Page 6
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The Artist Synapse Back to Intro |
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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] |
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Features vs. Beauty [View] |
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Artist: How should I create
multipass lights? Producer: Create separate geometry that is coincident with, but simpler than, existing geometry. Map it with the lightmaps and name it MP-OBJNAME. At run time, this model's rendering will be multiplied with the basic model. |
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| Tech: There are many ways to handle multipass lighting input, and no real standards except QUAKE, which only really works for QUAKE or QUAKE clones. The programmer's answer is a simple example; real projects are usually different. | Psych: By bringing this issue up, the artist is wisely exploring a part of the programmer's earlier answer that wasn't fully explained. The principles of multipass lighting aren't usually part of normal 3D modeling software, so this issue could probably use some more discussion, and even a simple test of the procedure. |
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Artist: What kind (if any)
of texture mapping is supported? Producer: Perspective-corrected, no run-time filtering. |
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| Tech: It's a rare game that doesn't support texturing. There are several kinds of texture mapping possible, each with different tradeoffs between rendering speed and distortion. | |
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Artist: How much texture-map
memory is budgeted? Producer: You have 2MB of texture memory. |
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| Tech: Obviously, the texture-memory limit affects how large and how many textures we can use. This is a pretty typical limit for 1997 graphics accelerator cards - usually, developers are limited to the texture memory on the card, which is often 2-4MB. | Psych: This question is a really important one, and the artist should make a strong effort to get as accurate a number as possible. If the producer is technical enough to answer meaningfully, the artist should probably ask the producer first. If it can be done casually, it would be worth exploring the memory situation with the programmer a bit - asking what is in memory, if the Z-buffer uses VRAM, and other topics out of the scope of this article. |
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Artist: What size and shape
can the texture maps' dimensions be? Producer: They've got to be 16x16, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128, 256x256, or 512x512. |
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| Tech: These numbers are pretty restrictive - artists would prefer nonsquare textures (such as 64¥16) and nonpower-of-two sizes (such as 234¥11), because it allows the artist to be more efficient in using the texture memory. | |
