Next-Gen texturing

[Kickflipkid687]

I recently watched some "Next-Gen" video tutorials I won't mention by whom. But I will say that even though the results and the techniques presented were interesting, the model and textures themselves were quite ridiculous.

It really bothers me when people think, "Oh, it's next-gen so you can use 6x2048 diff/spec/normal/bump maps." I know some games do this or attempt to, but it's just not practical. Then the game ends up being a resource hog, and even on high-end PC's will bog down everything and results in fps inconsistencies.

These videos have you believe you can use multiple high resolution textures on a single mesh and it's ok. But in reality for most types of next-gen games don't do this, and still rely on alot of texture sharing, compression methods, and smaller texture sizes. Memory is still an issue even on the 360 and PS3, and people shouldn't learn to believe they can get away with using 1024, or 2048 maps on their assets.

If your object is something like a huge piece of architecture or any really big asset that might suffer from extreme pixelation or what have you, then it may be ok. But if it's something like a desk or smaller/simple object, you don't need something like a 1024 map.

Maybe I am over-reacting somewhat, but it just bothers me. What do you guys think about all of this "next-gen" talk or way of doing things?

[janus]

These are very vaild points. Some of it is due to simply the fact that the better an asset looks for a dvd, then the more people will buy it. But some recent videos out there for sale do sort of give the impression that game texturing is just a matter of throwing 2 k maps at something until it looks good.

So thats the reason you don't se a load of dvd's on game modleing and texturing low poly characters..the assrets don't look apealing enough to be blunt....people are used to seeing still images in 3d of uber detail. Which is strange as it takes more skill to 'sell' a characetr visualy with no normal maps and a polycount of 3000 than something much higher... Thats my view for what its worth anyway.

Wayne...

[Maph]

...
So thats the reason you don't se a load of dvd's on game modleing and texturing low poly characters..the assrets don't look apealing enough to be blunt....


In all honestly, if the pretty picture on the box is the main reason why people would buy DVD education, there's something wrong imho.
I'd rather watch an instructor at work that actually knows what's he/she's doing and explaining all the way, even if the thing he/she's building is complete crap (sort to speak). It's those little tips and tricks that help so much in the end. Not smacking a 2k texture on an asset that no one cares about.

Texturing for games is a dark art, and using a whole load of 2k, or 1k textures just isn't smart. You're creating a big overhaul when it boils down to video memory and asset sizes.
When dealing with hero assets/characters I can understand why one would want to go overboard a bit, but that's the only place I can think of where you'd want such resolutions. :)

Someone ought to do a kickass instruction dvd on the dark magic of tileable images imho. ;)

[Lamont]

Yeah, I've seen one of these videos a friend purchased online and the first thing I though was "There is no viable application for this in the real world other than to look pretty.". So I told her to join here ;). I tell everyone to join here or PolyCount.

But this is what "Next-Gen" (bugs me to even say those words) mean to the average consumer/person who's thinking of getting into 3D/texturing for games. No consideration for texture usage or optimization, no real-world examples or work-flows. Which is why I can't even recommend a video (as far as I know) to anyone. Someones poor soul is gonna get crushed when you're asked to model and texture a large area with multiple objects and stay within 8mb :thumb: . There needs to be a little critical thinking to tackle problems which most videos either don't have the time to cover or just ignore it all together.

I just woke up... so I rambled a bit. Stupid time change.

[seven]

No consideration for texture usage or optimization, no real-world examples or work-flows. Which is why I can't even recommend a video (as far as I know) to anyone. Someones poor soul is gonna get crushed when you're asked to model and texture a large area with multiple objects and stay within 8mb :thumb: . There needs to be a little critical thinking to tackle problems which most videos either don't have the time to cover or just ignore it all together.

word :flag:

[janus]

Someone ought to do a kickass instruction dvd on the dark magic of tileable images imho. ;)

I totally 100% agree maph, theres a massive ammount of scope for something not only done well, but viable as well. Tileable images are an excellent example. The way the dvd market stands right now, is that a masive portion of it is those just starting out, and many just want to learn 'how to make model 'x ' and dont realise at that point the value of learning why something is done as well as how. As a result many companies dont take risks anymore (especially in the current financial climate)...but a good indepth game modelling and texturing series is well overdue.

Wayne...

[Lamont]

GA video series?

[Maph]

Wayne: I completely agree. Learning the basics is all fine in my book, and I certainly encourage those willing to learn to buy these vids.
But starting off with the "wrong" (mind the quotes) mindset (read: next-gen as explained by Lamont) towards games is a big mistake imho.

Seriously, maybe a series where someone shows the know hows of modeling and texturing an entire playable -and not to mention gamer/hardware friendly- environment would be something I'd buy in a heartbeat.
Including FX tricks like animated UV's (instead of relying on heavy shaders), the power of multi-texturing with 128² tiles, optimized UV-spacing, geometry culling (although this depends from engine to engine), etc...
Production worthy stuff in other words. :)

[Kickflipkid687]

Ya, you all make very valid points as well. I use tiling textures alot at work, and do alot of UV sharing and texture sharing across assets.

would also enjoy seeing a lowpoly model with a 512 texture or something that is well done over a 1k + textured model that's 10K tris.

Imo, creating a low detail model that looks really sharp takes alot more skill than slapping a ton of 1k textures and normal maps on something that looks good. I appreciate the time they took to do those "next-gen" tutorials, but alot of it isn't practical.

[janus]

Stuff like that is seriously needed out there..... I know form personal experience that there is sometimes presure for guys doing DVD's to go for 'lowest common demominator' and aim for the people real at the very beginning. By that I mean the pressure to aim it at the very beginners market and not any higher.....

Anything to me that contains the word 'game' in its title must provide usable assets, knowledge and workflows first and foremost. Nice pretty stuff is all well an good, but as much use as a chocolate teacup if it can't be used as an in game asset. I come across guys I learn all the tie who seem to think that the only difference between movie assets and in game ones are lower polycounts and the use of normal maps lol.

I love doing nice high res stuff as much as the next guy, but often the actual money comes from the lower poly stufff that often never see's (or needs to) a sculpting app. Besides which there's no substitute for good poly skills I think.

Wayne...

[mr_ace]

i think it goes both ways, make a video showing very low poly leaves out a lot of important stuff, and making higher poly bigger texture asset stuff leaves out important stuff too. As a student, I find it hard to find a middle ground and am yet to see a very realistic, current gen art asset production dvd. theyre either crap, outdated or for pre-rendered stuff. and whilst u learn good things from them all, I'd really like a dvd by a good senior character artist talking through low poly, high poly, texturing and so on. the closest i've seen is moarcus' one on this forum

[Kickflipkid687]

What I've found that works best, is just learning from other people. I mean, just working side by side with someone day in and day out, you learn so much you wouldn't learn otherwise. Just in the last few months working contract at Bungie I've almost completely changed the way I model, Unwrap and texture.

But that doesn't mean you need to work in a studio or have a job in the industry to do the same. If you are a college student doing this type of stuff, talk to your classmates and try to teach and learn from one another as much as possible. Also just experimenting yourself can prove great results, but also many mistakes, haha.

If you aren't at a studio or a student, then forums like these are a great resource as well. I like to checkout tutorials, but I've learned as the years go on that they are good for new techniques and whatnot, but artists in general need to develop their own techniques and integrate what they've learned into theirs. There never really is the ONE way to do something, but tutorials often make beginners think in this way.

[Lamont]

What I've found that works best, is just learning from other people. I mean, just working side by side with someone day in and day out, you learn so much you wouldn't learn otherwise. Just in the last few months working contract at Bungie I've almost completely changed the way I model, Unwrap and texture.This is true. The time I have been at Midway I have learned a ton of things, expand on things I knew, and I also got to try out things I wouldn't have had the chance to if I wasn't there. Learning from people you work with is always a sure way to get the skills growing.If you aren't at a studio or a student, then forums like these are a great resource as well. I like to checkout tutorials, but I've learned as the years go on that they are good for new techniques and whatnot, but artists in general need to develop their own techniques and integrate what they've learned into theirs. There never really is the ONE way to do something, but tutorials often make beginners think in this way.I can name quite a few people who didn't have the funds to go to school, and they didn't have a job at first. It's forums like this where they got all of their education. These people are very successful now and have awesome jobs. Education is what you make of it no matter what school you go to or how much $$ you've spent. I think GA.org, Polycount and ConceptArt.org (and others!!) are the places ALL students should go to and supplement their education with. Like you said, they are so many techniques out there and by learning some of them you can come up with one of your own.

I gotta go to bed. See ya'll in the AM.

[stimpack]

I love those vids! it makes me giggle when I see some of the ways they do things. It really is a good resource to get a broad idea of how things are done, but in reality, if you land a job, exspect to be rewired immediately to fit current pipelines and resource constrictions.

I would actually suggest new people hit up the old school tutorials on how to handpaint textures and all that jazz. I was taught by a guy that did env textures on the OG unreals. I still do things in a similar fashion b/c it saves texture space and looks great at the same time! cant beat the old school!

I also agree with most, the phrase next gen is so stupid. We got a bump map, and a few other sweet maps. oooooooo sooo advanced =P but the common tool thats out buyn games for there navigator buy into that sales pitch time and time again.

[Lamont]

I would actually suggest new people hit up the old school tutorials on how to handpaint textures and all that jazz. I was taught by a guy that did env textures on the OG unreals. I still do things in a similar fashion b/c it saves texture space and looks great at the same time! cant beat the old school!Hahaha!! I still get the "You know, there's a tool for that now." comment. Makes me feel dated sometimes, but it's good to know the real process instead of hitting a button... just in case that button isn't there anymore.

[Kickflipkid687]

Ya, being able to work with little as possible is a good idea I think. I don't like to use plugins or anything really. I like to learn to use things like max's default UV unwrap well incase I can't use something like Chuggnuts at another job.

[stimpack]

exactly! If you learn the basics, the more advanced stuff is just icing on the cake. Too many try and jump ahead and it shows horribly. Like trying to paint a master piece with out knowing how to even mix colors. We may make games, but its still art, and that means finding a great balance between traditional art, and tech art. So when you cant find a photo to texture with, you can paint it. or make it better than the photo!

[kexan]

reading this is a great resource for me as an upcoming 3d artist, but it´s hard to figure out what res of textures to train for. I´ve done texturing on 512 and found them to be to small for greater detail, or is this just a question of skill? You guys working at games studios, what´s the general resolution for a main character? It seems that its almost two different workflows when doing 512 vs 1024, since you have to consider how i looks on the final product.

What about props like weapons, vehicles and stuff?

[Kickflipkid687]

Well as far as characters go, I'm not sure what they use at Bungie. But I know Epic's characters like in GOW use 2048 on their face alone.. which is rediculous I think.

I would say maybe 512-1024 on the face and then prob. 1024 for the rest of the body. You might need more maps for accessories.

As far as props go, it also really depends. But I almost never use 1024 maps on objects. Usually it's like 512,384,256 map sizes.

[The Devo]

To my recollection, Epic's characters in Gears used 14 maps per character. For head and face, they used a 2048 diffuse, 2048 normal, spec level, spec color, sss, glow, and alpha, or something like that.

The thing about current gen texturing (or next gen, whatever you want to call it) is that you have the freedom to use what you NEED. A book probably doesn't need to be much more than 64. A shelf? Not much more. A human character with clothes, armor, and a weapon uses a lot of texture space. A dragon probably uses more. Modern game engines can handle enormous texture loads, but you still use the minimum possible to get a good looking model. You have you use your head. On the flip side, if you're trying to do a model for a top of the line game and it looks like garbage at 256, bump it up. Another trick is to use a bigger normal map and smaller diffuse. Keep in mind also that games compress the hell out of their textures using .dds.

I'm always surprised at how good my creatures end up looking when I shrink my textures down to 1024, or even 512 for smaller ones.

Chris

[seven]

You also have to consider what genre the game is. Things like wow (or other mmo's) generally don't go above 512 in texture size. Direct X really likes the number 512, fyi. Though GOW uses 14 maps per character, look at how much is going on in the scene at once. Not a whole lot. You have maybe 3 or 7 characters and an environment. I'm interested in seeing what the texture size is for the characters in GOW2 because they boast that they can have many many more on the screen at once than GOW. There's a few ways they can do this, not to mention if they instance the same character many times they still have one texture load of those 14 maps even though there's 100+ characters on the screen. Same body, swap out the head and arms texture... to add variation without adding too many maps. At that point you're just poly crunching. Texture size tends to be a pretty big problem.

[kexan]

thanks for the info guys, gonna get crackin :)

[dmightyone]

like been said before, it all depends on what you need, and also on what u can do as well, if epic games managed to put a game with characters using 14 maps each, and it looks good, and it works, why not? the public seemed to have accepted it pretty well, and it looks good and it works in the end. they could have used something else? maybe, but it looks good anyways. i love doing low-poly chars with lowres and hand painted textures etc, but i do enjoy as well going crazy on sculpting and making hi-res chars with 2k maps. i agree about the whole thing about the videos, cause crazy hires chars and textures arent quite the standards for the industry yet, we do have to be economical and all, but i just dont think it's ridiculous at all that some companies go crazy on the hires stuff

[Kickflipkid687]

Well I agree highrez is fine if it works.... but if it doesn't make much of a visual impact if your using a 1024 vs. 2048, then don't use 2048.. just waste space on the disk, takes up processing power and slows down the game. Just like others said, be smart about it and everything should be ok.

Gears 2 looks quite amazing though. They do alot of tiling textures and static mesh instancing, but it looks good and works. But it allows them to have big texture maps. It really depends on how many AI characters will be on screen at once too and how advanced they are. That's why Crysis can do those visual things, because the AI isn't good.

[sage]

Hi I have bought a few tutorials where they use large maps for assets. I usually like to use 512 x 512 for my assets especially if they are simple props like say a trash can. I just take the videos for what they are, more like a suggestion and try to make what I learned work with small textures. I am used to texturing entire buildings, or vehicles with a 512 for rts games, so the the idea of using anything higher for a prop, is kind of like whatever.... I noticed when I try to bake normal maps to a small texture like 512 it usually has issues that don't occur when the same texture is baked at 2048. I usually just resize down to 512 and usually get good results. Is that a good way of dealing with this? I like to paint things at res In unreal 3 the small props use large textures considering the size of the object, so that sort of made me wonder if larger textures are just starting to be use for everything now. When I buy these tutorials I'm looking to see if they are dealing with issues caused by normal maps, like seams caused by trying to mirror things, or if these stuff is just ignored.

[Maph]

...When I buy these tutorials I'm looking to see if they are dealing with issues caused by normal maps, like seams caused by trying to mirror things, or if these stuff is just ignored.

This unfortunately depends on how the engine calucates the tangent space for each vertex. And is not something you can easily fix with texturing.
In worst case scenario's, you'll have to even out the edges by painting over the seams with neutral blue (basicly saying to the shader=> the normal at this texel is 0,0,0,0). But you'll obviously lose detail on those seams.

I haven't watched many of these video's, but I've yet to encounter one where the importance of normalizing your normal map is underlined though.
Which is, in my humbly opinion, a very important step.

[BradMyers82]

I am pretty sure that there aren't any 14 map characters in Gears. I am a really big fan of Gears of war and their style, so I have studied the textures from the pc version in the editor quite a lot.

The Marcus Fenix Cinematic model might have 14 maps in all including the different versions (like diffuse spec normal head maps = 3 maps// + diffuse spec normal body maps = 6 total maps and he has some small eye hair and other maps)

But the actual playable character only has 1x 2048 texture map of each main map type (normal, diffuse, specular) Also, I am pretty sure the game engine compresses these textures, so its not anything like rendering out a character in 3ds max with a 2048 texture map size. Also, from what I can see the Marcus Fenix playable model itself varies from the gore version to the healthy version, but stands around 11,500 tri's. I could be wrong about this, but I'm looking at the editor now, and it seems fairly clear what they are using texture wise.

Also, smaller characters like the stranded and the wretches use 1024 maps and smaller.

In any event, Gears is probably the front runner for graphics and really pushing the limits of what a game engine can handle. That said, people should look at what Gears uses and figure that it is the absolute limit of what one can use in a game. Therefore, one can assume that given compression and the unlikelihood that one starting out will work on the next platinum "Next Gen" game, you shouldn't need exceed 1024 for a character.


As for the training DVD's, I'm a self proclaimed training DVD junky myself, so I enjoy just about anything they shell out. Actually, I think I bought all of Wayne's DVDs from Kurv. I find that there is usually something that can be learned from a large majority of all the training DVD's out there, and of course some are far more helpful then others.

So I think there is plenty of value to the DVD's that many companies are shelling out especially when you consider that for 40-60 dollars spent on a DVD, I can learn like 2 times what I would taking a class at my last college (and it cost like 2,000 a class there).
However, I agree with what is being said; it would be nice to see more practical DVD's out, and I think there is a large market for them as well that hasn't really been tapped into.


On a personal level, I took the advice of some guys over at Polycount to improve my skill-set by working on really low spec characters (like 600 tri's and 256 and smaller map sizes) and its crazy how much more can be learned from doing this. So I can't help but think how awesome it would be to find tutorials on these kind of projects.

I'm done rambling for now, ha ha. Good thread here.

[Lamont]

I would look at the number of unique materials used on screen in Gears. The layout of the levels lend to a lot of re-use and occluding.

[Kickflipkid687]

Ya, I did notice alot of instancing going on in Gears 2 and alot of tiling textures.

I also would like to see some really low poly character modeling/texture tutorials possibly. Those tend to interest me probably more than super high res stuff, but it depends. I am working on learning Zbrush, so those tuts are nice as well.

[kageko]

You should check out Low polygon game-modeling in maya from gnomon, its a great tut using a low poly count, i believe they also sell a texturing one. Anyway, u COULD always bake those materials they showed u, and get a result looking very much the same with only a few maps, u can always bake textures for enviroments, which as i understand,this was, so the tutorial really only shows u how to make the material look good, which is the hard part, after that u can compress the hell out of it. and it will most likely still look effin awesome, the important thing is that u have a clean and crisp looking material, compression isnt that big of an issue.

As for the GoW-issue, yeah, they have an insane amount of textures and detail, but as someone else said, it wouldnt be very next gen if they only had about 7 lowpoly characters running around with only diffuse and specular on. I doubt that they wasted any texturespace in that game that couldve been put to better use anywhere else, as the saying goes, if u got it, u might as well spend it. Look at little planet, where theyre using a realtime cloth-simulator, not THAT would be a waste, if it wasnt so freaking awesome to play with! xD