Is it me or Baldur's Gate look better than POE?

[Elerond]

Why not just make the whole game 3d instead of these "hacks" to apply 3d effects to 2d environments? Was it faster/easier? I thought the whole point was to have heavy paintovers so that the backgrounds would look unique and organic, foregoing detail limits of 3d games.

 

Real time rendered environments would had needed more work to get them to have similar look quality than what PoE's environments now have. So if they had gone with that route game would have less polished look than it now have or it would have much less environments.

 

It is sad reality that you need quite lot money and time to be able to produce lots and lots high quality environments and spent lots of time to give them that finishing polish and if you don't have that money and time then you need make compromises in somewhere.

 

In my opinion PoE's environments look quite excellent and I have quite few qualms with them and my qualms with don't come from their quality, but from area design where my preferences go bit different direction than what we see in PoE.

[Sedrefilos]

Why don't we just let devs carry on with their vision, play the final product (we're just a month away) and then come back and talk about it, instead of ranting over every trivial matter, jumping to know-it-all conclusions based on personal assumptions and demanding whatever we want to satisfy our nerdy personal rpg "needs"?

Edited February 11, 2015 by Sedrefilos

[Sensuki]

But then we don't get useful information from Sean Dunny 

[Sedrefilos]

But then we don't get useful information from Sean Dunny 

Also forcing devs to defend themselves for -> "ranting over every trivial matter, jumping to know-it-all conclusions based on personal assumptions and demanding whatever we want to satisfy our nerdy personal rpg "needs""

Edited February 11, 2015 by Sedrefilos

[Sensuki]

I don't believe that's what we are doing. Also none of the environment artists have ever posted about the game online before other than when Hector Espinoza was interviewed in 2013. It's been good to hear Sean talk about his experiences developing.

Edited February 11, 2015 by Sensuki

[Hassat Hunter]

Why not just make the whole game 3d instead of these "hacks" to apply 3d effects to 2d environments? Was it faster/easier? I thought the whole point was to have heavy paintovers so that the backgrounds would look unique and organic, foregoing detail limits of 3d games.

Cause handdrawn paintings are 2D?

 

I'm interested how you would paint a 3D painting however.

[Quantics]

Why not just make the whole game 3d instead of these "hacks" to apply 3d effects to 2d environments? Was it faster/easier? I thought the whole point was to have heavy paintovers so that the backgrounds would look unique and organic, foregoing detail limits of 3d games.

 

Because then PoE would look like another D:OS 

 

 

I've tried playing that game several times, but the 'cartoony' art keep throwing me off. Again, it's all personal taste, but PoE's graphics are much much more appealing to me.

Edited February 11, 2015 by Quantics

[Elerond]

 

Why not just make the whole game 3d instead of these "hacks" to apply 3d effects to 2d environments? Was it faster/easier? I thought the whole point was to have heavy paintovers so that the backgrounds would look unique and organic, foregoing detail limits of 3d games.

 

Because then PoE would look like another D:OS 

 

 

I've tried playing that game several times, but the 'cartoony' art keep throwing me off. Again, it's all personal taste, but PoE's graphics are much much more appealing to me.

 

 

D:OS don't use that "cartoony" style because of the fact that it don't use prerendered backgrounds, but because it is style which Larian Studios liked best for the game, they could had gone with more realistic aesthetics or some other style if they had wanted to do so. Of course some aesthetic styles need more work from artist than others (like for example stick man graphics versus photo realistic) and games may have to use some other style than what its creators would prefer most because of economic reasons and some times because of technical reasons as computers or consoles aren't capable to run game in wanted aesthetics in high enough quality. 

[GreyFox]

 

 

 

Also the 3d paper-doll thingy was a bad decision as that 3D doesn't compare at all to the rest of the game or the parts done in 2D....could have totally done a prettier paper-doll that wasn't in 3D.

am suspecting that more than anything, the choice to go with the current poe paper doll were a matter o' a largely uncontested cost v. benefit analysis.  it would have taken effort and art resources to make an appealing 2d paper doll. why go through that effort when you already got the 3d game avatar?  is there options that would look better than what we got? sure, but current paper doll is functional... and, truth-to-tell, considerably superior to the old bg and iwd paper dolls. is good enough and, from a development perspective, relative painless  compared to other options.

 

HA! Good Fun!

 

 

Those are all valid reasons for sure and your suspicions are likely right on. 

I personally don't care because graphics are somewhere near the very bottom of things I rate a game on. I only care from the standpoint of negative attention it will garner as almost everyone notices how it doesn't look good, especially compared to the rest of the game.(and inevitably other 3D games) 

[rjshae]

I've never really understood the term when it's used like that. If we were graphics whores, would not we be profiting off of our own graphics?

 

I suspect that graphics junkies would be a more accurate analogy.

[Osvir]

 

Why not just make the whole game 3d instead of these "hacks" to apply 3d effects to 2d environments? Was it faster/easier? I thought the whole point was to have heavy paintovers so that the backgrounds would look unique and organic, foregoing detail limits of 3d games.

Cause handdrawn paintings are 2D?

 

I'm interested how you would paint a 3D painting however.

You make a 3D object of painting stand and then paint on the blank canvas

 

Or ya know, every single 3D Object = Sculpture, and Sculptures are essentially 3 dimensional paintings.

[ruzen]

 

But then we don't get useful information from Sean Dunny 

Also forcing devs to defend themselves for -> "ranting over every trivial matter, jumping to know-it-all conclusions based on personal assumptions and demanding whatever we want to satisfy our nerdy personal rpg "needs""

 

I dont know what "needs"" you talking about. Also I dont belive anyone attack or harrast developers on this posts. Since %90 population here is backers I belive most of us just share our feedback here because "we" wanted this game to be happen at first place too. There are no sides. Sometimes Its good to argue with people to understand one and other. What are these forums for? Just to share hype or casual talk? I belive this forum is one of the best public research about gamers on the internet. Not just because Its a game forum, because Its a game developing forum. After these tons of feedback, arguing sometimes overly heated discussion(!) I belive every developer at this project must have gain some experience. Even the maxed levels  

[sdunny]

I don't mind answering questions or clearing up misconceptions or any of that.  On a project like this - backed by the fans - I think it's important that you guys have your concerns addressed.

I generally avoid posting on forums or really anything else online, especially in a professional capacity, but it's not a bad thing to keep you all informed and maybe I can give some reasons that various decisions were made.

As for why we would make the game using 2d backgrounds instead of fully rendered 3d, there are a number of reasons.  The project leads could better illustrate some of them, but the gist of it is that we're doing it this way because it captures the classic IE aesthetic.  That's sort of the base reason behind it, but there are a number of corollaries to this.  For one thing, this game is really, really big.  To give an idea (although I know it's been discussed by Bobby and others), when we did our team-wide play week, I didn't make it past act II of the game.  I wasn't rushing through or anything, but I also didn't do everything, I completely skipped the Stronghold and Od Nua, and I didn't pick up every quest.  In addition to that, I already know the layout of most of the areas and where everything is located in relation to everything else.  Even with all of that, 40 hours was not nearly enough time for me to finish the game.

As has been mentioned, we have a very small art team.  There is no way we could have made environments of this size and scope with a team this small in this period of time in a traditional 3d workflow.  Maybe if we heavily re-used assets and had a very limited, modular building style.  But it certainly would not have had the same scope and variety that we have in the game.
 

There are going to be pros and cons to any development choice that is made, but I think for the results that we've got the benefits have far outweighed the negatives.

[AndreaColombo]

As for why we would make the game using 2d backgrounds instead of fully rendered 3d, there are a number of reasons.  The project leads could better illustrate some of them, but the gist of it is that we're doing it this way because it captures the classic IE aesthetic.

 

This +1 million, and I will never thank you enough for it.

 

Besides, achieving the same degree of detail and overall quality in real-time 3D would have mandated much steeper system requirements, and I believe it was always Obsidian's intention to make this game work on older machines to reach the widest audience possible.

 

Last but not least: Area artwork in PoE looks RAAAAAAD!! *Leonidas gif animation*

[Ineth]

Its totally you, probably because we tend to remember things in a idealistic way. But compare a couple of screenshots from both games and that banishes... sure some BG2 places have PoE quality, but just a couple. The years can be spotted easily in water, the fog of war. illumination in general, some textures / buildings that feel old renders (more geometric / with less detail / repeated textures / some "materials" don't look what they represent), UI, characters and some FXs. (radioactive vines, most fire effects in spells)

 

Oh yes, water in the IE games looked horrible.

[lordkim]

 

Its totally you, probably because we tend to remember things in a idealistic way. But compare a couple of screenshots from both games and that banishes... sure some BG2 places have PoE quality, but just a couple. The years can be spotted easily in water, the fog of war. illumination in general, some textures / buildings that feel old renders (more geometric / with less detail / repeated textures / some "materials" don't look what they represent), UI, characters and some FXs. (radioactive vines, most fire effects in spells)

 

Oh yes, water in the IE games looked horrible.

 

So does the women, but who gives a damn

[Sensuki]

2D backgrounds again =

 

 

'nuff said really.

 

2D backgrounds with paintovers = 

 

but yeah 

[Sabotin]

It was a genuine question. As far as I understood the process of these things the areas are basicaly "screenshots" of what is actually built in 3d, so it seemed that it's extra work to make it 2d after that, especially if they would look exactly the same (due to no paintover).

 

But I guess I'll believe there are such "painting" areas as I'd like to see, it's just that not every random forest patch is like that .

 

I wonder what kind of criteria was used to weigh this. How central to the game the ereas are (main quest temple or something)? How fast the player goes through them (random wilderness area you walk trough as opposed to an intricate dungeon which you explore inch by inch)? Just in general to optimize workload (save on unique assets)?

 

Something else that comes to mind: there's usualy a bunch of texture mods etc. for rpgs, I wonder if someone will make a "paintover mod" for the areas that received less attention :D .

[rjshae]

Something else that comes to mind: there's usualy a bunch of texture mods etc. for rpgs, I wonder if someone will make a "paintover mod" for the areas that received less attention :D .

 

Yes, I was wondering that as well. It'd be a nice project for a team of artistic contributors.

[aeonsim]

The 2D use also probably lowers the system requirements as well, and give all players the same level of visual quality if they can run the game. Those are pretty significant advantages and the result is that people with built in Intel graphics seem to be able to run the game fine. Something I'd doubt if these levels were all full 3d and being rendered on the owners machine.

 

Also I'm not entirely sure if they've done this but with prerendered 2d you can put in huge amounts of detail, high quality textures and models and let the render spend 15-20mins per area to get really high quality areas.

 

Maybe one of the artists could answer this but how long does it take to render one of these levels and what spec computer system are you using to do so?

[Sensuki]

Last I remember, Josh said they had the render time down to ~80 mins for 5 maps. However that info is old (from 2013) - they now only use four renders and probably improved the time even further.

[Adam Brennecke]

The 2D use also probably lowers the system requirements as well, and give all players the same level of visual quality if they can run the game. Those are pretty significant advantages and the result is that people with built in Intel graphics seem to be able to run the game fine. Something I'd doubt if these levels were all full 3d and being rendered on the owners machine.

 

Also I'm not entirely sure if they've done this but with prerendered 2d you can put in huge amounts of detail, high quality textures and models and let the render spend 15-20mins per area to get really high quality areas.

 

Maybe one of the artists could answer this but how long does it take to render one of these levels and what spec computer system are you using to do so?

 

and let the render spend 15-20mins per area to get really high quality areas.

 

Or days in some cases. We render on two machines that spin all of the time. Sean can chime in on how long it takes to render a scene like Dyrford Village, but I think it's several hours now. It used to take over a day before we optimized it. 

[sdunny]

Small, one room areas can take as little as 30 minutes or so to render.  Most of these areas are somewhere in the 8-10 hour range for a render.  I think Dyrford is right around that range.

 

Some areas that are particularly dense (lots of reflective materials, etc.) clock in at 15+ hours.  We're using advanced materials and lighting calculations and that stuff takes a lot of time.

 

All of the machines we're working on have 32 gigs of ram.  Any less and Maya will run out of memory trying to render these scenes.  We don't have anything super crazy in terms of processor or graphics card, but there are also a number of tricks we do to optimize our viewports in Maya to avoid chugging.  When everything is unhidden, framerate gets a bit rough.

I'd say an average scene is somewhere between 50 and 100 million triangles.  It varies a lot depending on area size and what's in the scene.  The inside of a cave is going to be less intensive than an exterior area with a lot of foliage.

[aeonsim]

 

The 2D use also probably lowers the system requirements as well, and give all players the same level of visual quality if they can run the game. Those are pretty significant advantages and the result is that people with built in Intel graphics seem to be able to run the game fine. Something I'd doubt if these levels were all full 3d and being rendered on the owners machine.

Also I'm not entirely sure if they've done this but with prerendered 2d you can put in huge amounts of detail, high quality textures and models and let the render spend 15-20mins per area to get really high quality areas.

Maybe one of the artists could answer this but how long does it take to render one of these levels and what spec computer system are you using to do so?

 

and let the render spend 15-20mins per area to get really high quality areas.

 

Or days in some cases. We render on two machines that spin all of the time. Sean can chime in on how long it takes to render a scene like Dyrford Village, but I think it's several hours now. It used to take over a day before we optimized it.

Thanks Adam and Sean

 

Thats a decent amount of render time, do your render machines use a professional GPU to accelerate the renders or is this solely CPU based rendering? Definately doesn't sound like something that could be render in real time at 60fps on most desktop or laptop computers.

Edited February 11, 2015 by aeonsim

[Sensuki]

Heh, one of my friends works as a researcher at Monash University Melbourne and does cat scans that are similar to rendering like that, his PC has 64GB RAM and he says it takes a few hours as well.

 

Josh mentioned on Something Awful that you were looking at using Octane GPU rendering, but decided against it.

Edited February 12, 2015 by Sensuki