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Introduction
As an industry, we are now deeply entrenched in a new generation of console development. What seemed unknown and even scary only a few years ago is now part of most developer's everyday work. In the end, most people's fears about the new breed of games requiring hundreds more artists, drastic increases in budgets and longer development times turned out to be unjustified. Many high quality titles have been made on time by small to average sized teams of experienced staff.

With that said, creating artwork for these new machines has never been more problematic. Many artists, especially those coming from the familiarity of the previous generation, have had to learn a whole new set of tools and work practices.

Creating efficient, high quality environment art can be done with the right amount of planning and forethought. I have identified, based on my experience developing several titles for the 360 and PS3, key 'problem areas' commonly found in next-gen art pipelines. This article outlines these areas and offers solutions, hopefully helping other artists identify problems earlier rather than later.

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Good Read, thanks...

Quite interesting, nice found

Cheers

Frazzle

yeah, I read this one before, pretty interesting, although most of the techniques arent really "next-gen".

Well maybe they're still using old techniques which are being 'pimped' to make it fit next-gen in the positive way

Cheers

Frazzle

that link doesn't work ?????

Maintanance over now, link active again

real-time ambient occlusion is indeed "next-gen" but nothing else in the article is. it doesn't appear to describe real-time AO, but static AO, in which case it isn't "next-gen" in the slightest. here's the hint:

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Do some experimenting with these built-in tools, as you may find they are overly complex or render times take too long. If you're going to be lighting a city block, for instance, you're going to want a fast renderer.

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i believe this is referring to the time it takes to make a static AO lightmap. the most common realtime AO techniques are variants of screen-space ambient occlusion which is unaffected by scene complexity if a depth map is already being rendered anyway. the idea that it is static is further supported by the fact that they treat dynamic lighting in outdoor scenes as a special case ("One direct light source means the whole world can be either lit using lightmaps, or in some cases, dynamically lit.").

all this can be done in Gamestudio with nothing more than ventilator's second uv-set plugin (though you don't even need that if you use Gamestudio's radiosity on level-geometry coming in the next update).

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And you still have to create shaders for things like AO.

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that's half the fun of graphics. shaders are ridiculously easy to learn, and if we all depended on pre-made shaders we aren't going to be ground-breaking, are we? anyway, a few of us are already working on our own variations of realtime AO shaders

julz

Julz, your post sounds a bit theoretically. And in this case I totally agree with you. You can do all this. You can write the shaders. You even say it is "dediculously easy". I am sure that most users will disagree here since only little know vector and matrice mathematics.
And yes - you can add shadowmaps with Ventilators plugin.

I know all this since we work on a prototype with exactly those techniques and because of that I can tell you that in practice there are more problems then you might think of.

You will get heavy problems when you want to make a level with more than one texture and more than one uv. FBX and obj import does not support more uv's and shaders get problems with many textures and uv's.
When you pack all into one texture and one uv then you have some problems with modelling and level design.

Besides that it is not that easy to write shaders for AO, depth of field, dynamic shadows an much more in a small team. It takes much time and effort and will not compete with experienced shader developers.

We do our best and will show our progress in the future. But I still would suggest to argue a bit more realistically and not only with the usual term that I read since several years: "It can be done"

Regarding radiosity on blocks:
This ist still not available and had some light bleeding in the last images. And I doubt you can combine it with shaders. And then you still are limited to point lights with linear fall-offs (no spot lights, no area lights, no squared falloffs). This is not a good lighting-toolset.