Thanks very much for all the replies everyone. There is definitely the possibility to achieve stylized and hand painted PBR, I was just wondering whether studios actually do it and HOW they do it. EQ: hand painted for me would mainly mean that hand drawn, painterly effect when looking at the colors of a models texture.…
Can anyone confirm that studios have been adopting PBR for their "hand painted" / stylized games? There isn't a lot of material or art samples about this on the net and I`m currently looking into whether it is worth it creating Warcraft style stuff with PBR. I know for example that in the past people could tell from your…
I definitely think it's possible. Heavily stylized games will typically rely on hand painting their textures, while some of them still make use of normal and spec maps. Some things that come to mind immediately are Wildstar, Darksiders 1+2, Dota2, and Skylanders. Also, there are many games that use high poly models as a…
While I do like 100% fullbright diffuse hand-painted stuff, I really like the hybrid stuff like DOTA2. And I LOVE the 100% hand sculpted, stylized, fully realtime lit PBR stuff. I'm trained as a painter, and while I can produce the hand painted look that some clients want, I prefer assets that can exist and work in many…
Look at the darkness 2 and the wolf among us. They don't use normal maps in the traditional sense, but use it in the diffuse shading with a ramp shader to get really stylized lighting effects. As far as pbr/PBL goes you can still go stylised the tech dosnt limit you at all, in fact it can help you a lot of stylzation will…
JedTheKrampus: thanks for the swift reply. Yes, I do notice games that really look like they are using more realistic shaders, but in a stylized manner. I was also thinking about Heroes of the Storm. I`m not completely sure whether that uses normals, but the shaders themselves look similar to PBR a bit. I've always been…
I'd say don't try to theorize it too much. An engine with the most realistic material support could very well be used to create a game with very brightly lit environments with a lot of ambient lighting, which in turn would require the albedo texture to compensate a lot. (That's the case of Dota2, which *does* support a…
It looks like Epic's Fortnite is shaping up nicely! Also Insomniac is working on Sunset Overdrive: I think skylebones brings up a great point too. Feature animation keeps getting better and better. I think a lot of that is attributed to better rendering solutions. For example, I read somewhere that Monsters University was…
As a matter of fact, yes :) Of course one skillset feeds the other (similarly to the way traditional sculpting can help someone's drawing skills and vice versa). But it is pretty clear that, say, a skilled Zbrush artist with no previous experience in straightforward "handpainting" techniques would need quite some time and…