Crono141 said:
HoloDust said:
Crono141 said:
HoloDust said:
Not necessarily - lot of that increase in production costs has already happened in this generation. If you watched UE4 presentation you could've noticed that one of its main advantages over UE3 is not just improved graphics capabilites, but actually tools and workflow, which allows artist to achieve desired results much faster than today (e.g., global lights don't have to be prebaked anymore). That's why I think development cost increase in this next gen won't be as steep as it was the case in this gen.
As CPUs/GPUs advance I can see more of this trend - e.g., we have lower poly models, tesselation and all the maps (displacement, normal, specular, diffuse...) approach now because current hardware can't deal with original models that artist made in 3DMax/Maya/ZBrush - in some (relatively near or distant) future those models will be just dropped into game editor without need to make all of those steps. Practically, developer will be removing one part of worflow (thus cutting cost) cause hardware will be powerfull enough to handle the original art. Not that I think that production budgets won't grow - they will, but I think that once we hit certain tech level that money will be spent for improvments in other fields.
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I see what you're saying, but making a bump map is far quicker and cheaper than creating a 3D model with all those bumps actually on it.
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Well, when they model the objects they do it with extreme poly counts - all the "bumps" and geometry is there in original design Than they need to downscale it for game engines (because it "costs" way too much in proccesing cycles to put original), and that's where low poly model and all various maps are coming from. Once we hit enough raw power, original high poly models of object will be directly imported into engine. In both cases artist is making high poly model, it's just in second he's skipping one step (thus reducing time/cost). Though I don't think we'll see this in at least 10 more years.
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Extreme poly counts yes, but nobody makes polys with the bump mapping actually on the models as polygons. Not even 3D animation (such as How to Train your Dragon) used polygons with the scales and hair on the models. Those were rendered in at post processing. It would take an impossible amount of time to do that level of detail work on a model by hand.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYXr7AuPGwE
I cannot express admiration I have for those people and amount of beautifull things they create - ZBrush (industy standard) is actually more like sculpting and not modeling. Once we see that fidelity of models directly in games....
EDIT: Now, day we see this stuff directly in the game....it's rendered using V-Ray, in some future we'll get there in real time...
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?171132-Blur-Studio-Farcry-3-Cinematic-Character-Art
