Problem Machine

Ugly pretty textures

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So I've been kicking an idea for an essay around in my head for a while about a thing which I'm pretty sure is a thing but which I'm having a hard time remembering specific examples of-- I'm hoping you kind folks might be able to lend a hand.

Basically, I've observed that a lot of 3d games use textures that are either way too high-contrast, way too large for the surface they're on, or both. An example of this would be a game I saw recently (I can't remember which for sure, it might have been a youtub video of Natural Selection 2) which had a standard metal plating floor which looked approximately like this:

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I'm sure we've all walked across floors more or less like that. However, in-game each of those, uh... protuberances? Each of them was scaled somewhere between the dimensions of a thumb and a wrist. Such a surface would be most uncomfortable to walk across and not be nearly as useful for traction, but that's how the texture was scaled to its surface.

Now, it's not hard to see why this would be the case. If you know the detail is there, you want to be able to see it-- normally, in our day to day lives, we could just peer more closely at a surface to see what the texture is, but when you're taking screenshots to sell your game with that isn't exactly an option. So artists end up making textures that are scaled up and overcontrasted to make sure that you can see that there's a damn texture there. The same thing happens with specular and normal maps, so we see bizarrely shiny craggy rocks rather unlike any one would observe in nature, which I suppose wouldn't necessarily be a problem except that the developers are trying to evoke a natural environment.

This is, incidentally, one of the traps Valve has consistently avoided. The textures in their game worlds tend to be realistically scaled and contrasted, which makes for less impressive screenshots but far greater potential for verisimilitude which can sometimes border on the creepy-- one of the reasons I've found Left 4 Dead so compelling is because some of the environments are so much like places I've been that I found seeing the nightmarish post-apocalyptic versions of them genuinely chilling.

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Anyway, I'm looking for more examples I could use, though I actually found more to say on this and more to show towards it than I thought I had here. Specific examples from big name releases are particularly welcome. Or, if you think I'm full of shit and would like to take this opportunity to say so, that's fine too :tup:

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Video game art is still suffering growing pains in its transition from using representational/symbolic artwork to depicting reality or a facet thereof as it actually is (even in stylized games). I think a lot of it is outdated problem solving ("it needs to be scaled up or it won't read on a TV or small monitor" or "that texture will just disappear because of mipmapping" eventually goes from a pain to a skillset to a religion) and has now become a sort of tacit aesthetic choice. Valve and other developers are increasingly less guilty of it, but I think that autopilot left over from the really early purely-representational days of gaming 3D is really hard to shake.

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That's interesting, I hadn't thought of it as a holdover from lower res days. I mostly tend to think of it as being more analogous to doing traditional artwork, and how when you pay attention to one part of your drawing and try to get the details right the scale starts to drift and that part ends up being bigger than it's supposed to be, and one part of your drawing looks good to the detriment of the piece as a whole. Perhaps both of these contribute to the problem.

Actually, just speaking of it as a drawing or visual artwork problem is maybe even still too specific. I've run into this pitfall in literally every medium I've ever worked in. When writing music there's a constant temptation to try to make each segment pop, to pull each segment out, and of course when you do that you end up with a bunch of sound which is all at about the same amplitude and kind of undifferentiated. One must learn to be stingy with detail, because making everything detailed tends to simply result in a baroque monstrosity.

Although, actually, video games can potentially present one of the few exceptions to that rule, since players can hypothetically explore that detail at their leisure. This isn't really true of the visual design, but speaking of game design itself, given a highly detailed space to explore the player might not feel overwhelmed if they can explore that space in a naturalistic way-- naturalistic meaning, if the game presents a giant list of menu options to the player they will feel overwhelmed, but if they present a room which the player can poke around in and explore the player will naturally gravitate towards points of interest without being overwhelmed. Now, whether the chief difference there is in terms of the implied demands the menu places on the player, the comparative lack of information given to the player by the menu, or by the intuitive naturalistic interface of the spacial exploration, I don't know. I am super digressing from my original thought anyway.

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I'm having trouble figuring out what your criticism is. Is it that games have too much contrast and end up looking like baroque monstrosities? Because I think something can look like a baroque monstrosity without being very contrasty, and it can look very contrasty without looking like a baroque monstrosity. Or is your problem that games look unrealistic because textures are often built to a scale that allows you to see the detail even though that's unrealistic? That seems like a knock against games that want to look like real life, so to the extent that L4D avoids it, I think it's rightly praised, but Natural Selection 2 and a lot of other games aren't going for 100% realistic verisimilitude because photorealism in games is difficult at best and unachievable at worst. For a decade now, the Natural Selection franchise has been about hand-crafted textures that explicitly shy away from photorealism, so if your criticism is that they don't look realistic, then I don't think it's much of a criticism, because they aren't supposed to. I think the vast majority of video games are still not trying to achieve 100% photorealism, simply because things like lighting aren't there yet.

I'm also not sure about the point about scale specifically - do you have examples of games that try to mimic real life that get the scale wrong? If I look at GTA IV or Sleeping Dogs or LA Noire or Saint's Row 3 or something, the scale on all those textures seems more or less accurate.

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I'm having trouble figuring out what your criticism is. Is it that games have too much contrast and end up looking like baroque monstrosities? ... Or is your problem that games look unrealistic because textures are often built to a scale that allows you to see the detail even though that's unrealistic?

The latter, except both scale and contrast-- that is, contrast is an issue, but I believe it's the texture's contrast specifically that's a problem rather than say an overall contrast filter applied. The former I was getting into as a tangent, because it tends to be the end result of the latter.

That seems like a knock against games that want to look like real life... but Natural Selection 2 and a lot of other games aren't going for 100% realistic verisimilitude because photorealism in games is difficult at best and unachievable at worst. For a decade now, the Natural Selection franchise has been about hand-crafted textures that explicitly shy away from photorealism, so if your criticism is that they don't look realistic, then I don't think it's much of a criticism, because they aren't supposed to. I think the vast majority of video games are still not trying to achieve 100% photorealism, simply because things like lighting aren't there yet.

Well, I find it hard to credit 'randomly messing with the scale of detail' as an intentional aesthetic choice since, disregarding 'realism', it completely works at cross purposes to building an internally consistent and aesthetically pleasing world. I am completely okay with people eschewing the rules of photo-realism, and in fact I think this is something that's generally necessary in game development, but the inconsistency or internal reality of the game is harmed when the textures don't make physical sense within its own universe.

Honestly, I'm kind of sick of people using 'but it's not supposed to be realistic as a defense against all criticisms which use reality as a frame of reference.

I don't want you to think I'm shitting on Natural Selection 2 specifically here, btw, because that game looks pretty good... for a video game. I just think that, aesthetically, games in general use these overcontrasted and overdetailed textures which make for nice detailed screenshots but in practice tend to be overwhelming and unappealing.

I'm also not sure about the point about scale specifically - do you have examples of games that try to mimic real life that get the scale wrong? If I look at GTA IV or Sleeping Dogs or LA Noire or Saint's Row 3 or something, the scale on all those textures seems more or less accurate.

Well the entire reason I wrote this post is because I couldn't remember any examples right offhand, though I wouldn't cast my net as narrowly as that anyway. As I mentioned, just because a game doesn't aspire to photo-realism doesn't mean it gets a free pass on this. It's a look I tend to associate in particular with Unreal 3 based games, though I don't know whether that's due to something in the rendering engine or just how developers think an Unreal 3 game should look.

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I can't come up with any specific examples, but I'm thinking of the incredibly large and stark pebbling textures used for stones that scream "THIS IS A STONE LIKE GRANITE" from half a mile away, or the kind of video game grass that comes up to the player avatar's eyes in most games.

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Do you have example of overly contrasty games that end up looking too busy? I mean, I'm sure it happens, but I can't really think of any off the top of my head, at least not among the games that we would care about.

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I've certainly seen a lot of this over the years. I have a feeling that it's getting better, though.

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Do you have example of overly contrasty games that end up looking too busy? I mean, I'm sure it happens, but I can't really think of any off the top of my head, at least not among the games that we would care about.

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I would say that the 'Unreal Engine' look was pretty much produced through excessive contrast, seen in games ranging from BioShock to Enslaved to Gears of War. Fortunately developers have managed to veer away from that now.

As for the scaling thing, I would say that's born from technical limitations as Jake described. Until this generation console games in particular had very low-resolution textures, so you literally couldn't put in much fine detail — there weren't enough pixels. Even with this generation, textures are relatively small in comparison to what PCs can handle, thus most games have artwork produced with consoles in mind and again ultra-fine detail is avoided.

The next generation is when we'll likely see much more in the way of nuanced detail, because for the first time consoles will be capable of rendering truly high-resolution textures. When you play something like Crysis or Battlefield on a beefy PC with texture detail pushed way up, you realise just how lacking the current consoles are in this respect with their comparatively blurry and undetailed surfaces.

Plus there is of course an art direction side to this story, so even once the ceiling is lifted off texture detail next generation we'll still probably find developers exaggerating details out of habit for a while.

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That's interesting, because Gears of War has always seemed to me to be one of the poster children for the whole "desaturated, everything gray, zero contrast" look that was fucking up video games before they decided instead to go with the "everything blue" and "everything brown" look that is currently fucking up video games. I suspect 80% of the contrast in that screenshot is coming from the lighting effects, not the textures, and if that guy on the right weren't literally on fire then there would be almost no contrast in the scene.

Specifically, the only black in the scene is in the shadows and the only white in the scene is in the explosions. The textures themselves are shades of gray, and not overly contrasting shades of gray, if you ask me. If I had to say why that Gears of War shot looks bad, I would say because there's not enough contrast, not because there's too much contrast.

Thrik mentions BioShock and Enslaved, which DO have tons of contrast, but I think those are two beautiful games that are all the more beautiful for the way they push their palettes to the breaking point. Spec Ops: The Line, which I haven't played yet except for the demo, seems to have the whole "high contrast" thing going on and I think it looks pretty good.

A lot of games these days want to eliminate contrast by doing some post-processing color grading to get everything to look blue or brown or gray. I think this just makes things look awful. Check out this BF3 video for instance:

They took all the contrast out of the game and made it uglier than it has any right to be. BF2 wasn't afraid of color: forests had color, cities had color, jungles had color, and I think it's crazy that the studio that made Mirror's Edge could somehow think that making its game less colorful would be a great idea.

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I think the color grading discussion is a separate and fairly controversial one. For example, I think BF3 looks stunning. It's grading focuses the eye away from the background and onto the action which is usually exaggeratedly lit. They've also gone for a very cinematic feel, hence the heavy color correction and I'm glad they didn't just make another moderately colorful, semi-photoreal FPS. Same goes for Enslaved and Bioshock. Far from examples of Unreal Engine driving art direction I think they took the engine and made it work for a very specific and directed look in each case.

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They are certainly desaturated, but not low contrast. The high-exposure low-contrast look has been in with blockbuster movies for a while, often using blue filters to achieve the effect, and video games seem to be aping that rather shamelessly. That said, there's a lot of different places you can have contrast. You can have high contrast textures, a high contrast environment, and high contrast lighting. I used that particular screenshot as an example of how horribly exaggerated the normal mapping was. The problem is actually worse with normal mapping, since most people haven't learned to have a light touch with it yet. The actual textures aren't as bad in the particular example I used, but the overall effect is as I described.

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This literally makes me slightly nauseous to look at.

It helps if I look at the shadows... the shadows are nice.

... though, now that I look at it, that room is awfully brightly lit if it's supposed to be lit by candlelight...

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Ugh. Bethesda does great with vistas but needs to figure out how to design interiors. Or hire someone who does.

That's a good point about differentiating categories of contrast. Good art direction is about balancing them all. Hawken does a great job of creating beautiful environments that are highly detailed but use an extremely limited palette. It's a very nuanced approach to art direction that stands out immediately.

hawken-screenshot.jpg

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Another example of very saturated colors (and shit brown) is Bulletstorm: http://deadendthrills.com/?cat=316

I like the it's style, it firts the over-the-top nature of the game.

Just like Hawken, Deus Ex Human Revolution is also a good example of good art direction with a rather limited pallet and stylized environments: http://deadendthrills.com/?cat=268

Not featured in the previous set, by Jenkins' apartment is an absolute gem: http://wide-wallpapers.net/deus-ex-human-revolution-house-interior-wide-wallpaper/

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Contrast doesn't have a whole lot to do with palette. Black and white can have a ton of contrast.

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Hawken looks great, and when it was announced reasons screenshots immediately grabbed my attention. The low world-contrast has a hazy look which implies a kind of dystopia, It's kind of strange that with such an evocative world it seems like they're going multiplayer only, but I guess the same could be said of TF2.

Bulletstorm does look nice. There's some degree of overcontrast in the textures, but the world has a graphic art design which supports that fairly well. It makes me think that maybe the bigger problem is overemphasized normal maps, because games I look at that use a light touch when it comes to normal/specular mapping are consistently less vomitous to my tastes.

I really like the DXHR screenshots which aren't flooded with tons of random amber lights. I'm kind of getting tired of thematic amber and/or blue lighting these days. The more neutral ones are really nice though. They feel like real places. The last one is an excellent example of dramatic uses of lighting, which is super interesting but not exactly what I want to write about. I do want to play DXHR now, though. Maybe I'll fire that up later today.

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Anyone here playing Dishonored? That game seems to be the antidote to this thread in all regards.

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Topic seemed to veer away from talking about textures... but anyway. From what I've seen of Dishonored, the texel density is fairly even in the environments, which really grounds the entire world in a believable place. It's just a shame though, because as consistent as it is, it seems a tad low res. Arkane in France used to work with the Source Engine and they were really big on texel denisty like Valve is... which is probably why there is a bit of similarity in the art constancy between their games.

The lighting also looks a bit flat to me in a lot of places, but I suspect that's more of the technology(light maps) than by choice... so I'd be curious to see it in motion on the PC because that may cure my a lot of the issues I mentioned.

***

We're going to get some god awful looking games in the new generation of consoles right out of the gate, just like we did when the ps3/360 were out. It's not such a huge leap in terms of production methods, but now that developers can afford higher res images, more FX, and complex shaders, I suspect more than a few devs will crank it to 11.

The choices made on a game for the level of detail in textures usually comes from art direction or lack there of. Personally, I think it's the lack of direction on a project that creates a discontinuity between textures in any given game and most artists just resort to default "hyper real" using photo sources.

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I don't think texel density is even what this thread is about, at least not my first read. It was about gratuitous contrast and gratuitous scale (textures being blown up to be too big on a surface) causing really offputting/unrealistic scale and depth issues in game worlds (despite the textures themselves all being artistically sound, from a detail and technical standpoint). The original example given was a corrugated floor texture where the actual corrugated... protuberances were the size of a wrist or most of a foot, when in real life those things are usually as long as the diameter of a small coin. That's a wholly separate issue from actual texel density, and I still think it comes from people being too far down the rabbit hole of "this is what a game space looks like," the representative school which comes from lower-res assets, a lack of stopping and re-assessing what the real world looks like. Maybe I am off, though.

That said, I wish Dishonored had a higher res textures. I bet the source textures are at least 2x what they shipped, and I hope that the PC version will get a patch to up that. The actual style of them, the scale, color design, contrast levels, and general map-based surfacing across that game all impresses the hell out of me, though. It's beautiful all the damn time. Every time you go around a corner, you feel like you've stepped into a new fully designed concept painting, but it's an open and explorable space. It's sweet. You just can't get as close to the walls as you'd like on a PC.

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Anyone here playing Dishonored? That game seems to be the antidote to this thread in all regards.

Haha, I came to post this exactly. Dishonored is like playing a video game version of a painting, and the painting is of rats eating people.

I also found myself wishing, like you do in your later post, that the textures were a higher resolution. If nothing's patched in later, then this is just another in the long line of unfortunate things that result from having a market dominated by consoles rather than PCs. Why force your artists to make everything at twice the detail when the target SKUs aren't ever going to see that detail? You could save time and money by making everything XBOX blurry!

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This thread is, admittedly, all over the place. But I'm still enjoying it as I can talk endlessly about this stuff (as I poorly understand it).

Jake, yeah, playing Dishonored made me think about this thread a lot. Also Total Biscuit's WTF on it. He mentioned that whenever he plays a game the first thing he does is gets up close to a texture to judge its resolution and implementation. But Dishonored sidesteps this kind of by having a painterly and impressionistic style. So things can be low res without looking low res. And yeah, individually, textures don't look terribly impressive, but taken as a whole and especially from a distance, the textures serve the design well.

I do agree the lighting feels a bit flat thus far, but that seems to be on purpose, the Unreal engine certainly has the ability to generate more dramatic lighting as some of the above examples show.

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I do agree the lighting feels a bit flat thus far, but that seems to be on purpose, the Unreal engine certainly has the ability to generate more dramatic lighting as some of the above examples show.

They seem to have gone for a flat look in part to combat the fact that the Unreal engine by default wants to gouge huge pits into all surfaces and make your game look like the surface of the moon, dipped in cooking oil. Some may argue that the pendulum swung too far the other direction, but I like the more flat look. The light and color levels throughout feel really deliberate, but still naturalistic, whereas most UE stuff, as good as it looks, does often look like the details were left up to a computer to figure out.

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I haven't made it very far into the game yet but I've seen old screenshots of cobblestones at night that look pretty bumpy. It's possible that although they've gone for lots of flat in the game, it has all been done in a deliberate manner, such that in places where flatness is not called for, flatness is not found.

But yes, I love how they've made Unreal Engine 3 look like something other than "let's make add noise to all our normal maps with Mudbox." The very first screenshots for this game, way back when, before the engine was announced, had me convinced they were using Source, partially because of the water and partially because of the lighting but also because it had the sharp corners and well defined geometric surfaces of the sort you often see in Source engine games (presumably for no other reason than coincidence, because of course Zeno Clash was molded out of clay and UE3 can look like basically anything).

Some games make me want to take screenshots continually while I play them. The last one that bit me hard with the screenshot bug, I think, was Team Fortress 2, before they ruined that wonderful aesthetic with items from every conceivable source. I wonder if painterly styles just inherently grab me for some reason. On the other hand, Mirror's Edge makes me want to take screenshots too, and that's not exactly painted.

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