Competition rendering suggestions?

[Marcus Dublin]

This is in response to the suggestions Mop and Fred brought up for the final comp renders. I’m for doing away with non game render setups, such as VRay, Mental Ray, Brazil etc. but I do think it’s a bad idea to restrict the final entries to a standard three point lighting setup. I mean let’s say I wanted to use 5 lights in my scene, or capture my final image in the Unreal 3 or Crysis editor? This is a grey area for the most part because lighting has improved over the last gen which the rules on CG Chat were based on. To me having advanced lighting setups are indeed game related and we should let the artist decide on how he or she wants to present their work. I think having a downloadable 3 point lighting set up is awesome for those who aren’t that good at lighting but this could be a handicap for artist who have a flare for it and treat the lighting itself as part of the game asset. Maybe the rules for this should be structured around what’s doable in current console rendering development. Any thoughts would be appreciated this way the mods can come up with a solid rule set.:)

[Gavin]

I pretty much agree wit everything that you and Mop have mentioned. I think having a 3 point setup at least for a base and a boost for those who aren't really strong lighting artists is a great idea. As for restrictions, I'm not sure. Definitely the higher end renders shouldn't be allowed. But at the same time, not everyone has access to Crysis or Unreal...they do, however, have access to Xnormal. So, that could make it more even. Maybe some kind of cap for lights, 5 lights maximum with shadowmap lights?

A lot of entries definitely suffer from poor lighting...I think giving out a generic blue/orange kind of deal would be a nice way to make it more of a fair game :)

Gav

[MM]

on the contrary i think it is actually unfair to provide artist with a presentation template. the entire execution and production of the content should be the artists sole effort.
instead of providing the lighting rig as a downloadable file may be you should have a small guide/tutorial to follow. this way the presentation remains the artists effort and not something already done by someone. since presentation is a major part of the comp it should be a criteria to judge on strictly.
as restrictions you could restrict artists to use only the textures made for the character. no raytrace reflection mapping, no mental ray SSS, no GI render etc. Also no particle effects, volumetric effects, or any other lighting or post effects.
After all that it would be on the discretion of the judges to accept or deny an entry.

[Gavin]

The tutorial is actually a better idea, I change my vote! :D

[ThatDon]

I say if it can't be done in real time then it's out lawed!

Basically any game engine or CGFX/HLSL/DX Shader is fair game.

[Kalango]

...in my opinion...as thatdon said it right...real time....
oh and directx shaders :D

[Marcus Dublin]

I think we can have artists reference Jeremy Birn's lighting setup tutorial: http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html it pretty much covers all of the basics.

[Ramseus]

While I've never been a fan of people using high-end renderers for gameart, IMO it really doesn't make that big of a difference anymore. Cryengine 2 and UE3 can do just about anything, including pseudo SSS and refraction (unless I'm just imagining things). The rules should be more like if you can't do it in a game engine, like CE2 and UE3, then you can't do it for your render. Or even just: do it in a game engine - which also proves that you can take a concept not only from 2d into 3d, but from 2d all the into a game which you are otherwise only hypothetically creating it for. I can't imagine why game artists wouldn't have some recent games that they could use... Then again that could be kind of unfair...

Don't mind me, just rambling.

[Beartastic]

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand I think it needs to be fair for everyone and fairly display the art the way it would appear in a game... but I also don't want to go too hardcore and restrict to game-engine only because these comps are about making beautiful art and sometimes artists know more about the creation tools than the game engines.

I'd be inclinded to say all entries should have an in-game shot (or if you don't have access and can't afford the $20 for a copy of RoboBlitz then you're limited to three-light max, scanline rendered) as well as a beauty shot where anything goes. That way artists who can pull hell out of a game engine will have an advantage for the game shot and prerender specialists can go to town on the beauty shot.

[xvampire]

I heard that some contestant having difficulties finishing
his competition entry because of rendertime ...

so

with little manual lighting practice actually you can render the stuff pretty fast with pretty result.
manual lighting is good practice, and its a lot easier to do than hi poly project...
in my latest scene I use 4 light with 1 shadow map source, mental ray of course ...


about the rendering engine ...
I think we dont want to be picky for that, mental ray is the only native renderer for xsi users ...,
so, I think the things that we might want to avoid is advanced shader and fx, like SSS, GI, FG, fur, in the final render

but baking them into texture map I think is quite legit ...


but if you still want to be super fair, ask everyone to render in xnormal :p

[kremrhi]

I dunno so much about the lighting things. But I prefer the option of giving tutorials on how to create a nice scene atmosphere. It will, IMO, give a better result for the participant who wish to improve this part.

[Mike_inel]

I agree with ThatDon...
I do game programming and HLSL, but so far, ambient occlusion and SSS is not yet possible in realtime...

For the AO, Crysis is so far the most advanced realtime rendering i've seen, yet its so called "realtime AO" is just a dark glow around the object that'll strengthen if the surface behind it is near... (An observation i had when i was playing the demo...)

For the SSS, one of Nvidia's tech demo features a skin shader... But it simply blurs the surface and add redness in the lighting to make it look soft/waxy...

I suggest that the final renders are realtime shots like a large viewport... You can turn on the anti-alias if you're using Geforce... (Not sure about Radeon...)
This way, if the entrant knows how to use HLSL or anything similar, he/she can apply it to his/her entry...
My idea however is unfair for those who doesn't know shader programming...

So my other suggestion is that entrants may only use basic materials like phong...

(Just an IMO...)

[Yung]

Perhaps we should should come to agreement about what current game engines are capable of then we could slowly tick off and restrict certain rendering engines. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe Vray and mentalray are all just renderer that could handle GI and other more advanced raytracing calculation, which most games engines are slowly catching up (more powerful computers + great programmers).

Or xnormal as well. Some really need to teach me how to use Xnormal correctly. :P

[genesys]

I agree with ThatDon...
I do game programming and HLSL, but so far, ambient occlusion and SSS is not yet possible in realtime...


Oh it is possible. :)


What about this: If the final entry is rendered in realtime, then there are no restrictions about what technique is used (since it's game-technique anyway) - if it's rendered in software, then no raytracing is allowed, only scanline. (i.e. no raytrace reflections, no raytraced shoftshadows, no shader that do scattering like AO, SSS and so on).
So - IMO being able to present gamecontent in realtime is a skill gameartists should aquire sooner or later and it's only fair if they can benefit from this.

[iceblazer17]

I do beleive that we should set some sort of 3 point lighting or game engine real time rendering rule.

The whole point of this competition is about showing off your model and texture work. Not about how pretty you can make something look with a render engine. (One reason why I love game art so much is because you dont have to worry so much about render time, all of the info is real time within the gme engine or already included within the textures.)

[East]

For the AO, Crysis is so far the most advanced realtime rendering i've seen, yet its so called "realtime AO" is just a dark glow around the object that'll strengthen if the surface behind it is near... (An observation i had when i was playing the demo...)
That's how ZBrush 3 handles the preview shadow, I believe. Creating a sort of generic dropdown shadow. I remember playing Crysis and being struck by how ZBrush-like it all is hehe :)

Aren't there enough contacts in the industry to have one of the developers contribute with a stand-alone model viewer? Such as Crytek or Epic making one out of CE2/UE3that doesn't require the entire engine. I suppose they wouldn't want to do this, if people at this time buy their products to use as model viewers..

Either way, I believe Keg is working on a nice one with multiple lights and such, over at Polycount. Though I'm not sure it will be in usable condition in time. Doesn't even run on my machine.