Creating Unreality Comments by Rob Fahey

And after all of that... you end up with space marines?

If artists don't have knowledge of human anatomy, what the fuck are they doing getting paid making human characters?

Think that says a lot about the games industry. On the other hand, now these games are picking up visually only the talented ones are going to end up hanging around.

A good, interesting read. Sure it's just part of the UT3 hype juggernaut but even so I'd like to see more such articles on EG.

"And after all of that... you end up with space marines?"

And all the other races that feature in UT.

Unless you want them to completely remove all the human races from the game?

as human models get more and more life like i get more and more turned off tbh.

"Unless you want them to completely remove all the human races from the game?"

I think what he meant was... they now have all that creative freedom, and the first thing they do is create games with hulking macho-marines (human or not), that would make He-Man look like a flower fairy, shooting stuff to bits with ridiculously oversized handguns/rocket lownchers. Yes, it sells rather well, cf. Gears of War. I still don't see the progress in that.

Even the characters in the Square-Enix game that uses UE3 look brutish (for an SE-game). It must be something in the engine. j/k

6 weeks to create a character? jesus. maybe i'm not as shit at 3d art as i thought if it takes the professionals that long.

Its the intrinsic homoerotic asthetic which so appeals to the US post-teen male demographic.

Oh good another FPS game that's exactly the same as every other FPS game, we don't have enough of them.

Basically it's a lot of people inspired by the same stuff working in different companies. It takes a lot to get people interested visually these days, simply because most artists and concept artists are inspired by Moebius, Aliens, Warhammer 40,000 etc. etc. They're all generally great artists but it's hard to come up with something fresh when a bunch of people are eking inspiration from the same sources.

"I think what he meant was... they now have all that creative freedom, and the first thing they do is create games with hulking macho-marines (human or not), that would make He-Man look like a flower fairy, shooting stuff to bits with ridiculously oversized handguns/rocket lownchers. Yes, it sells rather well, cf. Gears of War. I still don't see the progress in that. "

Gears started out as a tech demo for the UE3 engine I think, before being turned into a full game. They may not be the most imaginative, but it served well as an advert for Epic's new engine at the time, and with all the stuff that they had built they probably decided to keep the assets they had and use that for a new game.

And in the unreal series, this being a sequel you can't really expect anything different.

Epic has never shown any kind of artistic originality (or gameplay originality, to be fair), but the engine has proved itself capable and I'm sure other companies will exploit it (or already have, with Bioshock)

I think it is also fair to say that deviating from an established and well regarded art style is a financial risk. Making games is a business.

We are all happy to say "do something original", but I wonder if any of us would put our own money in the pot and then say the same thing again? As gamers we apply inherrent value to being original. In business, doing something original has to be shown to be of value on your cashflow sheets. Purely in itself, it has no value at all.

"Remember when game characters were about 30 pixels each? Simpler, uglier times."

disagree about the ugly.

Its a shame as i prefer the style of flat guaraud shaded polygons. (ie: Rez)
All the high rez materials are wasted on me...
Bring back old skool graphic style and speed our games back up.

/edited in Rez (is my favourite)

I agree with those criticising Epic's lack of originality, fine so perhaps being wildly original is a financial risk - but their obsession with thick-necked macho-marines is just incredibly boring. Many other developers find a happy balance - creating somewhat more original characters without taking big risks. Epic are just lacking imagination frankly.

"Chris Wells creates warriors."

No he doesn't, he alters Space Marines slightly.

LOL.

EG, you still have this game flagged up as a 360 release.

"With materials creation, our working file size for the bitmap is 2048 by 2048, and there tend to be about 14 of those maps per character, all told,"

This is a job for the Blue Ray!

:)

It is a 360 release but its being released in early 08, not the end of this year.

Personally I found the article very interesting. I'd really love to go into this sort of thing as a potential career.

What I find depressing is this whole 'unorginality' debate...christ guys, love to see you lot do a better job. Please go back to your Pikachus and Zapadlos :D

polygons,polygons, blah blah blah.

What? Do I have to do everything around here?

"Personally I found the article very interesting. I'd really love to go into this sort of thing as a potential career.

What I find depressing is this whole 'unorginality' debate...christ guys, love to see you lot do a better job. Please go back to your Pikachus and Zapadlos :D"

This attitude will come back to haunt you when you spend the next 5 years of your life modelling the same shit day in, day out for generic game franchise #343534095 ;).

Surely better than modelling another goddamn anime based character :P

It may not be original (the 3 at the end of the name Unreal Torunament 3 might be a clue there) but it looks nice and will probably be a lot of fun.

So basically fuck off.

Also, what kanga said regarding spreadhseets and cashflow and that. While it may be fine for experimental bongo players and poets to churn out niche crap from their dingy weed filled bohemian soho apartments, games are actually made by businesses and cost a lot of money. So surprise surprise, if this artist fella had bowled into work one monday mornign and said "hey chaps, lets knock all this macho stuff on the head, yeah, howsabout we make the main character some sort of trippy purple toaster who pours marmalade out of his arse to prevent wars and corporations from doing bad stuff to folks" it would be very original but not a particularly good game, nor very commercially viable.

In closing then, I enjoy games with burly men in very much, they enable me to release the pressure of my repressed homosexuality without any one finding out that I find boobies and minge to be utterly repellant.

Xiphos - for one, it's not a review, it's an interview. Secondly, a big chunk of the feature is about that exact process, converting the 30 million polygon model down to a lower polygon model with the detail expressed through the various texture maps he mentioned (especially the normal map).

I'm not entirely sure what your point is, but I'm pretty certain that whatever people's views on the art Chris Wells creates may be, everyone can acknowledge that he definitely knows what he's talking about when it comes to creating next-gen art assets and the work that goes into them.

What bugs me most isn't the unoriginality (good points made about anime'ish characters in JRPGs and whatnot), but the focus on macho-marines and "cool" military types. If they claim that these games are for grown-ups, maybe they can fill them with characters a grown-up can relate to, not Captain America clones. I might add that a rather successful and highly rated shooter featured a nerdy looking particle physicist, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, as its main character. Physics FTW!

The guy makes it sounds as if he manually puzzled together all 30 million polygons to create one model.

For all the dozens of millions of polygons, the visuals still look as sterile and plasticky as ever.

Oh wait, the game is actually called "Unreal". Never mind ;)

I can't see a FPS featuring blokes with beer guts and birds with love handles selling that well myself. Timesplitters focused more on the comedy element, but even those games had a more generic bald headed, muscular hero.

Also, why is it that since Gears, any game featuring blokes who've kept themselves in shape is now homoerotic. They're called muscles and you get them by exercising rather than sitting on your arse all day, you don't have to be gay to have them.

"They're called muscles and you get them by exercising rather than sitting on your arse all day, you don't have to be gay to have them. "

These kind of muscles you only get from working out and taking drugs.

Real men do sports and get realistic muscles ;)

@Dizzy

These kind of muscles you only get from working out and taking drugs.

Real men do sports and get realistic muscles ;)


You're right, but either way that wouldn't make you gay, which was the point I was trying to make. Anyway, when did realism and games ever go hand in hand, especially in the FPS genre!

Liked the article - had a bit of a feel good factor, nice to see someone from Epic giving an honest and positive vibe.

Doubly nice to not have Mark "I just can't stop lying" Rein telling us some more lies about Unreal Engine 3.

And I have still not forgiven Epic for Purchasing the Reality Engine - where the bohemian indie dev's could have had a go at developing something on a reasonably powerful engine - without needing to win the lottery, at least a couple of times to pay the license fee.

'Gears started out as a tech demo for the UE3 engine I think'

UE2, before even Unreal 2:

http://www.beyondunreal.com/image.php?sr...
http://www.beyondunreal.com/image.php?sr...

Though it looked a bit different back then. Seems all of the tech demos have been erased from the interweb.

E3 2004 tech demo

http://www.fileplanet.com/140731/140000/...

And image

http://www.fileplanet.com/screenviewer.a...

Streaming version below (I am sure I have seen those characters before)

http://www.gametrailers.com/umwatcher.ph...

It's undeniably UT style indeed : lots of tacked on details in hyper saturated colors...

This is a technical story. Why not interview the Art Director / Graphic Lead ? They could have been asked why they think thick huge armour suits fit a game based on
twitch reaction and speed ? That super suit from Crysis makes alot more sense, with those artificial muscles and it looks way more cool imo.

I'm not really saying UT style is bad per say, but it's Sci-Fi + Asian architecture style all over again like in Perfect Dark 1, Daikatana and Huxley.

Can anyone find the 2001/2 tech demos?

That old gow model on udn:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/SkelAnim2.h...
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/rsrc/Two/In...

More assets that never made it into a game:

http://www.planetunreal.com/features/tec...
http://udn.epicgames.com/Two/rsrc/Two/St...

Is there a place in heaven for characters that never made it into the game? :/

From 30 million polygons in Maya/ZBrush to 10 thousand in the game.

fuck next-gen art. that's all I have to say to their 30 million polygons.

Wow, a lot of you guys are being real assholes :/

Xiphos, do you even know what you're rambling about?

I hate the trend towards normal mapping models for games because it's so fucking wasteful - you make an x-million polygon high-resolution model(what you see in cinematics), it takes several weeks, then you turn it into a shitty normal map for a x-thousand poly character model which now probably looks like plastic shiny ass.

Then you texture it...!


As a painter before a sculptor, I loathe normal mapping. Why waste all that time and effort making a high-poly model when you could just paint detail on your texture maps and have it look great in a quarter of the time?