When I originally said I wasn't that impressed with the game from an artistic point of view, most people thought I was nuts. But there are a considerable amount of shortcuts that lower the final quality of the graphics in the game.
I'd rather model a few more features and work on better shadows over curved surfaces. There's all kinds of weirdness in dooms shadows, and some other games have actually done better in the realtime animated shadow department. I personally prefer to use optimized geometry than going overboard with the bump maps, and really don't see the need for these millions of poly models except to sound good. I doubt anyone could really tell the difference between a 50k - 70k poly character, and these. I wouldn't be surprised if they used splines or nurbs and turned up the subdivisions, to come up with crazy poly numbers with which to impress the media.
Still, it is cool that these kinds of games are being done, it's not 10 years since I first got interested in 3D rendered characters, and these are better than what was around back then.
3dsmax can allready create your FX shaders, and this is supposed to have been improved a lot in Max 7, in 5 years time, I expect we will be creating materials the same way you might for a pre rendered scene in your favurite 3D app.
Pretty cool really. you should be able to do a lot of that now, if the hardware is taking over the lighting and shadows, working with simple diffuse textures becomes a lot easier.
Anyway, I've started rambling, but things are looking like they should be fun in the future, and I don't think it will be too long that smaller devs like ourselves can make use of this kind of tech.
I'd rather model a few more features and work on better shadows over curved surfaces. There's all kinds of weirdness in dooms shadows, and some other games have actually done better in the realtime animated shadow department. I personally prefer to use optimized geometry than going overboard with the bump maps, and really don't see the need for these millions of poly models except to sound good. I doubt anyone could really tell the difference between a 50k - 70k poly character, and these. I wouldn't be surprised if they used splines or nurbs and turned up the subdivisions, to come up with crazy poly numbers with which to impress the media.
Still, it is cool that these kinds of games are being done, it's not 10 years since I first got interested in 3D rendered characters, and these are better than what was around back then.
3dsmax can allready create your FX shaders, and this is supposed to have been improved a lot in Max 7, in 5 years time, I expect we will be creating materials the same way you might for a pre rendered scene in your favurite 3D app.
Pretty cool really. you should be able to do a lot of that now, if the hardware is taking over the lighting and shadows, working with simple diffuse textures becomes a lot easier.
Anyway, I've started rambling, but things are looking like they should be fun in the future, and I don't think it will be too long that smaller devs like ourselves can make use of this kind of tech.