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It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
Early-Late 2000s CGI/Game textures
How/what software was used to create PBR textures in the 2000s? For example, Iron Man. The reflective metal is something I've always been curious on how it was done for the time period.
Another example is the older GTA's and Half-Life's.
How do these textures look so real on the colormap alone?
Another example is the older GTA's and Half-Life's.
How do these textures look so real on the colormap alone?
Replies
In the case of iron man, its probably just raytraced reflections.
reflections back then and still for mobile stuff are based on fake cubemap that gets interpolated with texture, this cubemap is just environment being captured within engine or you make a fake texture. I made simple texture and blended with shader to get bubble reflection effect in Unity.
Textures were either handmade in PS or photosourced and adjusted to be straight / flat and went through highpass to remove lighting info. Then turned into greyscale with value adjustments for specular highlights and bump mapping.
In the early 2000s GPUs didn't have enough VRAM for baked normal maps, and didn't have enough zoomies to run more than 1 simple shader calculation per pixel. When you did see normal maps, it was only as tiny tileable detail normal maps that would help sell the effect of sand, rock or brick. (see halo 1)
So a model really only had a single texture, which depending on the artist would either be entirely hand-painted, sourced from images or a mix.
Then a simple light would provide a bland lighting effect and environmental coloring.
Things like AO, shadows and reflections were painted into the texture. There were many methods, but what I did was create tileable detail textures for each material, and blend them on top of a base lightness/color layer in PS.
Using dodge and burn tool in photoshop, I'd create the reflections and shadows. Baked AO (if available) would be set to multiply.
For dirt and rust I'd source it from a picture of something white and blend
For dust I'd take pictures of dirty black cars with MY HANDHELD DIGITAL CAMERA.
Scratches I liked to do with a mix of custom brushes and stencils I made, got from others, or pirated third party grunge brushes, which were an actual thing you could buy with real money.
To give you an idea of what the process would look like, here's a couple of before, during and after pics of me revisiting a skin I was never really happy with.
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/1.jpg
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/2.jpg
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/3.jpg
http://skins.thanez.net/oldschool/aks74u/render.jpg
Unreal Tournament baked lighting info on the base texture to have that distint look.
Below is an example, using the same old 2k technique I baked lighting on the texture itself (3ds max, Mental Ray) using a plugin called Flat Iron. This saved ton on performance for VR.
The idea of baking is ancient. I recall people used Lightwave and Brazil render for 3d max in late 90th or something . Long before Render-to texture dialogs appeared in 3dmax . It followed an idea of "baking camera" using surface normals and UV space for ray tracing. Or just baking shader into UV including reflections.
they would normally used in conjunction photographic reference. the strange thing is they were pretty big images for
the texture limits of the day 2048 * 2048 so they can still be used in a 4k world, well almost
I had tried my hand at it but my PC wasn't fast enough to render even a million tris. I was poor and on a laptop my sister gave me. If I remember correctly, it didn't have a GPU, not even an integrated one.
I did use max 8 to bake lighting for reference and environment coloration to blend into my diffuse texture.
I wasn't using Maya much at the time but it's had some pretty advanced features for a lot longer than people realise so I wouldn't be surprised if it got there first.
Xnormal was my first encounter with high-low baking. Nothing says early 2000's like weird window shapes.
I used Faogen 80% of the the hero models, or things that needed more complex baking.
This is the book I used for character art modelling.
"How do these textures look so real on the colormap alone?"
These diffuse textures look real because the artists who painted them understood the properties of a given material (similarly to how someone would assign roughness values), but *also* knew how to represent these materials like a figurative painter doing portraits or still lifes would.
In other words if you want to learn how to create this kind of textures you need to learn digital or traditional painting, similarly to how game character artists from the 2000s were studiying Frazetta, Leyendecker, and so on.
As for baking : baking scene lighting down to vertex colors was indeed used very often as a base for texture painting as it provided a good starting point for form shading. This has been available in 3d software since forever, way before per-pixel/ray cast texture baking.
- Photoshop to desat, fix lighting, make tileable, color correct.. needed a good base for the next stage. Depending on the texture it was sometimes took a while; fixing angles, editing, pixel hunting... lens distortion fix.
- Add my lighting/color work.
- Run through Optipix.
- Bake lighting to vert colors.
The base for this was done with Mankua in 2002. Apparantly, I did not care about texture padding or straightening UVs back then.
Theres a video that talks about the development of God of War 2005, but it skips a part of the whole reason I was looking for it, character modeling.
Was ZBrush or something used back then to make these models?
This is the video I was trying to watch, if anyone knows, it would be incredibly useful, thanks!
Manual sub d modelling was the thing, afaik Zbrush wasnt that main stream till 2008.
Alias Maya as it was called, enjoy the making of Final Fantasy Spirits Within some cool insights in 6 parts.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/TexturingTutorials
Well ... one could ask the same thing about every piece of sculpture ever made. The artist simply pulls from their experience, knowledge of anatomy, and personal design vocabulary for the representation (and stylization) of the various facial features.
As a matter of fact you actually don't really want to have references for every angle, because whoever provides these references isn't a perfectly accurate 3D software but rather a mere human artist. The multiple views on the model sheet will never quite perfectly match up, some adjustements will always be required.
A character modeler (or a modeler in general) isn't hired to be a human photogrammetry machine. Having hundreds of hours of drawing, sculpting and modeling under ones belt is an important requirement for the job.
I was trying to see if there was any information if modeling creatures/animals were the same as modeling people during that time
https://www.amazon.com/Maya-Techniques-Hyper-Real-Creature-Creation/dp/1897177046
I found this book, but it seems there is a very limited supply, and there isn't any e-books, would anybody know of this?
it is scanned and you could officially borrow it digitally if you are applicable.
the book goes over more parts than just modelling like texturing, skinning and rigging.
For modelling only, you could also peek into the powerpoint file accompanied with more stuff which are about the exact same figure.
the gist of it is imo there.
http://downloads.alias.com/gcs/edu_J_Unay.zip
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchiveDotOrg/comments/16tincu/this_book_is_available_to_patrons_with_print/
There are copies available for as low as 10USD though.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=Maya+techniques+:+hyper-realistic+creature+creation&_sacat=0&_from=R40&_trksid=p4432023.m570.l1313
I'd say you are thinking about this backwards. You are assuming things about the past based on what you know of game art and 3D software of today, which I suppose is an intuitive thing to do ... but this leads you to imagine things about previous tech and workflows that just don't apply at all.
- First off, metalness and roughness are just greyscale masks. They can of course be be baked down from complex materials (like the materials one may create in Substance) but that's in no way mandatory. These greyscale masks can be created any way one wants, and because of that the only thing needed from a texture baking tool is the ability to transfer a simple texture map (regardless of what it may be called) from one object to another. As a matter of fact, for some stylized art styles painting the needed masks by hand (either projected on the model or directly on the 2D texture) can still be much faster than attempting to create a complex Substance material and baking it down.
- Secondly, just because an older game looks great doesn't mean that it uses bells and whistles analogous to today standards. Games from the PS2/PS360 era managed to look great with very simple rendering tech. It is perfectly possible to make a character look fantastic with just a well painted diffuse map and a simple mask driving specular on/off. As a matter of fact this simplicity is IMHO specifically what made some older games visually striking, because it favors a strong differentiation of materials (shiny/not shiny).
Here's a rip from The Boss from MGS3, loaded into XNAlara with a very simple material setup applied. The skin of her face looks matte, and her outfit looks shiny. But this doesn't involve any baked metalness or roughness (or any handpainted metalness or roughness either for that matter) - just a low specular value applied to the face and a high specular value applied to the outfit. That's it ! It doesn't involve any painted masks. And the game as whole doesn't use anything more complex than that on anything really. It's enough to convey a whole world of rich locations and characters.
You can see this effect (or rather, this design choice) very clearly in game during the first Sokolov cutscene. His black leather coat has strongly painted highlights in the diffuse texture to take care of most of the look, and it is enhanced by a bit of dynamic spec applied to the whole garment. It's as bruteforce as it gets but it works.
I would highly recommend you to look into actual asset rips from any game you are interested in to see the texture sets involved. Or even better, attempt to mod your own models into PC games from a few gens ago with a strong, still active community (like for instance games that are being community-enhanced with highres models and texture packs). There's a ton to learn from poking around.
And it will also shed some light onto why the way we are building game assets now is incredibly resource-intensive, compared to the barebones (but efficient) processes of 20 years ago.
I'm repeating some things others have already said, but metalness and roughness, while general concepts, are in the specific application you are probably thinking of part of the PBR workflow. Back then, you'd have e.g. specular and specular glossiness (see Pior's answer), and if you tinted the specular according to the material you'd have your "metalness" (or you'd have a different shader with hardcoded "metal" properties). Someone already linked Neil Blevin's tutorials. But since it fits:
http://www.neilblevins.com/art_lessons/reflections_spec/reflections_spec.htm
Historically I mostly used 3d software to generate normals, AO and masks rather than all the output channels. They'd then go into photoshop where I'd set up various layer groups and use the masks to composite them.
basically - exactly what you should be doing in painter or designer but a far worse user experience.
For context, the company I work for has built a custom pipeline for baking complex 3ds Max V-Ray materials into PBR for glTF/USDZ, and we bake metallic/roughness and a bunch of other PBR outputs. It basically does it all for you. Some info here if you want to see how that works: https://rapidpipeline.com/en/cgi-to-pbr-conversion/
You can also use plugins like ucupaint to make the baking process less convoluted. I'd recommend studying what are these maps first though, eg that a metallic map is just a grayscale with 0 being no metalness and 1 maximum metalness. It's very equivalent to how the principled shader works.
The only caveat is PBR usually expects "color" style textures to be stored in sRGB... albedo, emissive, specularColor, etc.
All other textures are expected to be "linear sRGB"...roughness, metallic, normal map, etc.
That's been a difficult thing to teach to artists. sRGB vs. Linear, and which matters when.
General guidance I've used is... if a texture is meant to be captured with a camera, then make sure gamma is applied (sRGB, gamma 2.2, basically the same thing).
Gamma workflow vs. Linear workflow is really hard for artists to learn, it's such a weird thing. But, so necessary when working in 24bit color, and with PBR pipelines.
I wish there was a better way to explain this!