Renzatic on 19/1/2017 at 06:00
Substance Designer is an awesome, awesome program, and can do some absolutely incredible things you (
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2Le2K) wouldn't ever imagine could be done with procedural textures.
It's only weakness is that it's pretty clunky at generating specific details. The way I figure it, you could use a vector program like Inkscape, Illustrator, or Affinity Designer to whip up your shapes, then run them through SD to bang out the texturing and detail.
One day, I plan on buying it.
demagogue on 19/1/2017 at 08:31
All these procedural tools are going to start chipping away at the narrative that you need a 50 person team to make nice-looking levels.
Sulphur on 19/1/2017 at 09:02
You still might as long as there's a large variety of bespoke models and constant iterative design required. Textures remain only one step of the process.
Yakoob on 19/1/2017 at 22:32
Speaking of art, I got a question to the folks here:
I realized part of my problem is that my general sense of "art taste" is just not very good. I have an idea for a style and can whip up some programmer art or assemble 3rd party free assets, but it never quite works in the end. Same with other games, I usually never have issues with graphics. Only after others point out obvious faults (like lack of consistency) I realize "oh yeah, you're right, how did I not see that..."
I'd like to improve that. I don't care about developing a specific skill to be an artist myself (like drawing/painting/pixel/modeling etc.), rather just the overall sense of style and aesthetic. For example I finally realized from Karaski and Headliner that I often lack consistency or mix clashing styles together. So things like that.
What's a good way to go about developing better taste? I was thinking maybe picking up a general art/design/color theory book but wasn't sure if that's the best way. Any specific books/websites/videos etc. that would point me in the right direction?
I just picked up "Art That Changed the World from the library, as I got that recommended before. Gonna start going thru it and selfducating :) I also got advice to spend more time in the pre-design mockup stages and nail down the art before I even get to really putting it together. Lastly, I think coming up with a core list of visual traits (i.e. vector vs. pixel, color pallet, specific resolution etc.) and sticking to it would help with consistency at least.
Quote Posted by demagogue
All these procedural tools are going to start chipping away at the narrative that you need a 50 person team to make nice-looking levels.
Honestly I'd say Unity and UE4 asset stores will come before. As NV's post suggests, it took quite a while for him to get a rather "simple" effect. That's half (or more) days of work on a single texture. Granted, a well versed artist can probably whip it up much faster than all of us combined (hi Renz!) but I still wouldn't underestimate the time needed.
Until we get to full procedurally generated stuff on the fly. Anyone remember the Krieg (I think?) that was ALL procedural? Probably an hour or more of an FPS game with nice graphics at 96kbs download only!
Nameless Voice on 20/1/2017 at 01:26
Well, one thing is that after a while, you'd probably learn how to quickly make realistic surfaces of different types (stones, rock, metal, wood, etc.) and be able to whip up more very quickly (plus, you can make libraries of common effects and patterns to re-use later, so once you've built up such a library you can use them to work much faster.)
Sulphur on 20/1/2017 at 05:24
.kkrieger wasn't exactly procedural in the way we use the term for games today, though. It was a linear game that remained the same from start to end, but the key thing was its compression tech, which was procedural. IIRC, they didn't store the actual textures, they stored the steps the artists used to create the textures, and the game generated them at launch (which was also why it took so long to launch).
Renzatic on 20/1/2017 at 06:09
That's pretty much what Substance Designer does. Unreal and Unity have support for loading raw substance files, which are usually only about 30k in size for even 4k textures, and builds them at load.
The only downside is they're expensive to use like that. A single texture can explode to over 100 meg in memory, and take 10 seconds to load. If you use a bunch, they can add up after awhile. It's something you have to be careful with if you want to use them exclusively.
Judith on 20/1/2017 at 07:37
Quote:
What's a good way to go about developing better taste? I was thinking maybe picking up a general art/design/color theory book but wasn't sure if that's the best way. Any specific books/websites/videos etc. that would point me in the right direction?
I don't think there are shortcuts here, and general information won't do you much good (except that you need to know it). But, you don't have to learn the whole history of art either. Pick up a discipline you're likely to obsess with: photography, cinema. Studying lightning and color grading in movies helps. Take screenshots of both movies and games that you think are interesting, obsess over their choices of light and colors. Do exercises like this one: (
http://moviesincolor.com/)
demagogue on 20/1/2017 at 14:13
For palette selection and color combination generally, I recall a cool little tutorial on this. You start with some recognized art masterwork, then save its color palette. Then you apply that palette to all your textures in a set, where it best fits from original to the artistic one. Solves two problems at once, selecting good color complements and having a consistent tone for a set of textures. There are variations where you can be looser and more flexible (eg, not one palette but a set where half the colors or whatever are the same, etc) that work well too.
Renzatic on 20/1/2017 at 18:06
I've only studied a couple of artbooks, and only read a bit on color theory. For the most part, I just eyeball everything. If it all looks good, fits well together, and comes close to what I had in mind, I'll run with it.
...though admittedly, I might be terrible at composition, and no one's ever told me because they want to spare my feelings.
