dragonelite
Member
Cool thanks for posting that, i learned a bit more about game asset pipeline.
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GI Biz: A developer sees model costs double for Durango sequel to Xbox 360 title
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iOS will always live.
Karak
Member
I have a question on this then.
So these guys finding it doubling their dev costs must not make PC games where the textures and such are far higher in res and the polycount is increased correct?
It seems that if a dev is a PC dev they would already be using far higher res models and so forth. Well actually many areare, as they talk about it all the time when talking about prepping different versions and lowering the complexity and so forth for the current gen.
Maybe I am wrong. Just seems weird to read of the issue when it seems like many PC games are probably already using assets. Of course if it is a console only dev I can see that. Maybe that's why some are happy about the upgrade and some seem scared. Makes sense I guess.
So these guys finding it doubling their dev costs must not make PC games where the textures and such are far higher in res and the polycount is increased correct?
It seems that if a dev is a PC dev they would already be using far higher res models and so forth. Well actually many areare, as they talk about it all the time when talking about prepping different versions and lowering the complexity and so forth for the current gen.
Maybe I am wrong. Just seems weird to read of the issue when it seems like many PC games are probably already using assets. Of course if it is a console only dev I can see that. Maybe that's why some are happy about the upgrade and some seem scared. Makes sense I guess.
Rhazer Fusion
Member
Yep. I'm looking forward to it also. Cherish your PS3, X360 and Wii's guys. You thought we got nickel and dimed this generation, you ain't seen nothin' yet folks with development costs supposedly rising. Next generation is the end of an era.
*$70-$100 games
*Overpriced systems $450-$600????
*Longer development cycles.
*Bigger budgets and more man-power.
*More expensive and numerous DLC.
*More expensive accessories.
*More companies closing?
*Anit-used games.
*Must be online at all times?
*Less genres?
*Less Japanese games for the obvious reasons. I dread for them the most. 6 to 10 year development cycles????
Wow. Truly sad. Slightly prettier graphics for all of this? Why are development costs still so high for game development? Stop making so many Hollywood-wannabe, big-budget games maybe?
Double huh?
If this happens then next generation is going to see more bankrupted developers than even this generation did. Not only that, but the variety of medium to large size games will shrink yet again to a paltry few.
Pretty soon a developer will not be able to secure funding for a decent scope console game unless they are making a game, not only within an established genre, but within an already proven IP that is guaranteed to sell enough to cover the higher costs of development.
People think this is a joke or not a big deal, but there will be a pretty sobering wake up call when publishers are not able to afford to make sequels to the IP's they care about the most. The banks will refuse to loan the publishers more money because the likely-hood of being repaid by them will be close to zero.
MS and Sony are taking a huge risk that may end up costing all of us a steady flow of quality console games.
You joke but if and when it happens you might not feel like jesting. Neither will the countless developers who will be out of the job and forced to either go indie or find another field of occupation.
If this happens then next generation is going to see more bankrupted developers than even this generation did. Not only that, but the variety of medium to large size games will shrink yet again to a paltry few.
Pretty soon a developer will not be able to secure funding for a decent scope console game unless they are making a game, not only within an established genre, but within an already proven IP that is guaranteed to sell enough to cover the higher costs of development.
People think this is a joke or not a big deal, but there will be a pretty sobering wake up call when publishers are not able to afford to make sequels to the IP's they care about the most. The banks will refuse to loan the publishers more money because the likely-hood of being repaid by them will be close to zero.
MS and Sony are taking a huge risk that may end up costing all of us a steady flow of quality console games.
You joke but if and when it happens you might not feel like jesting. Neither will the countless developers who will be out of the job and forced to either go indie or find another field of occupation.
Which PC developer and games are you talking about exactly? Even Witcher 2 has to have a console version in order to supplant the cost of development.
PS3 and 360 have been holding PC games back for years. Cryteck is the best example of this. PC developers were forced to concede that they can no longer make exclusive PC games and turn a worthwhile profit without keeping them at a level that makes console ports easier.
Imo we haven't even begun to see how the costs of developing games on next gen technology will affect PC developers. And we won't see the effects until those pc developers can unshackle their PC's with the power of the PS4 and 720 to back them up.
BoilersFan23
Member
I pretty much guarantee that Sony and MS would rather ride out the generation as long as possible, especially because HD game development is not as pricey as when the generation first started, but still a bit expensive. There are some developers already having problems with HD consoles. However, the market wants a push onto the next generation and that's when it gets expensive again.
If one is afraid of text, feel free to skip.
TL;DR. Artists are generally always wanting to do better than their last project. They always try to push push push. You give them extra resources they will take it, fill it and demand more. That's just how we are. Milk every drop.
Each company has different ways and pipelines for making assets. Figuring out a good pipeline to get a character from the concept phase to in game and working is crazy long.
I'll give you a basic pipeline from start to finish.
Concept Phase, pretty self explanatory. Batch of thumbs and designs till its whittled down to one core design.
Modeller gets that, talks to rigger/animator if there is any special needs this character might require.
Character modeller models a low poly base mesh. Passes this off to the rigger as a proxy. (if the rigger requests this for a special case)
Character Modeller then takes the base mesh to a high poly stage. This may require a re-topology stage during this (usually if they pre-planned their base mesh well or the mesh isn't very complex this isn't required). Where the they reconstruct a new base mesh with better poly flow to create a cleaner high poly.
Then character modeller gets the high checked off.
Character modeller then does a final re-topology of his high poly asset to a lower poly in game version. This is always LOD0 (highest polygon version) obviously. (this job can be palmed off to a specific artist who only handles retopologising, UV unwrapping and baking)
NB: This is the part where they will be doubling their polygon count for next gen machines.
Then comes the UV unwrapping of the low poly game mesh and packing of UV's
NB: This can take a little longer if you have more polygons to deal with. But its not so bad these days with the tools available.
Then you need your different bakes from your high poly source mesh. This can be quite a complex process if there are lots of fiddly overlapping objects on the character. Things need to be pulled apart and baked separately. Usually two maps will be baked. The normal Map and the Ambient Occlusion (AO)
You can get more like displacement, height and cavity maps baked if needed.
Then you go from there onto the texture phase. This can be handed over to a specific texture artist.
NB: This is where you may get higher texture budgets. Painting a higher res texture takes more time. Also if more maps are needed for shader tricks, then more time is spent making special case textures.
After that its setting up all the sharers for the character. Depending on your shader pipeline (something that is worked together between tech artist/FX artist and code)
Then once this has been done the rigger then gets the model.
NB: Shader complexity may increase for the artist to hook up. But this is all dependant on the specific shader pipeline of your engine.
The character modeller then makes the needed LOD's for that character.
The rigger or Tech character artist, sets up all the final rigs and controls. Usually sets up the collision and all the technical gizmos that are needed like Sockets and code controls.
NB: Next gen machines may allow more bones per chunk. So this may add more time in the rigging phase to set up.
Then this is passed over to the animator for animation. Blends, animations and all that.
Then the animations need to be hooked up to the game design and code. So we can say when SPACE BAR is pressed, character plays Jump animation. ect ect.
NB: With more bones per chunk, Animators may need to spend longer amounts of time animating (Yes there is mo-cap which has its own stupid crap to deal with. cleaning up keyframes.. bleh. Also it can't be used for lets say, a crazy squid monster of doom). Though I am not an animator, so I'm only talking from observation.)
Then the character is finally in the game.
Wow finally its in the game! Oh shit... what happens when, for example, you show this to the publisher and he decides you character needs to wear a cloak? Then you have to dismantle the pipeline back to the modelling phase to add the cloak. the rigger/character tech artist then needs to re bake weights and add the new bones and re rig the bastard. Then the animator needs to add all these cloak animations to his existing animations.
One fuckup or one change can bring the whole pipeline to its knees. The more complex it is the harder the pipeline crashes.
Do this times X number of characters in a game. It can add up.
Now environments that's a different story. You usually only need to do up to the collision part. (Unless you had to make a complex prop with animation of course) We need to make collision meshes (soooo boring) and try to find new ways of saving drawcalls while adding more to a scene. Environments of course need a variety of shaders for different materials and different shaders on the one object also means more drawcalls. For example a tree will need two shaders because wood behaves differently than leaves. Its a discipline quite different from characters but takes just as long because the basic process is the same with the baking and the source models.
NB: Artists are generally always wanting to do better than their last project. They always try to push push push. You give them extra resources they will take it, fill it and demand more. That's just how we are. Milk every drop. If a frame rate is shitty in a game its because the artists pushed too hard expecting code to keep up.
For reference I have been both a character and environment artist for a next gen single player game utilising unreal engine 3 and also a next gen MMO. The pipeline I described was what I used when making characters for the single player unreal3 game.
Thanks for the insightful post!
dragonelite
Member
You should keep on doing research what the way the market wants to go.
And adept to it. From all the succesfull companies these gen i heard them talking a lot about where they think the market is going and doing R&D in that direction.
If one is afraid of text, feel free to skip.
TL;DR. Artists are generally always wanting to do better than their last project. They always try to push push push. You give them extra resources they will take it, fill it and demand more. That's just how we are. Milk every drop.
Each company has different ways and pipelines for making assets. Figuring out a good pipeline to get a character from the concept phase to in game and working is crazy long.
I'll give you a basic pipeline from start to finish.
Concept Phase, pretty self explanatory. Batch of thumbs and designs till its whittled down to one core design.
Modeller gets that, talks to rigger/animator if there is any special needs this character might require.
Character modeller models a low poly base mesh. Passes this off to the rigger as a proxy. (if the rigger requests this for a special case)
Character Modeller then takes the base mesh to a high poly stage. This may require a re-topology stage during this (usually if they pre-planned their base mesh well or the mesh isn't very complex this isn't required). Where the they reconstruct a new base mesh with better poly flow to create a cleaner high poly.
Then character modeller gets the high checked off.
Character modeller then does a final re-topology of his high poly asset to a lower poly in game version. This is always LOD0 (highest polygon version) obviously. (this job can be palmed off to a specific artist who only handles retopologising, UV unwrapping and baking)
NB: This is the part where they will be doubling their polygon count for next gen machines.
Then comes the UV unwrapping of the low poly game mesh and packing of UV's
NB: This can take a little longer if you have more polygons to deal with. But its not so bad these days with the tools available.
Then you need your different bakes from your high poly source mesh. This can be quite a complex process if there are lots of fiddly overlapping objects on the character. Things need to be pulled apart and baked separately. Usually two maps will be baked. The normal Map and the Ambient Occlusion (AO)
You can get more like displacement, height and cavity maps baked if needed.
Then you go from there onto the texture phase. This can be handed over to a specific texture artist.
NB: This is where you may get higher texture budgets. Painting a higher res texture takes more time. Also if more maps are needed for shader tricks, then more time is spent making special case textures.
After that its setting up all the sharers for the character. Depending on your shader pipeline (something that is worked together between tech artist/FX artist and code)
Then once this has been done the rigger then gets the model.
NB: Shader complexity may increase for the artist to hook up. But this is all dependant on the specific shader pipeline of your engine.
The character modeller then makes the needed LOD's for that character.
The rigger or Tech character artist, sets up all the final rigs and controls. Usually sets up the collision and all the technical gizmos that are needed like Sockets and code controls.
NB: Next gen machines may allow more bones per chunk. So this may add more time in the rigging phase to set up.
Then this is passed over to the animator for animation. Blends, animations and all that.
Then the animations need to be hooked up to the game design and code. So we can say when SPACE BAR is pressed, character plays Jump animation. ect ect.
NB: With more bones per chunk, Animators may need to spend longer amounts of time animating (Yes there is mo-cap which has its own stupid crap to deal with. cleaning up keyframes.. bleh. Also it can't be used for lets say, a crazy squid monster of doom). Though I am not an animator, so I'm only talking from observation.)
Then the character is finally in the game.
Wow finally its in the game! Oh shit... what happens when, for example, you show this to the publisher and he decides you character needs to wear a cloak? Then you have to dismantle the pipeline back to the modelling phase to add the cloak. the rigger/character tech artist then needs to re bake weights and add the new bones and re rig the bastard. Then the animator needs to add all these cloak animations to his existing animations.
One fuckup or one change can bring the whole pipeline to its knees. The more complex it is the harder the pipeline crashes.
Do this times X number of characters in a game. It can add up.
Now environments that's a different story. You usually only need to do up to the collision part. (Unless you had to make a complex prop with animation of course) We need to make collision meshes (soooo boring) and try to find new ways of saving drawcalls while adding more to a scene. Environments of course need a variety of shaders for different materials and different shaders on the one object also means more drawcalls. For example a tree will need two shaders because wood behaves differently than leaves. Its a discipline quite different from characters but takes just as long because the basic process is the same with the baking and the source models.
NB: Artists are generally always wanting to do better than their last project. They always try to push push push. You give them extra resources they will take it, fill it and demand more. That's just how we are. Milk every drop. If a frame rate is shitty in a game its because the artists pushed too hard expecting code to keep up.
For reference I have been both a character and environment artist for a next gen single player game utilising unreal engine 3 and also a next gen MMO. The pipeline I described was what I used when making characters for the single player unreal3 game.
I'm going to quote this the next time someone suggests that significantly higher development costs are unrelated to more powerful hardware.
Great job breaking this down for us.
NinjaBoiX
Member
Wow! They should hire you man, you really seem to know your stuff.Learn
To
Rhazer Fusion
Member
Consumers seem to want next generation to start from what I am hearing, but the industry isn't ready for it.
Funnily enough he's right. Any dev that sees costs double next gen isn't budgeting properly. Budgets will expand as they do with any new generation but only a poorly budgeted project will see a doubling of costs.
NinjaBoiX
Member
Really? I know he's right FFS! It was more that he was pointing out the blatantly obvious, as if dev's don't know the importance of budgeting.
Also, they never mentioned their budget doubling, simply that models would cost twice as much. Which is admittedly a large part of dev costs.
Machspeed007
Member
Character detail like this cannot be simulated with normal mapping while maintaining the same quality.
Outsourcing is paid on poly counts. The prices for 8k character models are lower than 16k characters.
A 3D character made for normal mapping only doesn't need the same level of detail and optimisations as a 3D character that's meant to be rendered on the screen.
More detailed characters rendered on the screen = more time and/or more resources.
A high poly normal mapping character with un-optimized textures cannot just be scaled down and thrown into the game. You need a qualified human being to take those 5 1024x1024 textures and fit them into 1 512x512 texture while maintaining 80% of the quality.
I feel like everything you said is right, yet your argument as a whole is wrong.
New hardware is not just going to give you bigger textures and higher vertex counts, it's also going to give you new techniques. A lot of the time spent this gen is in making high-res models so you can bake normal maps - before normal maps existed this wasn't an issue.
New hardware is going to create a new breed of normal-maps. Maybe now you'll need to create maps for parallax on every surface, or maps for a different lighting model that is closer to BRDF. Maybe you'll need to do something to take advantage of things like geometry shaders and other DX 10 & 11 features. Maybe megatextures become the norm and now you need to uniquely texture everything. Maybe you'll be painting a texture that represents the rigidity of cloth.
I cant say for sure what those things are, but I'm relatively certain they are going to exist. Smart programmers will come up with new rendering (and other) techniques that require new inputs. This is why every engine created that supposedly scales forward has not actually scaled forward - if you take an engine from 10 years ago that can scale up it doesn't look as good as an engine from today because more has changed than just hardware power.
It's quite possible that the tasks you do today might get a bit faster, but it's also highly probable that you'll have new tasks.
---
IMO costs are always going to increase, unless developers make a conscious decision not to keep up with Joneses and move diagonally ahead instead of straight ahead. For example if you look at Journey, the focus there is on sand and clothing simulation, scene construction and cinematography (for lack of a better term), image quality, etc. It's not on normal mapping or super high polygon hands. It's like 2001 to Transformers - the former has superior shots and scene composition, the latter throws a bunch of technically advanced shit all over the screen. If you want to out-Transformers Transformers you have to spend more, because spending on effects is the essence of Transformers. That doesn't mean you can't make a better or even better looking movie.
Similarly if you want to create a "AAAA" game that's better than rival AAA games that largely boils down to spending more on production. If that is your goal then costs aren't going to go down almost by definition.
Movie production costs haven't gone down, even though CGI has replaced practical effects and new tools and processing power have made CGI theoretically easier and cheaper over time. I'm sure every time some new CGI tool comes out somebody says "this will probably bring down costs" but that has never actually happened.
yeah, that is bound to happen. And it's already happening.
Well put. I completely agree with this. With new technology comes new ways to spend money in order to make use of that technology.
Why hasn't every PC dev gone under then? I mean if it's a matter of higher poly models and high-res textures, the PC has had those for years...just check the Witcher 2 360/PC comparison thread for reams and reams of gleefully-posted evidence
Why hasn't every PC dev gone under then? I mean if it's a matter of higher poly models and high-res textures, the PC has had those for years...just check the Witcher 2 360/PC comparison thread for reams and reams of gleefully-posted evidence
This has already been addressed several times, even in the post which I quoted above.
Margalis did a good job in explaining why dev costs will always increase as more powerful hardware becomes available. That is unless the development part of the industry makes a conscious decision not to spend themselves out of business.
I have a bad feeling that voicing such concerns, at a developer forum like GDC, and suggesting a budget discipline style solution, that would demand participation from game developers, publishers and middleware developers alike, is generally frowned upon.
I would almost compare the conflict that exists, within the game industry, to that of the oil/coal industry vs. renewable and green energy alternatives. The parties who are most benefiting, from the money and positions of power made off of selling oil, wish to slow down, if not completely halt, the transition to more practical, independent, safer and cheaper means of energy. As long as there is oil to drill, those vested parties will do whatever it takes to ensure they can continue to milk that particular source of energy. They wish to do this for as long as possible but with complete disregard to the potentially negative effect it will have on the economy and the environment.
Of course this example is exponentially more serious to the subject of games but the premise is still the same. The parties involved within different aspects of video gaming, who benefit the most from driving technology forward, do not wish to slow down the advancement of visual progress just to help developers to better stabilize their development costs. I do not believe that their viewpoint is right or wrong, but we have seen the negative results of this kind of focus. This manner of modus operandi is currently unsustainable in the interest of developing video games.
I am not suggesting that AMD, IBM, Intel and Nvidia slow down the progress of technology. The problem isn't with them. The problem is in how the industry continues to choose to use that technology. Right now, the preferred way of using more powerful technology commands a high possibility of leading to another industry crash.
I personally do not look forward to a future, in gaming, where only small and inexpensive Facebook, ios and indie games will survive. I like and enjoy those kind of games but do not wish to depend on them.
Imho, the people who sit atop of making these kind of decisions, for the game development part of the industry, are being bullish if they assume that this is not a realistic possibility. If game budgets are not put into check, across the board, starting at the development tool level, then we can almost guarantee this current model being unsustainable. (That is just a polite way of saying "the industry will most certainly crash".)
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