. White Knight Chronicles comes to mind instantly.
I expected more from Level 5. I played Rogue Galaxy, Dark cloud, Dark Chronicle and I thought the art in those where brilliant for their times ( ok maybe not dark cloud LOL ), not for being the latest and greatest but for being overall consistant. At very least, the characters and environments went together well with the effects and whatnot.
But in the opening sequence of White Knight, I saw some brilliant stuff, and some downright ugly stuff standing right next to one another.
Check the helmet / armour of the guy on the right compared with the one of the main cast on the left... wtf ?
DANG!
Some of the characters looked so mismatched. Like the heads where done by someone completely diffferent to the armour on the characters body.
However once I ran outside the town into the countryside the enviros looked fantastic the and the creatures look great as well.
Environments > Characters.
Pior i think this may well be another case of what your touching on regarding just how important it is to get things right on assets that require normal maps, and whether or not your pipeline is engineered in away that can compensate for iterative progression on this kind of asset.
Any other games out there that are mismatched from enviros and characters that you guys can think of ?
at that point, artists will need to have qualifications in fashion design and hair styling on their resume :P