Page 5
|
The Artist Synapse Back to Intro |
|
Example Artist Interaction: Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 |
| Degrees of Separation [View] |
| Psychology [View] |
| Suggestions [View] |
|
Features vs. Beauty [View] |
|
Artist: Are there any palette
issues of which I should be aware? Producer: Nope. |
|
| Tech: This question always applies when the game uses 8-bit color. Again, this issue is too complex to explain fully here, but it's a very key point and there aren't many standard ways of handling palettes. The artist needs to know as much as possible about how the game's palettes work - specifically, how many (if any) of the colors can the artist dictate values for, how the fade tables work (if they exist), what happens when the lighting changes the colors, how to swap palettes, and so on. Also, the concept of palettes could be applied to higher color depths; even if we're in 16- or 24-bit, we may have to deal with palettes. | Psych: Psych: The terse response here is because the previous answer pretty much guaranteed that this question wasn't relevant - 16-bit color almost never has palettes. The programmer probably thinks less of the artist now; a better way to ask this might have been, "I know 16-bit usually means no palette; are you doing anything special about palettes?" |
|
Artist: Are there any "special"
colors? Transparent colors, for instance? Producer: Nope. |
|
| Tech: This question refers to colors that are handled by some special method. For example, some graphics engines consider any pixel that is pure black (RGB = 0,0,0) to be transparent, if the material has any file name under the "opacity map" setting. Palette-based systems often use certain palette entries for flashing colors, color-cycling, and numerous other effects. | Psych: Another terse answer - this may be because the programmer's irritation (read: loss of respect for the artist), which resulted from the last question. For example, the programmer might assume the artist is using "color" to mean a palette entry, not RGB values. If so, "nope" would mean, "No, dammit, we're not using palettes," rather than, "No, we're not doing any special-effect colors." Again, the solution is to demonstrate knowledge of the issue in the wording of the question. |
|
Artist: What kind of lighting
will be used in the game? Producer: Static point-sources. Actually, "static point-source lights with ambient" is more accurate. Lights must be defined in the LIGHTS.DAT file using the format lightname, XYZ, Radius, RGB, falloff. Multipass lighting is also supported. |
|
| Tech: As you can see, the, information relevant to this question includes the lighting type (point-source, directional, ambient), how to set these lights, and whether the lights can change during run time (dynamic) or not (static). | |
|
Artist: How should dynamic
lights be animated? Producer: Dynamic lights aren't supported. |
|
| Tech: If dynamic lights are supported, the artist will need to know how to define their animation. Hopefully, the artist can simply animate in the modeling software and export that data - but it doesn't always work that way. | Psych: Oops! This is another question that seems to demonstrate artist ignorance. The previous answer said that the lights are "static," meaning not animated. More loss of respect for artist's technical knowledge… and perhaps rightfully so. It would seems that our artist really doesn't know what static means. The artist probably should have asked the programmer to define "static" when the term was first brought up, rather than stumble ahead as if it were all understood. |
