> But animation students have been producing similar quality visuals for their show-reels for ages. All that has changed is the ability to render faster, but the creation of this content is still being done by the same processes.
Have you seen modern texturing pipelines? It's most certainly not the same process as 10 years ago. Have a look at this procedural wood flooring generator, built in Substance Designer's node-based texture workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc5Pdcbjr0U
Same for animation. Doing it by hand won't get you the quality of results that you need for photorealism, so we're bringing in new processes that require a bunch of equipment, a bunch of time, and probably multiple crew members. Used to be you'd make a walk cycle by hand, now it's mocap. With the same old processes, there's no way Star Wars: Battlefront would have been able to make its content in the volume it needed, even with a large art budget.
Now that we know how to create these assets on at least a somewhat feasible budget (compared to armies of artists manually doing 8K textures in Photoshop), the next step will be taking this high-end work intensive stuff and bringing it down to the point where we can crank out similar quality results with lower time investment. It'll take a couple more years, but there's definitely a demand for it.
Yes, the tools have gotten much much better, that is true. But it still costs an incredible amount of time to generate the art assets, it's a huge part of the budget.
I have not. That's super neat and I'm glad people are making progress! Is there anything happening on the animation side which will push past mocapped movements?
A couple of really cool things about the Substance texturing approach:
Feed it a 3D model and generate maps of its inside corners and outside edges, which can be used to mask layers for dirt accumulation and edge wear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTYia53801k
No reference handy, but you can expose parameters like "How much rust" or "color of scattered accent bricks" and make the textures be configurable in-engine. Really streamlines the process if the person building out a level in the game can adjust those sorts of features without going back to the texture artist every time.
EDIT: Here's a cool one http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2384431/#Comment_238... You can feed it an arbitrary mask to control the color pattern. Note how it's not just painting the color over the bricks, it actually makes brick seams following the edges. And if I had to guess, the dirt/sand accumulation is exposed as a configurable parameter.
Have you seen modern texturing pipelines? It's most certainly not the same process as 10 years ago. Have a look at this procedural wood flooring generator, built in Substance Designer's node-based texture workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc5Pdcbjr0U
Same for animation. Doing it by hand won't get you the quality of results that you need for photorealism, so we're bringing in new processes that require a bunch of equipment, a bunch of time, and probably multiple crew members. Used to be you'd make a walk cycle by hand, now it's mocap. With the same old processes, there's no way Star Wars: Battlefront would have been able to make its content in the volume it needed, even with a large art budget.
Now that we know how to create these assets on at least a somewhat feasible budget (compared to armies of artists manually doing 8K textures in Photoshop), the next step will be taking this high-end work intensive stuff and bringing it down to the point where we can crank out similar quality results with lower time investment. It'll take a couple more years, but there's definitely a demand for it.
Releasing today: Substance Painter 2 https://youtu.be/1pIoA34MVBA?t=26 (warning - annoying soundtrack)