Thanks Slum! That clears up a lot. I love that edge highlighting in the diffuse, reminds me of Quake 3 when there was hand painted wear on each edge, the technique has transitioned beautifully into this generation of graphics. Can we get a break down of how you achieve this layer.
I have a question about radient unwrapping the worlds. In Modo is it a requirement to unwrap everything so there are no overlapping uv islands? If so what is radient doing as the world should already be unwrapped at this point, or is there a second uv set used for painting/decaling that is then baked down to the base uv set from Modo?
Except just like any projection painter if objects get in front of one another it becomes a major hassle. Especially if you're doing a colour correction pass.
Yeah hehe same for texturing assets with camera projection - its cool for some stuff, but a pain sometimes too.
As for env stuff ... I could see it work well in order to gradually blend a concrete ground surface with the lower parts of a dirty wall. However this would basically be a unique stamp painted especially for that purpose, and not even having proper bump or spec, instead of a stamp taken from a collection of existing details.
What about vertex colors btw ? where they used in order to tint assets in a non destructive manner ? (before or after the final bakedown).
I do find it sad for the mod community that would like to spring up around this game. Its all baked out and flat. You cant go in and open up some big asset library and start making some new crazy maps with all new lighting and visual arrangement. If folks want to make any new maps then they have to start from scratch. I am talking full visual changes not game-play. So you cant even start small and just slap together tons of assets from the game like what folks did with Gears or UT3 maps.
In the end I think I prefer the more flexible environment which does more things in real-time with mass instancing and layered materials. Examples like Crytek, Unreal3 or the material and instancing in the Uncharted games. What you end up with in Rage can be compared to the final output frames of a CG movie. Awesome to look at but you cant appreciate each asset on its own and reverse engineer things to learn more from them.
Rage does look awesome though and I think its an interesting tech path to wander down. But I tend to lean more towards the more dynamic / flexible engine tech. Curious what other folks have to say.
"Skiffy the junkyard monster ponders the future... he likes it but at the same time does not"
We make kinect games at our studio with a very small art team so the logistics of the rage engine would destroy our productivity. I'm trying to steer our lighting tech to fully real time for our next project. Baked lighting was the single biggest bottleneck in our art production last year.
Our designers use the agile approach to design so baked lighting doesn't work here. Too many level design changes after the art has been signed off. Our games reuse textures as part of the simplified visual style so id tech 5 wouldn't help us as we're not going for a realistic look. Games like skate 3 and dead rising 2 could really benefit from it visually I think. But there is always the trade off of the bake time and the inflexibility of the art to consider.
Anyone else notice gears of war 3 is totally baked now and they removed the ssao. I was a big fan of baking in 2006 when epic was talking about 100% real time and now we've traded places. I think crisis 2 got it right visually/real time on xbox 360, but I watched a demo of their art pipeline and it was quite painful so iteration time was still slow.
I guess it depends on what you want your final product to run like. Deferred lighting like in Cryengine 3 speeds up lighting iterations at the cost of performance. Whereas engines like id tech 5 take baking to the extreme but Rage runs incredibly well even on old hardware.
I'm also not a huge fan of the art director coming in at the end colour cubing the shit out of world, often leads to banding and in a lot of cases making the underlying art look worse. I encourage all my guys to do their own post processing after the lighting is in a good place, (...)
I could print this paragraph, frame it, and put it on my wall to everyone to see! This is so true.
I personally really don't like color grading and exaggerated color post processing, and I bet it's worsen if it's made by an Art Director or Lighting Artist that disregards the underlying art. I understand that ultimately what matters is the overall image, but tinting the shit out of a scene with a monochromatic filter is NOT the solution for good art direction.
I'm also not a fan on how the color grading adds a lot of black clamping to dark scenes and corners, and it makes the 8bit color compression gradients even more noticeable.
I guess I am one of the few art directors that prefers to light scenes with just lighting and actual fog volumes / FX? I like to see that distant part of the landscape is a cold blue or fire red instead of said examples where I walk in and it all fades to red and suddenly becomes more foggy.
Color correction is just another tool but its something I prefer for testing concepts instead of the crux to fixing bad lighting. Plus for more dynamic events its awesome. FX like poison or near death type UI changes can work out great as a gameplay tool.
I'm also not a fan on how the color grading adds a lot of black clamping to dark scenes and corners, and it makes the 8bit color compression gradients even more noticeable.
Replies
I have a question about radient unwrapping the worlds. In Modo is it a requirement to unwrap everything so there are no overlapping uv islands? If so what is radient doing as the world should already be unwrapped at this point, or is there a second uv set used for painting/decaling that is then baked down to the base uv set from Modo?
As for env stuff ... I could see it work well in order to gradually blend a concrete ground surface with the lower parts of a dirty wall. However this would basically be a unique stamp painted especially for that purpose, and not even having proper bump or spec, instead of a stamp taken from a collection of existing details.
What about vertex colors btw ? where they used in order to tint assets in a non destructive manner ? (before or after the final bakedown).
In the end I think I prefer the more flexible environment which does more things in real-time with mass instancing and layered materials. Examples like Crytek, Unreal3 or the material and instancing in the Uncharted games. What you end up with in Rage can be compared to the final output frames of a CG movie. Awesome to look at but you cant appreciate each asset on its own and reverse engineer things to learn more from them.
Rage does look awesome though and I think its an interesting tech path to wander down. But I tend to lean more towards the more dynamic / flexible engine tech. Curious what other folks have to say.
"Skiffy the junkyard monster ponders the future... he likes it but at the same time does not"
Our designers use the agile approach to design so baked lighting doesn't work here. Too many level design changes after the art has been signed off. Our games reuse textures as part of the simplified visual style so id tech 5 wouldn't help us as we're not going for a realistic look. Games like skate 3 and dead rising 2 could really benefit from it visually I think. But there is always the trade off of the bake time and the inflexibility of the art to consider.
Anyone else notice gears of war 3 is totally baked now and they removed the ssao. I was a big fan of baking in 2006 when epic was talking about 100% real time and now we've traded places. I think crisis 2 got it right visually/real time on xbox 360, but I watched a demo of their art pipeline and it was quite painful so iteration time was still slow.
I could print this paragraph, frame it, and put it on my wall to everyone to see! This is so true.
I personally really don't like color grading and exaggerated color post processing, and I bet it's worsen if it's made by an Art Director or Lighting Artist that disregards the underlying art. I understand that ultimately what matters is the overall image, but tinting the shit out of a scene with a monochromatic filter is NOT the solution for good art direction.
I'm also not a fan on how the color grading adds a lot of black clamping to dark scenes and corners, and it makes the 8bit color compression gradients even more noticeable.
Color correction is just another tool but its something I prefer for testing concepts instead of the crux to fixing bad lighting. Plus for more dynamic events its awesome. FX like poison or near death type UI changes can work out great as a gameplay tool.
And I will print out this paragraph!