Redesign of an old character of mine for a 3D project.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
The Unreal Feel
Aside from my title being taken from a sale that happens occasionally on Steam, this is likely also one of my last *aherm* criticism posts before I devote this blog space exclusively to posting my recent work.
Now that the segue is out of the way, I'd like to talk about Unreal. Specifically, Epic Game's ever-increasingly popular engine, the Unreal 3 engine. I will be one of the first in line to say that the engine is a fairly masterful piece of technology, as it is responsible for powering a good chunk of the blockbuster titles of 2008-2010 (thus far). That being said, the one glaring issue I have with the game is similar to the issue many people have with Bethesda's titles running on Gamebryo, in that when I plug in a game that runs on Unreal 3, I can blatantly tell that it runs on Unreal 3.
I'm not exactly sure what is going on with the developers to make a game look so similar in the minor details to another, but when scenes from the utterly mind-blowing Batman: Arkham Asylum look like they've come straight out of Gears of War, I feel that we have a problem.
To this end, I have scoured the internet to provide screenshots from 5 titles, each of which I own and adore to varying degrees, excepting for the as of yet unreleased Mechwarrior reboot which I wait with frothing anticipation.
I'll post the baseline first- a screenshot from Gears of War 2, and then subsequent screenshots in order of similarity to Gears of War in terms of "feel"
Mechwarrior
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Mass Effect 2
Now, as you can see, the first two in terms of similarity share several common aspects in terms of how each frame was rendered: Saturation level, Light bloom, Light color, Specular highlights, Texture Style, Depth of field, and to some degree, the color palette. Each of these factors are shared between Unreal 3 games to some degree of "severity" or another. Mass Effect is a little bit of an aberration in that it has a nice degree of saturation to the overall image, and a high degree of clarity, where other Unreal games often have the feel of a blurry photo from the 1970's where the color mostly resides in saturation "hot spots". Mass Effect also does not suffer from the near fetishistic application of blown-out colored specularity on the textures and too many saturated colored lights. It does, however, have it's moments where it's plainly obvious the game is in the Unreal engine, such as on Omega, and anyplace where there is fire.
I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I feel that too many people fall into the trap of what could be called "same-ey rendering styles" with the Unreal 3 engine in particular. A perfect example: the difference between Splinter Cell iterations 4 and 5 are night and day.
Splinter Cell: Conviction powered by Unreal 3
Splinter Cell: Double Agent powered by a modified Unreal 2.5
For me personally, it felt like the graphics took a step backward between iterations, as Double Agent (aside from some UV issues and other bugs) is one of the most visually solid games I have played for this generation of games. Textures were absolutely beautiful, each material was given it's due, and Sam Fisher's textures in particular were given an amount of love I've never seen elsewhere. Everything was individually cared for, right down to the subtle specular sweat on his skin.
Conviction, on the other hand, while the environments were very solid, and didn't have an utterly ridiculous amount of specularity applied to everything (the character models had almost not specularity to speak of), still suffered from the Unreal thumb-print in the series' most crucial asset of individuality, the lighting. There is an insane amount of light bloom from the light sources, and most of the lights are an extremely saturated color, making everything look, well, strange, for lack of a better word.
Now that the segue is out of the way, I'd like to talk about Unreal. Specifically, Epic Game's ever-increasingly popular engine, the Unreal 3 engine. I will be one of the first in line to say that the engine is a fairly masterful piece of technology, as it is responsible for powering a good chunk of the blockbuster titles of 2008-2010 (thus far). That being said, the one glaring issue I have with the game is similar to the issue many people have with Bethesda's titles running on Gamebryo, in that when I plug in a game that runs on Unreal 3, I can blatantly tell that it runs on Unreal 3.
I'm not exactly sure what is going on with the developers to make a game look so similar in the minor details to another, but when scenes from the utterly mind-blowing Batman: Arkham Asylum look like they've come straight out of Gears of War, I feel that we have a problem.
To this end, I have scoured the internet to provide screenshots from 5 titles, each of which I own and adore to varying degrees, excepting for the as of yet unreleased Mechwarrior reboot which I wait with frothing anticipation.
I'll post the baseline first- a screenshot from Gears of War 2, and then subsequent screenshots in order of similarity to Gears of War in terms of "feel"
Mechwarrior
Batman: Arkham Asylum
Mass Effect 2
Now, as you can see, the first two in terms of similarity share several common aspects in terms of how each frame was rendered: Saturation level, Light bloom, Light color, Specular highlights, Texture Style, Depth of field, and to some degree, the color palette. Each of these factors are shared between Unreal 3 games to some degree of "severity" or another. Mass Effect is a little bit of an aberration in that it has a nice degree of saturation to the overall image, and a high degree of clarity, where other Unreal games often have the feel of a blurry photo from the 1970's where the color mostly resides in saturation "hot spots". Mass Effect also does not suffer from the near fetishistic application of blown-out colored specularity on the textures and too many saturated colored lights. It does, however, have it's moments where it's plainly obvious the game is in the Unreal engine, such as on Omega, and anyplace where there is fire.
I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I feel that too many people fall into the trap of what could be called "same-ey rendering styles" with the Unreal 3 engine in particular. A perfect example: the difference between Splinter Cell iterations 4 and 5 are night and day.
Splinter Cell: Conviction powered by Unreal 3
Splinter Cell: Double Agent powered by a modified Unreal 2.5
For me personally, it felt like the graphics took a step backward between iterations, as Double Agent (aside from some UV issues and other bugs) is one of the most visually solid games I have played for this generation of games. Textures were absolutely beautiful, each material was given it's due, and Sam Fisher's textures in particular were given an amount of love I've never seen elsewhere. Everything was individually cared for, right down to the subtle specular sweat on his skin.
Conviction, on the other hand, while the environments were very solid, and didn't have an utterly ridiculous amount of specularity applied to everything (the character models had almost not specularity to speak of), still suffered from the Unreal thumb-print in the series' most crucial asset of individuality, the lighting. There is an insane amount of light bloom from the light sources, and most of the lights are an extremely saturated color, making everything look, well, strange, for lack of a better word.
While I seem to have written myself into a hole without a clean way to wrap this up, I'd still like to offer some advice to be taken for what it's worth: Unreal is a solid engine, and it's popularity isn't an accident. But, take the development time to give your textures some love, tone down the light saturation if it looks like you're in a room full of chemical glow-sticks when you're in a room of incandescent bulbs, and pay attention to how your game looks compared to others in the same engine. If games continue to have the "Unreal Feel", you could be shooting yourself in the foot by not having your game set itself apart visually.
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