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Ugly pretty textures

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I'm kind of getting tired of thematic amber and/or blue lighting these days.

HA! It wasn't me who said that \o/

A good example of a game with a lot of shitty textures and often incorrectly sized textures is.... Rage!

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Do you guys follow this guy's blog:

http://enwandrews.tumblr.com/

He strips away the GUI and takes super nicely framed screenshots of games. Really gives you an admiration for all the detail and work that went into building the game environments. Both Rage and Mirrors Edge are well represented, actually.

Pretty relavent to this discussion I think.

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Those blogs are wonderful and they don't seem to be using Photoshop to manually edit the pictures - just a bunch of automated post-processes.

I'd be really interested to see the rendering time for those are because I wouldn't mind being able to play these games in a few years with that sort of quality.

Also, I've played 30 minutes of Dishonored on PC with maximum settings and I feel something is off visually; as if the textures were lower res and the lightning less 'rich' that what the videos seemed to show. It's beautiful but it falls a bit short and sometimes looks like an older game. Strange.

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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.

It actually really bothers me when this is attributed to the Unreal Engine. I've devved on UE3 and Source and in my experience neither is more biased towards this effect than the other. Epic in their own art, of course, do this stuff all the time - relatively low-res textures with crazy steep normal maps and waxy specular - but it's their art, not a predisposition of their engine. Doom 3 was ugly in some of the same ways.

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I doubt it's a technical limitation of the Unreal Engine as much as a marketing one. They made a big push to position themselves as the official middleware engine for Microsoft around the same time that Microsoft was trying to hard sell consoles based on processing and graphics power. At least back in the early days of the first Xbox, there was an explicit certification requirement to include no less than n items from a list of features to show off the GPU -- particle systems, bump maps, etc. I'm sure that's changed in the >10 years since, but it seemed to set a standard for what people expected to see in a game. (And of course, NVidia is still always trying to sell video cards and looking for games to show off).

It seems like it started a push towards screenshots with over-the-top texture density, bump maps, specular highlights, etc that gradually became accepted as "the way games look."

I remember when World of Warcraft first came out, I was stunned by how painterly everything looked -- it's pretty standard now, but at the time it was unlike what anybody else was doing. And I remember reading tons of complaints that the art was too simple or cartoonish, I assume because people had been taught that that Gears of War screenshot above is what "realistic" was supposed to look like.

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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.

I'm not minding the look either, though as usual a much better sound design could have helped pretty much everywhere. That first real mission, where it's raining, is the classic video game example of "let's put a few trickley noises when your in whatever bounding/map thing that triggers the rain particles" as opposed to something that might have been more atmospheric, like hearing the pounding rain on the tin roofs.

But otherwise it looks nice and the voice acting is, while patchy in some places, still solid in others. The only other thing I'd question is... it's not so much that I'm expecting the combine to come out at any moment, as that if a bunch did it might take me a few seconds to realize anything at all is out of place. Even the painterlay look, which I don't mind at all, can't hide the "Oh god it's Half Life 2" of Dishonored.

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Do you guys follow this guy's blog:

http://enwandrews.tumblr.com/

He strips away the GUI and takes super nicely framed screenshots of games. Really gives you an admiration for all the detail and work that went into building the game environments. Both Rage and Mirrors Edge are well represented, actually.

Pretty relavent to this discussion I think.

Wow. RAGE looks so gorgeous in all of those.

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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.

Hm, alright, I see what you mean, I think I've made up my own definition for texel denisty, but because texel density is an issue with scale, but not exactly in the same way that was originally stated... I just lump those two problems together even though one is more of a technical issue and one is an art directional issue.

The problem could be a number of things, not just developmental tunnel vision, which I'm sure you're more than aware of, so I don't think we can speculate on why it happens, it's just does.

And as far as resolution goes, it'd be interested in knowing how many companies actually stick with pipeline guidelines over a number of years where source textures are being made at 2x the resolution or whatever would had been originally stated. Would it be smart to do and be that organized? Yep. Does the practice of doing that get neglected during development? Yep.

***

Yeah I wished dishonored had a little more higher res textures and the lighting or maybe more specifically the materials give it a bit of a flat look. Lightmaps + not going hyper real/crank the dial to 11 specular and normal maps will most likely do that in Unreal... or it was a completely intended choice on the directional side, I can't say. I find Dishonored a little fragmented in art direction, but that's an entirely different topic.

***

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.

Art directional choice? Everyone keeps comparing the game to a painting and impressionistic. Well, that's painting, large broad strokes of colour with minute detail in certain areas to lead the eye.

This is a broad statement, but I've seen two different types of art directors, ones that are more concerned with the broad picture and others more intent on the minutia. Next-gen for a lot of directors meant hyper-real, gears of war style details and they weren't so much concerned with the what the big picture looked like, which is why I think the early next gen games were artists learning to make this type of content and art directors getting that kind of quality out of their system and even GoW was more refined with every iteration working on their composition and colours throughout the series.

Personally I thought RAGE was one the most beautiful games in recent history, it hit the broad strokes extremely well and at the same type felt detailed and rich with stuff, grit and colour. Here's the website from the art director, extremely talented dude; http://www.martiniere.com/

Will be interesting to see what happens in the next round when art directors get a million for fx to throw in the players face... might get a little ostentatious for the first years. Basically, we need some restraint, just because the tech can do it, doesn't mean they should.

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It actually really bothers me when this is attributed to the Unreal Engine. I've devved on UE3 and Source and in my experience neither is more biased towards this effect than the other. Epic in their own art, of course, do this stuff all the time - relatively low-res textures with crazy steep normal maps and waxy specular - but it's their art, not a predisposition of their engine. Doom 3 was ugly in some of the same ways.

I think it is how the engine is sold, as SpectreCollie said. Unreal Engine is always presented as "USE ALL THE SURFACE MAPS! YOU TOTALLY CAN!" and when you do, you get a world where every surface is super excited to catch and reflect light in 3 different ways, even if at the end of the day it isn't appealing. Dishonored and BioShock Infinite both seem to be made by people who are comfortable enough with the tools and their style to not throw every switch to "on," but that seems like a relatively new change. (I haven't seen a UE game, including Dishonored or Infinite, which has people who don't look like reanimated wax puppets, but I am holding out hope.)

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Even Enslaved? Or are you just talking about texture quality, not animation. Subsurface scattering would help skin stuff immensely, and it looks like the next Unreal Engine is going to be all about that.

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Let us take this moment to remember 2005-2007, the Bloom years.

I noticed a character in Dishonored had a scar on her nose, but I didn't actually see this clearly until I used my facemasks 2x optical zoom. Which reminds me. If he takes his mask off when he's home... THEN WHAT WAS ZOOM!?

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

it's odd because the art direction was one of my least favorite things about that game, but I really appreciated playing a game that didn't have every single surface covered in shiny fucking bumpmapping.

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