Mass effect artistic style

Will Faucher

So I was looking at Mass Effect today, and noticed a few things regarding it's artistic style. Why is it that the specular and bloom is totally overboard? I must admit is gives a real nice effect. But sometimes I feel it is too much, I can't even see the textures properly since there is constant light blasting in my eyes. Is this style Bioware/Mass Effect specific?

PredatorGSR

Heh, have you played any other games recently? Pretty much every "next-gen" game does spec this way nowadays. Some are more subtle than others.

Uly

Kindof part & parcel of the (broad) design style that Mass Effect takes its cues from, retro-futurism.

Uly

: ) but it doesnt hurt that UE3 does do bloom & spec quite well.

keizza

bloom is the new/old black.


uly: nice pics....mass effect rips from syd mead violently. but hey, s'not a bad thing to rip from. right?

Will Faucher

I have indeed noticed that many games use a ton of bloom/spec. But mass effect tends to be... less subtle than other games. I've noticed the very Star trek-ish lights as well. Here's what I mean:
See those horizontal light rays? That originates from star trek if I'm not mistaken. I've noticed the same light pattern when looking directly at a sun.

Cyrael

yea, its just excessive use of lens flare/bloom and star trek wasn't the first to do it, just the first to do it so much that you were like "f*** could we tone done the excessive lens flare already?" I remember in one 1:30 second scene I counted like 30 DIFFERENT lens flares in the new star trek movie. kinda a let down as its a cheesy effect thats a quick way to enhance (and cheapen in some peoples eyes) scenes without too much extra effort.

Will Faucher

Most artists I speak to regarding this agree that the lens flare and excessive bloom is not necessarily a good thing. I personally don't. Like you said, it may cheapen the scene. However, every single non-artist I've spoken to thinks it makes the "graphics look better".

renderhjs

its there because they can, thats how I see it in most games. It's the immature play with technology - but a couple of years it was even worse in many games like this:
http://image.com.com/gamespot/images/2007/007/928234_20070108_screen001.jpg

Just like the cold warm contrast (those orange blue colored grading style) and other things this will become less the way it is used today as soon as designers get over it.

Del

~ That horizontal "lens flare" is that's overused in the star trek movie is called Anamorphic Light or Anamorphic Lens Flare. An anamorphic lens consists of a regular spherical lens, plus an anamorphic attachment (or integrated lens element) that does the anamorphosing.



It's actually very difficult to direct with it and was completely deliberate. The thing is that its a lot easier to control in a game engine than in rl so I'm guessing we'll see it a lot more in games. Either way, its an artistic choice that kind of sells the sci fi. It's cleaner than bloom that's for sure...

People said that Bladerunner had wayyyy to much lens flare, but looking at it now its just such a big part of the art direction it HAS to be there:


I personally like it when its an artistic choice thats thought through, but its totally lame idea when people add it to their games for the sake of it and it just doesn't belong.

Slum

I love anamorphic flares. When done well, they are fantastic.

Unfortunately most games just half-ass it with a single sprite quad - there's a lot of intricate stuff going on inside of the lens that sells it, and makes it look organic.

Autocon

anamorphic flairs, super grunge, high spec, shinny rocks/wet looking rocks, over done bloom, the colors brown and grey all let you know if a game is next gen or not. otherwise how else would you be able to tell!

Xoliul

How would an anamorphic lens flare work technically? I'd think you'd only want them on pixels that have a certain intensity, so you'd certainly need HDR rendering. Or would there be some sort of special mask/renderpass for the lens flares ? I'm guessing it's the first method with some clamping done on the mask, and then a horizontal blur.

Electro

Xoliul: yeah, just a post effect, you can even create the "mask" dynamically using thresholds. Would just be done on a downsampled resolve of the framebuffer. Once you create the mask by basically clamping low values (so you're only left with the high), you can do a horizontal blur like you mentioned. The trick is that maybe this should be done PRIOR to HDR, or at least integrated into the HDR itself, so that the horizontal streaks go through the HDR pipeline correctly and flare out themselves a little. Helps give it a less digital look.

Having a seperate buffer that is only for lens flares I guess gives more control, but wouldn't just dynamically work on anything that goes insanely bright.

Might give this technique a go, depending what title I end up working on next.

odium

Erm, the lens flare effect was in ME1, which was made well before Star Trek, lol. In fact I recall ME1 being part of the design teams goals in trying to recreate the universe feel, which is why if you watch Star Trek there are parts that screen Mass Effect, in both music, colour tone and effects.

Watch several movies and TV shows these days and you will see the same "style" cross over. Even Stargat Universes Soundtrack is now a total rip of ME's, and Tron: Legacies soundtrack so far is pretty much a carbon copy (Listen to the trailer music and then the Normandy ambient track, spot on).

As for the original post about things being overused, its standard. New tech comes out, but new tech is expensive. Rather than keep it subtle, they shove it in your face. Env mapping? Normal mapping? Bloom? Its all been "found", and then shoved into our faces so much that you KNOW its there. Spec mapping being over used is just another one. Add to that most games still have no real control over specual power, scale and colour and that most of then just greyscale the diffuse, and yeah, its gonna look a tad crap. Shame really, as spec in many ways is most important to the selling of a surface material.

undoz

I have no problem with lens flare and glow generated by light sources. It is a lens phenomenon that's pretty common. But what the hell is that blurry vaseline soup that's in all the games at the moment? I HATE IT.

Anyway, prepare yourself for excessive vignette, dof, noise, chromatic aberrations, lens distortions, colored and gradient filters to come in the following years.

vargatom

Even Mass Effect 1 looked totally cool, one of the most accomplished visuals of this gen's SF games. And then ME2 has upped the quality to insane levels... just MHO...

yiannisk

undoz did we have a talk some days ago?

i feel sad that such wonderful tools of photography such as vignieting, lens distortions, colour filters etc. are not used much in our games. These are part of visual story telling and it is a shame that photography and its techniques are ignored so badly!


Also ME didn't rip Syd Mead.

Yes some designs were inspired from some of his classic masterpieces.. but you got to admit that Syd Mead has inspired generations over generations with his iconic future. He pretty much defined the way future should look like. Even the space shuttle design is inspired by his designs

SHEPEIRO

blurrey vaseline soup- its there to hide shit like bad AA or lack of etc etc also i think games still dont mask their bloom to the upper HDR or LDR ranges

I like lens effects they add to the pretense that you are looking through a camera at something, which for Sci-fi can really help if what you are looking at is blatantly fictional.

they can also help make a more interesting image if half your screen is er stars

the "overuse" of bloom spec and lens effects in ME2 is also in my mind due to the high contrast environment of space, the greater the contrast the harder it is to control lens effects, this is true in real life and reflected quite well ME2, maybe pushed a little

Del

yiannisk wrote: »

Also ME didn't rip Syd Mead.

Yes some designs were inspired from some of his classic masterpieces.. but you got to admit that Syd Mead has inspired generations over generations with his iconic future. He pretty much defined the way future should look like. Even the space shuttle design is inspired by his designs

~ Yeah, I never said anything about ME ripping Syd Mead though maybe just inspired by. I was just stating that lens flare was a big part of Bladerunner, and added to its sci fi feel just like Star Trek and ME. I was just saying its an art choice that some people either like or they don't but its quite deliberate.

Irreal

I love those lens flares! I wouldn't consider a level complete until I've added at least a dozen of those things together with some huge whopping volumetrics. They are the icing on the cake IMO.

I don't put them on every single light source but when used in the correct places they add so much to the scene. That blue beam is very iconic to the Mass Effect look and yes, Syd Mead is heavily referenced although not slavishly copied.

SHEPEIRO

i WOULD go as far as saying they ripped alot of meads style for the ship designs, the suit designs the environment designs, not a bad thing as you say most sci-fi since the 60s has, but ME2 is purer than most

GarageBay9

renderhjs wrote: »

its there because they can, thats how I see it in most games. It's the immature play with technology - but a couple of years it was even worse in many games like this:

! Oh god, I remember the Super Lens Flare Obsession... Back in the late '90s when the original Unreal engine was riding high and everybody was cramming games like Wheel of Time and Klingon Honor Guard full of lens flares, I remember talking to an animator at Epic who was trying to figure out how to make a character animation solely out of lens flares. Just to take it to the extreme and piss everybody off.


I've never minded Mass Effect's use of bloom and flare. Believe it or not, to me it evokes a lot of similarity to Apollo and early Shuttle-era NASA footage, when they were still using compact film cameras with lenses made for durability and weight instead of optical quality. Lots of those images and films show clear desaturation and bloom, and there's flares everywhere.

I think that's part of the root of ME's art direction's strength at immediately 'working' as a sci-fi setting - it looks like a real one almost everyone has seen before.

For example...

vcool

It's not done because everyone else is doing it. It's an art direction.

The bloomy and foggy ambience is reminiscent of scifi. The most obvious, to me, example is Babylon 5 where the conversations were kinda similar to ME: Camera changes from viewing one speaker to the next with a blurry background and massive bloom, giving the head forms a slightly hazy appearance.

Similar application can be found in Star Trek as many have already pointed out.

Oh and I love it.

odium wrote: »

Even Stargat Universes Soundtrack is now a total rip of ME's

Ha, I knew I wasn't imagining things! It may be a ripoff, but it's one of the small number of reasons I still watch that show.

lloyd

i r looking forward to reach!

Autocon

wait till you see those envios in single player where things dont have to be ripped out for MP performance

also the moon landing never actually happened.

Japhir

now my avatar has it's own art style