MGS4 art making-of articles @ softimage.jp
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http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.softimage.jp%2Fuser_case%2Fmgs4%2Findex.html&sl=ja&tl=en&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
Sorry for the machine translation, softimage says an English translation is on the way. It's a two-parter, hit that link at the bottom.
Sorry for the machine translation, softimage says an English translation is on the way. It's a two-parter, hit that link at the bottom.
Replies
Haha, I notice that Google didn't translate "FEISHARUANIMESHON" ... but I know what it is
Also another couple of good ones - "ROREZOMODERU" and "HAIREZOMODERU"... priceless!
http://www.chrisevans3d.com/pub_blog/?p=31
http://www.chrisevans3d.com/pub_blog/?p=33
English translations, by Mike Evans. Posted over on tech-artists.org awhile back.
Now to actually read the articles...
http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/customer_stories/metal_gear_4/
what's softimage?
Then again, Japanese game artists do tend to really pack stuff into their UV maps like nobody's business. The FFXI flats I saw a while back were insane. 256x256 never looked so good.
However, that section of the article was mainly talking about head models and textures, so I feel like maybe the translation was a bit dodgy and they actually meant 512x512 per character head/face, rather than the entire character?
I have done my fair share of snooping around japanese games textures and it's pretty interesting comparing them with western textures. For example if you look at gears of war or whatever, a characters hand will be all splayed out and pelt-mapish but you look at a japanese characters hand and its shaped int a rectangle and all the fingers are side by side.
But damn I love Maya and its script/bits so its a tie for me now ;p
It's plausible they can achieve medium level details with the normal map in a 512 texture... then have another 512 texture that has all the high level details all mapped to a separate UV set. So all the perforation, fabric texture, etc on Snake would be on a separate texture assigned to a different UV set.
Crysis does this, correct?
I doubt their UVs are structured like in the previous generation of games. Wouldn't the bake-out of the normals break because it tries to compensate for the stretching in the UVs by altering the pixels in the output texture? I don't think there's any way programs would know which pixels to make perfectly straight.
(clicky)
I don't think there's any damage to the normals from stretched pixels, the final per-pixel normals are interpolated just like they always are, just stretched out a bit more if the UVs are stretched. Tangent basis is still the same. Only problem I see is the one they've already tackled, extreme smearing can cause the texture to down-sample to a lower detail (calling a smaller mip).