Dr Chris's Astounding Modular Barracks!

Discussion in 'Art' started by Chris0132', Sep 22, 2009.

  1. blizzerd

    blizzerd Member

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    that only works if the canvas allows any color and paint type you want

    we are working with a canvas that only allows red water based paint, and it MUST be painted in 1 layer of paint

    for example, there is only so much art you can do with stacking turds before your art becomes "stacking turds on top of each other"
     
  2. 0yv47

    0yv47 Member

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    a WHITE CANVAS and a BUCKET OF SHIT is two completely different things.... :pathetic:
     
  3. Demented

    Demented Member

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    Barring gravity and space/time distortion, there's no limit to the number of turds you can stack, or the form they take afterward.[sup]1[/sup]

    While digital file formats are inherently finite in their variations, and compressed formats are limited further, the number of variations a .vtf file with 8-bit alpha and an additional .vtf for a 24-bit normal map can together create is inconcievable. Then there's the parameters available in the .vmt file...

    Suffice it to say that this is the sort of law to which posers like Rule 34 are only aspiring corrolaries.



    That's not to say Chris is wrong in not wanting new textures. It's not as if Empires is a cash cow just waiting to be exploited by masterful zbrushing (Zbrush is $595). The textures we have are good enough for moderately rational modding purposes.

    *1: That has to be the most bizarre thing I've written all month.
     
  4. Jessiah

    Jessiah Member

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    It's only the 3rd of the month :p
     
  5. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    This isn't a canvas, it's a game engine, there are some things it simply can not do.

    What you're asking is for me to paint the mona lisa without using half the colours.

    Source cannot do shadow contrast, it cannot do ambient occlusion, and it cannot do good speculars, now you might argue that I can simulate occlusion and shadows by UV mapping the entire model uniquely, but then you'd have to sacrifice texture resolution because in order to preserve it on a model this size, I'd need a ten thousand pixel square texture. Of course I could use mutli channel mapping which I know how to do, but source doesn't support that either. I could also add in more polies to shade areas darker, but that would cause Z rendering issues on some cards and would add massively to the polycount.

    Some things I can do, some things I can't, and make things look as good as I'd like to is something I can't do in source.

    The problem there is that it would require me to hand make every possible eventuality, to create for example an envmap for every possible location on every possible map and somehow compress them all into 2gb of video memory, and that's not even remotely possible.

    Computers aren't anything even approaching infinite.
     
    Last edited: Oct 3, 2009
  6. Headshotmaster

    Headshotmaster Member

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    I think too many people here are just trying to make excuses.
    It is possible to get incredible textures.

    Anyone remember the old NF walls? I do, and their textures suck compared to the newer walls. Same engine, different textures.

    Everyone keeps equating the "canvas" to "shit", but once again, the limit is the artist. You consider it shit, because all you see is shit. Now I'm kind of glad I'm not seeing new textures, because it seems no-one here has enough imagination to make anything better than what we already have.
     
  7. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    Yes the NF wall textures are very good, in fact both the wall textures are very good, but that's about as good as you can get in this game. A lot of the good shaders don't work on models and similarly, source really doesn't do big models very well. The walls look fine because they would never self-shadow, so the fact they don't is irrelevant, they are also small models so they can have a unique texture map, a big model like the VF cannot.

    Self shadowing only works on static props, if you gave me something like the NS2 engine or the neoaxis engine (play the demo, it's really cool) I could make the structures look great, they have dynamic light support, otherwise you're asking me to make something look good in fullbright.

    Games are not a magical thing that can do anything you want them to, the engine bestows huge limitations on the game. For example I am limited in the number of polygons I can put into something because I can't fade parts of a structure in and out, I can't put huge amounts of detail into everything because then it would lag like hell.

    I know a hell of a lot more about games art than you do and I am telling you that there are limits.
     
  8. Headshotmaster

    Headshotmaster Member

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    Instead of making 1 big textures, just split the VF into 1-3 smaller maps.

    Wouldn't be hard. Go from full orange to not so full orange.

    Really? I swore the source engine was made by god, and anything could be done by simply wishing it hard enough.

    If you did, then you would know that you can make better textures.

    I'm not talking about shaders, lighting, etc... I'm talking about quality in the diffuse map. When I'm far away from an NF building(like 50> feet), I get no sense of detail because to me it looks like a big orange block, and I'm not talking about the building when it changes the LOD model.

    I'm talking about adding detail, adding little things to make it look cooler. The old textures are really low resolution and boring. Add more color, different colors, etc...

    I know they are low resolution to keep things slightly faster, but this is 2009. Move from 256x256 to 512x512, or if it's 512 then move to 1048. We already moved from low resolution map, weapon, and vehicle textures to higher resolution ones in the past 3 years, so why not buildings?

    That's why I made that reference to the artist and his canvas, because that's what I was literally talking about. A diffuse map is a canvas if I ever saw one.

    Jesus Christ, I can't believe I had to explain that. Fail
     
  9. Demented

    Demented Member

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    Nothing wrong with that from an artistic perspective.

    Maybe from a photographical perspective....
     
  10. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    The textures are all 512x512 and all include normal maps, I'm not making them higher resolution than that because that's stupid, they're tiling textures and I tile them smaller, if they look blurry at a distance then that's due to the mipmapping, which scales the textures back as you get further away, and it's done to prevent clusterfucks. http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1233.asp You can choose between having high res distance textures or having things that don't look like a random mess of pixels.

    You don't need giant texture resolutions, that's what we have detail maps for, they're very clever and far more efficient, and I'll add them as appropriate to my buildings. I will probably have to chop together some of the BE textures to accomodate the theme I had in mind for them, but I'm not turning them into a frigging rainbow or making them bigger just because you are under the impression that bigger = a million times better.

    The screenshots in the thread are taken from about fifty feet away and they use the exact same textures you'll see ingame, and I didn't use self shadowing either so it will be lit more or less that way in game, assuming of course the mappers don't add in bright orange sunlight and fuck up the colours, if they do that's their problem, not mine.

    As I said, I can't use shadows to add contrast and the shitty lighting is an engine/mapper problem. No amount of work on my part will stop structures being luminous orange on maps like hazard. If I make all the materials different colours it's not going to look like a material set, all materials are more or less the same colour in a set, this is true for any game including half life 2, now you can add colour correction and good lighting to maps to break them up and provide different colourations in areas, but I CAN'T DO THAT WITH MODELLING BECAUSE THE ENGINE DOESN'T SUPPORT IT.

    I will make an example map to show that crap mapping makes models look bad. And to illustrate that crap engines make everything look bad.
     
    Last edited: Oct 4, 2009
  11. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    You don't get it, this isn't a picture I'm painting, I can't just paint in the lighting and the reflections or stylistic touches because then it will be on every instance of that texture and it will look even worse.

    It is photography, you are asking for a photograph that is taken using stock film, no thought as to the position of the scene, under overcast skies, with a £25 digital camera to look as good as professional work, and I can't do that.

    Players do not think about the artistic quality of their building placement, mappers do not think about their lighting (because they're idiots) and don't bother to use colour correction (equivalent to different types of film/lighting) and textures have a finite amount of information they can store (no texture looks good closeup, because in order for that to be so you have to make everything way to big, there are technologies which scale textures across a wide area but source doesn't have any of them)
     
    Last edited: Oct 4, 2009
  12. Headshotmaster

    Headshotmaster Member

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    Once again, you get technical.

    Personally, I think the textures look like shit because they are shit. Their style is brown, blocky, and doesn't come together. That, and the rocky surfaces depicted in certain NF buildings look boring

    See, when I look at the Warhol cambel soup painting, I see shit, because it's a fucking can of soup. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo. That's the same feeling whe I'm looking at the NF art style for their building textures.

    I'm not saying the textures look like shit because they aren't lit properly, or because they aren't using the latest shaders. I'm saying they look like shit because the art style is shit.

    Do you get it now, lol? If not, I won't be surprised :P
     
  13. Demented

    Demented Member

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    You don't bake the lighting, the shadows (ao notwithstanding), the environment maps, or the reflections into the diffuse texture, and HSM isn't asking you to, so stop bitching about something that's irrelevant.

    If you can't think of any other way to make the textures look better, then we go back to either:
    A) The artist is the limit.
    or
    B) The textures we have now are perfectly fine and I'm not wasting time making more.

    Probably both.
     
  14. Headshotmaster

    Headshotmaster Member

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    someone gets me <3
     
  15. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    So you aren't asking me to make better textures, you're asking me to make textures you personally like.

    In which case, no, because I like the current NF texture style, making ones you like won't be making better textures, it'll just be making different textures, I cannot account for taste or lack thereof.

    The BE textures on the other hand are a bit lacking, there aren't as many different plates as there are for NF and the BE style is more complex, so I am probably going to need non-tiling textures or possibly bespoke ones. So I will probably make a couple of new ones for the BE buildings.

    It's quite true that I'm a rather poor texture artist but it's not through lack of ability to look for improvements, it's through lack of ability to effect them. I see no reason to improve the existing NF ones in a technical or aesthetic sense.
     
    Last edited: Oct 4, 2009
  16. Headshotmaster

    Headshotmaster Member

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    No and Yes. I'm still asking you to make better textures, but as you finally figured out, it is a matter of tase on my part. Still just because it's my opinion that the NF textures are shit, that doesn't make it any less valid. I do like the rustic, industrial theme of NF, but I think it could be done much better and more vibrantly.

    That's all you had to say 3 pages ago : /

    Sometimes different is better. Just look at the old empires weapons and the new ones. Same function, same theme, different style.
     
  17. Chris0132'

    Chris0132' Developer

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    The old empires weapons used painfully low res textures, that's the only improvement, I am indifferent to the model changes. The animations are still abysmal (non existant) on lots of the guns. Updating something that needs updating like unneccesarily low res textures makes sense, because it will look better to everyone, it's empirically better, but theme changes are not so.
     
    Last edited: Oct 4, 2009

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