Variety
There's an obvious cost to thinking about
every modeling task or environment as a
story. Inevitably, relying on shorthand
symbolism is easier and quicker than
imagining an entire history behind every
poly and pixel.
The time differential may
be a lot less than it seems. The actual
amount of detail necessary to sell a story
can be quite minimal. The mental effort,
on the other hand, is considerable.
Artists who like to wade right into a
project and start laying down polys will
find it uncomfortable to put the building
on hold while they ponder a bit of
backstory.
If the task seems daunting,
though, it's worth remembering that the
modeler or level designer doesn't
suddenly have to become a screenwriter
to make use of narrative detail. The
stories don't need to have a lot of depth
or character development; they simply
need to respect and reward the player's
latent powers of observation.
There is one practical drawback to
focusing on narrative details. The
essential point of a storytelling approach
to modeling is to emphasize the
individual history -- the
"personality" -- of the
subject.
In games,
unfortunately, we have to
manage scarce runtime
resources, and many of
the assets we create
have to be reused. The convincing detail
that turns a model into a uniquely
believable object can backfire when it
shows up again and again.
Asset
modelers will have to plan carefully how
to avoid undermining their own efforts
through repetition. Even environment
artists will find that key details will
repeat, whether common elements like
doors and fixtures or, more often,
textures. Balancing the need for
reusability with the power of hand-crafted
individualizing detail is a tough trick.
Retreat Lightly
One common strategy is to build both
individualized and generic versions of the
same asset. For example, if you have a lot
of stop signs in your city, you'll probably
need to reuse them often.
But if the mix
is leavened with a couple of variants,
such as a bent stem from being hit by a
car or a vandalized version with a "'Stop'
Eating Animals" sticker, the monotony is
relieved and even the generic variants
gain a touch of extra depth.
Ideally, the variants can share
geometry or texture work with the
generic versions so that the resource
costs of the whole package aren't
overwhelming. Designing assets from the
outset so they support cheap color
variations, part swaps, and decaling
makes life much easier as you balance
unique details with unobtrusive generics.
Rigging assets for animation and then
"re-posing" them to build variants
cheaply is another good investment.
Naturally, of course, the amount of
energy you'll put into individualizing
assets will scale with their relative
importance.
You probably want the
details of the heroine's car to tell the
player something about her and her
history, but you probably don't want to
spend too much time on the life and
times of her toaster oven.
Figure 4: This 4,000 year old Egyptian diorama displays many of the artistic techniques a modern environment artist or modeler would recognize.
Although game technology seems to be
at the height of information age
modernity, the basic challenges of the
working artist never really change.
Learning some tactics from real-world
modelers isn't an unreasonable stretch
for the modern pixel pusher.
We're the
latest generation in a line
of modelers that goes
back at least to the days
of the Egyptian Pharaohs,
who passed into the next
world accompanied by
detailed hand-carved
dioramas of daily life in this one.
The
4,000-year old diorama in Figure 4,
despite its simple execution, still conveys
startling immediacy. You can almost hear
the commotion and smell the sawdust in
the crowded carpenter's workshop.
Though we work in ways that
anonymous 11th dynasty craftsman
never dreamed of, we're still hoping to
achieve the same things. Let's hope we do
an equally good job.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was independently published by Gamasutra's editors, since it was deemed of value to
the community. Its publishing has been made possible by Intel, as a platform and vendor-agnostic part of Intel's Visual Computing microsite.]