Why grime and wear on textures?
polycounter lvl 7
I can understand using this technique for very old, heavily used and not maintained items, but it seems that it's used for every texture. Some of the quotes are "needs more dirt", "looks too clean", and "needs more wear"
Is there something intrinsically wrong with making a new or well maintained looking item?
Is there something intrinsically wrong with making a new or well maintained looking item?
Replies
Going against the grain kind of way.
I would have to agree, but only up to a point. I have a 40 year old motorcycle that has never been in a garage and it's cleaner than most of the hard surface texture I see here. I actually even clean it once a year.
I'm not saying worn textures are a bad thing.It just seems that it's going overboard sometimes. I actually appreciate a well done grimy gritty worn textures and like Fwap I also like the clean textures. Both have their place.
Sometimes trying to get the surface variances to show up in-game, you have to take it up a notch or two to be seen.
Just my opinion.
Usually you're trying to hint at the history of what happened there. And usually in video-games we're talking war, destruction, some kind of conflict. Whatever happened in the history and in the vicinity of the object, you should try and communicate that. Maybe it's the post-apocalypse. I would think the apocalypse would leave some kind of impression on objects and characters. Or maybe it's alien tech. I would think a spaceship that just flew through millions of lightyears from another galaxy or something would show some wear and tear. Stuff like that.
I think you may be onto something there. It does seem to be less obvious in game. Perhaps going overboard is a good way to get things to show up more.
Bigjohn, that's exactly my thought. A texture tells a story. There is a story to be told with a clean texture but it's a different one from worn textures. My marine friends told me if your not doing anything you usually get a paint brush shoved in your hand and told to paint. On base things don't look worn in peacetime. Also Classic car collecters who have old cars that look like new. That tells a story of care. Military weapons and amor in the middle of a war look worn. The story there is struggle.
I haven't really had a model in a game so I don't have the experience that other do. Perhaps Lamont is correct and you have to go a bit overboard to get the story of the texture to come through.
Thanks for the food for thought guys.
do you fill a 256² pixel surface with nothing but a flat color?
texture have been invented to show information that is too detailed to be shown in geometry, so you should use them that way.
also realism is not the target, not even in "realistic" looking games.
because if you look at your everyday environment you will find out that it looks realy dull and boring.
so you give your gameenvironments more detail then they would have in reality so they look more interesting then reality.
I notice alot of artists just throwing on rust or grime to convey what they think is metal or paint. Ive only seen a handful of artists that do it right! adding that wear and tear to enhance their asset, not to define it.
On the flip side, it tends to be the video game trend to add alot of grime/grunge/lived in look to help the 'history/story.
Grime and dirt are easy candidates for that.
While most things are pretty clean in real life, the dirt or damage they do have is usually pretty specific and localised. Those are things that are very easily recognised as a repeating/tiling detail across props or textures. The easier route is to give a lighter but more general pass over the entire thing - so that anything that might stick out as being a repeating detail is sort of lost in the noise of it all.
i.e. My phone's got a scratch on the corner 'cause I dropped it. That's a story that it's texture would tell if it was a game asset. But if every phone in the game had that same scratch it'd be weird. So the easier route is just to give a sort of light but general scratch on all the corners - generic enough to not repeat but pronounced enough to give visual interest.
And if your texture is getting resized from 1024 to 512 or 256 or something in-game... punching the amount of it up helps it survive the resize.
Like drybrushing is used in miniature painting or similar objects, it gives shape to a form which does not have enough definition in the physical shape itself to look like it should
Our brains make an effort to recognise things quickly and accurately and we see what our brains believe. Even if the levels of grime and wear on an object in game doesn't reflect how it exists in real life, we've seen enough things that have certain degrees of dirtiness depending on the context, and we'll have an easier time being immersed in a world that meets our own expectations.
9 times out of 10 I bet when we make something, others go "It's good but there's something missing. and then we dirty it up a little and then it becomes "Yeah that looks way better."
You'll notice all ths stuff in real life when you look at the world with an artist's eye. Take a walk around a clean city, all the surfaces are still weathered and beat to hell.
At this point in gaming history I'd love to see more stylized art like Borderlands 2, I get tired of games trying to "look real". Every game doesn't need to be battlefield or Modern warfare.
a matter of taste
I remember rpg, that has big part going on in desert. This was quite realistic desert too; mostly endless dunes, here and there building, maybe an oasis. Some ruins.
Exactly how i image desert to be.
But...playing in endless desert where there are mostly dunes with little of anything else...that may be realistic, but it's also boring for a game.
(just so that people won't say i just complain, in same game, you had other areas there were really nicely done).
Same is with the textures. Realistic or not, environment must look interesting for player, and nice, spotless
environments, most of the time, isn't as fun as dirty, scratchy, etc.
Of course, you have to be careful not to over do it.
Just my opinion.
The thing with Mirrors Edge though is how when you get up real close to the walls and poles and stuff it does have a fine layer of texture with grime and dust, making the tactile surfaces of the game look real and touchable. Then from a distance everything remains as stylistically clean as the game is remembered for.
Talk about totally missing the point of silver materials, and why they're good at covering up said stuff, or why black can really show the nasty, but nope, instead we get generic stuff that is supposed to tell a story, without even material being taken into consideration.
Take a look at the carpet in an office builing that isn't new. The heavy worn paths from heavy foot trafic tells you where people walk every day. A rectangle of clean carpet shows you where the filing cabinet used to be.
Buttons on keyboards and pads are worn and shinier than the rest of the object. If you where making an adventure/puzzle game you could texture a keypad so that one of the keys was more worn than the rest. This would give the player a clue as to what the code to unlock the door is.
It's really hard to perfectly nail a material that is in pretty much pristine condition. This is true especially ingame where you can't always work with specular power (gloss) and specular color maps. However if you coat everything with a mild layer of dust and icky, the detail that wood has the same specular as metal becomes less apparent. More so because we tend not to see super-gross materials IRL as much, so we have less reference in our brains.
Same goes for glass, too. It's hard to create the subtle refractions and minuscule colorations and exact kind of reflections that you see in real life. But as you dirty it up, the inaccuracies become less apparent. Even better! If you cake the window in a giant thick layer of yeugh, you don't have to render the other side of the wall, except maybe via a blurry cube-map.
Another factor is that games aren't real, and as such, things get exaggerated often. The same way we stylize anatomy and animation, and have stronger lighting schemes. Do you think anyone would really design interiors the way they did in Deus Ex or Dead Space?
Artist A wants to work for studios B,C and D. Those studios make such and such games, those games most likely in today's current market have an artstyle of gritty, dirty, worn down realism. So they make art in the same style to show their potential employer that they would work great there.
Other than that I would have to agree with 'wear shows the history and day to day use of said asset'. And that novice artists may plaster 'cgtextures generic rust texture 02' on everything, crazybump and call it done because its easy and they haven't learnt better yet.
So you may possibly replace that question with why are there so many realism styled games, but that has an obvious answer so I'd go straight out and demand to see more diversity in mainstream games. Which I think may be slowly but gradually happening. Larger studios & publishers are starting to veer away from gritty realism seeing that repeating titles aren't raking it in as much. Although still playing it safe with similar games/genres, uniquer art styles helps it stand out slightly from the overflowing monotony of dull grit. Plus indies are growing ever stronger and will eventually rise up and slay the industry's evil overloads blah blah blah.
Lol end.
I'd be down for living in Adam Jensen's apartment, minus the mess.
Mirror's Edge is an excellent example of this (although it still has slight wear). God I love that art style.
I meant the lighting schemes in that game. The design isn't the worst from the gaming world, but the lighting is definitely over-the-top stylized.
Also, would you really? With the lack of doors, horribly laid out furniture plan, scarcity of storage, useless split-levels and crapton of other impracticalities? I mean, sure, the renaissance aesthetic is nice, but it can be implemented in much finer ways. I think you're just looking at it as "a nice big place" and "huge TV with hidden gun-stash" but not looking at the actual design.
No I actually really liked the design. Then again, my wife and I have had to fit all our stuff in one room a couple times over the past few years, so I'm sort of used to a minimalist lifestyle I guess. I liked the lack of doors, the workbench area lining the windows, etc.
Also I have a chinchilla, and he'd totally get a kick out of running around on all those steps when he's out.
I get your point, lighting wise.
Sure, you don't need to spread poop all over the walls or anything. But it's hard to have a perfectly clean surface.
Metallic surfaces always have little scratches, dull parts where someone touched + dust, even the most well cared object gets somewhat dirty.
Now, about Jensen's Apartment...
If I had his lifestyle (meaning most of the time outside) I would love to go back to a home like that. He expends all his days at the streets, and at night, he has that softly-looking, dim-lighted yellowish room. It's very relaxing and at the same time, moody, great for some relaxation.