[ceenda]

I really wanted to try and gauge opinions from the various people here on what they thought about the over-use of 3D renders in all types of game and film related art thesedays. If I've put this post in the wrong place then my apologies and I hope Sumaleth will move it to the correct place.

I understand that this is possibly a sensitive issue, but I wondered whether people here were getting totally fed up of the bad and compulsory use of 3D for every bit of art that you come across thesedays.

Here's an example, I picked up a copy of the magazine PCZone the other day. There is a picture on the front relating to "Emperor: Battle for DUNE" which is just a prime example of the most awful use of 3D programs. It must have taken ages to render all that, and for what? A crisp, unrealistic and thouroughly plastic-y looking scene with badly jointed and angular characters. Just think how much quicker and better a picture could have been done by the guys on this forum!

Even the box covers of games like Command and Conquer look awful with unconvincing rendered faces.

In contrast, PCZone used micke's picture on their cover a while back when Project IGI came out and I really wished that all game-related art was done using 2D. It just has so much more character. Is there some 3DSMax lobby we're supporting or something?

Don't get me wrong, people like balistic regularly show us good use of 3D with the scenes that he does.

Do people hate 3D for it's over-use as much as me, or am I in a smaller minority than I thought?

[wayfinder]

you're not.

[Lev]

I think it can work both ways, I don't have a solid opinion on this but I think 3d is only good for animating things, what's the use of making a 2d pick in 3d when you could paint it 10 times faster? When 3d looks plasticy that just means the person who made it doesn't know how to texture it right/didn't use the right materials or lighting or put the right properties on the object (too reflective, etc).

[Justin Kramer]

I miss 2D games, especially the old adventure games (Police/Space/King's Quests). Just when they started to look really good (256 colors, etc), they switched to 3D and everything looked like crap again. I'd love to see a Sierra adventure-style game with 800x600+ resolution 2D graphics.

[KrassOtti]

cheap 3D = sucks
cheap 2D = sucks
good 3D = rocks
good 2D = rocks

It's only that there is a lot of cheap 3D art out there, maybe because it's a relatively new medium. Whatever the reason, I am too tired of all the cheap 3D art out there, but if it's good 3D it can be as effective as good 2D.

It amazes me how so many people think everything 3D is automatically great. It's the new buzzword in terms of graphics. A lot of non-artistic people think everything 3D is great. Sometimes when I am with friends and we see something 3D, I'm like "Dude, this is so cheap, all plastic looking and poser used"... and they are just looking at me "wtf? this is awesome"... sigh...

3D in games: Makes a lot more sense, even in 2D RTS games. It's quite a lot easier to do a 3D model and animate cleanly than drawing everything by hand. Also, 3D in games gets a lot better every year. Capcom's 2D fighters are absolutely stunning drawn, but something like Soul Calibur also looks incredibly good. If you want a really nice looking 2D game, I can only recommend Guilty Gear X on the Dreamcast [it's a fighter].

[samdragon]

hmmm, now this is a good point.
I'm not sure if you are talking about real time 3D or the full Highquality, beautypass renders.
As for real-time goes, you pretty much have to rely on your texturing skills. As there are not too many, if any shaders that allow for metallic, plastic or even anisotropic materials. It all has to be convincingly done with 2D textures.
You also have to take into account that you're limited by the number of polygons you can put on screen. So you have to be pretty creative in how you model something, this includes deciding on what areas are best suited for textures. Why model it, when you get the same effect with a texture?

Working in 3D isn't the easiest of all mediums. So yeah, there will be some people who can't quite grasp the ideas and generate some pretty nasty looking stuff.
The phong renders are starting to get alot like the lensflare. Just like the chrome ball with a checkered floor.

Take a look at some of the few 3D scenes Spooge has done. With little knowledge of the program he could render out some incredible stuff! And alot of it was textures.

Alot of the game stuff is, how cheap can this model be? (polycount wise) and still look expensive. It's a combination of 3D and 2D working together to fool the eye.
Look at Shane Caudle's site (www.planetshane) and look at his textures that he did for Unreal Tournament. He gave the illusion of many shapes that did not exist in the 3D mesh. Which allowed for a smaller polycount and faster game play.

Sometimes I cringe when I see those magazine covers too.
I do see that more game companies are looking for 3D artists with backgrounds or degrees in art. So maybe they realize it's no longer about the technology anymore, and it's more about the people and what they can do with it.

[Alan]

I agree that a lot of unneeded, poor quality 3d is out there. This does, in part, have to do with it being the current darling of the cg industry. Either it will improve or go away as the novelty wares off.

Also, it is interesting to note that some of my favorite 3d pieces are pieces that have fooled me into thinking they were just very detailed 2d...

-Alan

[Rinaldo]

I couldn't agree with you more ceenda.
I find it interesting that poeple can spend so much time on one of those 3D scenes but not understand what makes a picture look good.=/

[pixualize]

Personally I find the use and over-use of 3D tiresome if it's left on its own, even though I use 3D for a variety of things myself, animation included. Having just crawled out of the theater from The Mummy Returns trying to stuff my eyeballs back into their sockets, my new catch phrase is:
"Just because you can doesn't mean you should."

If you guy want to find high calibur 3D stuff that knocks the stock Poser and Bryce renders check out
http://www.raph.com/3dartists/
Some of the stuff there doesn't look 3D.

Which is kinda ironic really - we use Photoshop and Painter to fool the eye into thinking that the image is not digitally produced, but created with traditional media. Good 3D then should fool the eye into thinking that is is something else also.

[J Bradford]

Keep something in mind, 3D is still a very new and evolving form of art. Traditional 2D has had thousands of year of perfection, and for traditional to come over as digital is not a big changing process. 3d is however becoming better and better as the years come through (ff movie for example), but still seems to be widely used for an unrealistic or cartoonish form.

I have to agree, I see something sometimes 3d rendered and think "wtf?", but I try to keep in mind the reasons I mentioned above.

[Socar MYLES]

Myself, I tend to dislike art that screams: "Look at me! I was made in Maya/3DSMax/Bryce/Poser/Painter/Photoshop!" If I can tell for sure what program was used, and which brushes, and--worst of all--which filters and buttons--I just find something else to look at.

Yes, one could call me a hypocrite--I know that much of my art at least mutters under its breath: "Hey...hist! Photoshop, here!"--but I am very inexperienced with digital art (less than a year), so I'm still learning. Hey, at least I don't use the lens flare, eh?

My personal hate objects are Bryce and Poser--not the programs themselves, understand, but the fact that most of the people using them allow the finished products to be very OBVIOUSLY Bryce/Poser generated.

I love 3D work with nice, gritty textures and a few painterly strokes added in Photoshop or Painter, so I can't quite tell how it was done. I like to stare at a brilliant image and think: "Damn...How'd they DO that?"

If I were asked to express a preference for 2D or 3D, I'd choose 2D, though, because I like to see the little flaws in lighting and positioning, the sketchy lines, et cetera. Those things, I find, give some life to an image.

(If my English is sucking at the moment, by the way, it's because I've spent the past 6 hours or so glued to some headphones, repeating phrase after phrase after PHRASE in Swedish. I am now royally confused. *Sighs* *Goes back to the task of learning to speak Swedish*)

[ May 06, 2001: Message edited by: Socar MYLES ]

[Frost]

Most artists cannot do convincing 3D, including myself. Most of them rely too much of the shaders and technology of the renderer and don't know how to make scenes and such interesting. This is where knowledge of lighting and design comes in... it takes more than a pretty shader, a patch object, and global illumination to make great looking stuff.

[gLitterbug]

Yes, I also hate to see cheapo-made 3d everywhere.
But what I hate even more is what Justin said. I like adventure games and I would love to play games like Sam and Max with good graphics. But I don�t think 3d is the point there, looking at monkey island 4, I can only say, it COULD look good in 3d but it�s made soo crappy. There are clipping-errors in the pre-rendered scenes, oh my god!
The main factor is that developers think an adventure game wouldn�t sell good. They can�t write "fast paced 3d action" on the packaging.
But I think there would be still enough demand for good adventures. But please without crappy 3d and a *#"!�$!" controls like monkey island 4 or grim fandango (a masterpiece in my opinion)
The point is the 3D is too "trendy".

[tayete]

2D forever!!!

(unless 3D is really necessary: FPS and such. And Project IGI is the only game I've dedicated some time to look how the faces were made: great textures!)

[ViPeRIII]

LENS FLARE 0WNZ j00

[Tendril]

Yeh theres plenty of bad 3d. I think its because it is generally considered to be more technical. Lots of people whove never drawn anything in theyre life hop straght into 3d.
Companies use it on the cover cos theyve already done the models and everything for the cutscenes. Its quicker to paint stuff but u can do so much more with a bunch of 3d models.

[balistic]

Thanks for the compliment Ceenda.

I myself am also frustrated at the sheer volume of bad 3D out there . . . I think you see so much of it because it has appeal among laypeople . . . its replaced bad airbrush as the easily-digestable visual cheese of the masses.

Probably the sorest example of this right now for me is the Final Fantasy movie . . . people are all ga-ga over the fact that they've painted skin-cells into the face maps, but I'll be damned if whenever I see footage from it I don't instantly notice how bland and computery it looks on a macro level. Does Square even have a lighting department? The proverbial trees look awesome, but pull back and look at the forest, and its just more gimmicky 3D.

"But loooook at the deeeeetaaaaaiiiil!"

*sigh*

Its all gone a bit Bill Flemming.

No offense to Craig, I'm sure his matte work for that film is up to his usual impeccable standard . . . but what they're putting in front of it worries me.

If you're an aspiring 3D guy, learn to draw and paint, or you'll just end up a cog in the big gimmick.

[Lunatique]

One thing that REALLY bugs me is that many of the 3D modelers out there don't know jack about anatomy/figure drawing, and they are modeling these highly detailed characters that are out of proportion. What a waste! One example is The Longest Journey(an European adventure game). I love that game, but the in-game low poly model of The main character is better looking/more proportioned than the high-poly version in the rendered cut-scenes! WTF? How can you model a high-poly character with all the details and overlook the proportions??

[Perplexer]

quote:

---

Originally posted by balistic:

[...]

I myself am also frustrated at the sheer volume of bad 3D out there . . .
[...]

Probably the sorest example of this right now for me is the Final Fantasy movie . . .

---

hmmm... i think too often 3D is perceived too much as 3D, not as just another way of producing imagery. what i find tiring about this chapter of (compared to other artforms relatively young) 3d history is the omnipresent contest in producing the most photorealistic results. i am looking forward to the day when that "barrier" of 3D created photorealism is broken. i am sure we will then get to the true potential of that technique- with all its stylistic varieties. maybe even revivals: impressionism, pointilism, cubism, jugendstil, whatever- but always with that distinct 3d touch that separates it from other artforms and gives it a slightly different touch. what we have now is not really much more than trompe l'oeil. cool. a challenge, certainly. but not very original.

the final fantasy characters are clearly some of the closest to photorealism i have seen so far- except for some image based renderings (well, and the new works of rene morel -www.amazon.com-, who played a key role in creating the final fantasy characters). and even though one might argue that photorealism was not fully achieved with FF, considering the trailers i find it turned out to be a very interesting and unique look - one i like very much. i therefore tend to disagree with balistic on this issue.

its obvious: the medium used doesn't turn "bad" art into "good" art. in the end, what disappoints me more than badly rendered 3d images or odd looking perspective anatomy in a painting are boring, inexpressive motifs.

[travis travis]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Justin Kramer:
I miss 2D games, especially the old adventure games (Police/Space/King's Quests). Just when they started to look really good (256 colors, etc), they switched to 3D and everything looked like crap again. I'd love to see a Sierra adventure-style game with 800x600+ resolution 2D graphics.

---

http://www.qknowledge.net/royalquest/
Check out this page, they're doing VGA remakes of Sierra games that never were VGA. Is cool.(check the screenshots, not bad at all)

As for this whole 3D thing, YES I'm one to absolutely agree that the world is flooded with insipid depersonalized 'generated' images. And a few of you have drawn the parallel with photoshop image filters because it's the same thing. People are just clicking the buttons and letting their images be shaded or defined by 'default'. It's a hideous thing, akin to if you were an artist who had developed his own style and all of the sudden the whole world was exactly imitating it. But it's not even that, because these computer styles are rarely good looking or even appropriate for anything, and thus we are flooded with an ugly, almost anti-stylization of all our media. Gross. Very cheap commercial. Icky. 3D can have soul, but it depends upon an artist to design original facets in rendering, modeling, everything... to make something their own. And with that we start to get into such a wide range of knowledge and competence as well as creativity an artist would have to display, that we wonder if it's possible for 3D to be a... this is hard to phrase, I want to say medium in itself because it takes more then one person... but that's not exactly what I mean, because anything can be a medium.

It comes down to an issue of personal expression I think, and personal creation - how much, and how well you put into your images. I think we can all agree that things like filters and default simple shaders are moving more away from art then ever into the realm of purely commercial, mass produced crap. Let's do our part and show the public that there's something better so that they don't just go along with having their world plastered in button-click art.

[fazedesign]

One of the best uses of 3D art in terms of game boxes and in games for Character faces I though, was the original "Commandos: Behind enemy lines" game, it was an AWESOME game, just ultimately hard. But the characters were all really well rendered and all had their own accents and everything love it.

As for the Adventure games, aparently the longest journey is a really good game, as someone mentioned before the in game art is great. Ive half given up on the mainstream gaming industry now though, i find little games made by amatures can be way more fun that any q3a shit. Would like to play Metal Gear solid 2 tho, looks nice

[TylerHunter]

Time for my 2 cents. Im a 3D art fan, so I wont rag on it. Except using it for stills because that is missing the essential idea behind 3D art. The point of 3D art is to create fluid motion and realistic animation without having to draw 1000s of frames. Even though I make 3D stills for personal projects. I dont find such a form of art effecient. I could paint most 3D stills I make in about 1/100th the time. But in the end if it looks good, it looks good. And if it looks bad, it looks bad.

Um yeah..

Tyler

[balistic]

The main reason I do my major photorealistic pieces in 3D is because instead of just being a painter, I get to wear a lot of hats . . . I get to sculpt models, brush textures, write equations for procedural shaders, light for effect, dress a set, and snap a picture. If I don't like the camera angle, I can change it . . . granted, some of my renders take three days, but that's three days of my Athlon pushing pixels instead of me. Try moving the camera on a painting you're 90% finished with sometime

As someone who works in and around photorealism, 3D makes sense because the artist is no longer dependent on photographic reference to acheive said style. Because most renderers are built to simulate a mechanical camera, it becomes possible to endulge in a sort of speculative photoreality . . . I've created scenes from vague memories and my imagination that have fooled professional photographers when presented as photographs . . . it was tough enough to do that in 3D, and I shudder at the prospect of trying to do it flat. I would need to know so much more about perspective, and spend countless hours pressed against my Viewsonic eliminating brush strokes, and then I'd be shit out of luck if I wanted to change anything . . . I'd rather spend that energy on concept and composition than on execution.

There are also 3D still artists who are interested in the CG equivalent of visible brush strokes . . . check out the work of Jeremy Engleman:

http://art.net/~jeremy/cg/inf_cg.html

His OpenGL figure studies are some of my all time favorite pieces of CG (I have a signed Iris of "Figure v5" on my living room wall), and I think you'll agree, are not something that would look better painted.

So I guess what I'm trying to get across is that while 3D is oft misappropriated to tasks it isn't suited for, there are certain areas where it is absolutely unrivaled, even for still images.

[ceenda]

A wide range of thoughts and some points that I hadn't considered. I guess that at the end of the day it goes back to the analogy of the workman and his tools. I even use 3D myself now and again. I guess it's just that 3D rendered advertising just seems to be the "Opium for the masses" at the moment, which is a shame, as I think that we've kinda reached the saturation point for that kind of thing.

[Muzman]

quote:

---

Originally posted by ceenda:
I picked up a copy of the magazine PCZone the other day. There is a picture on the front relating to "Emperor: Battle for DUNE" which is just a prime example of the most awful use of 3D programs. It must have taken ages to render all that, and for what? A crisp, unrealistic and thouroughly plastic-y looking scene with badly jointed and angular characters.

---

I believe this was 3dpalette's pic of the day recently.
I'm with ya though. But I do sympathise with those who adore *anything* 3d. There's something about that CG rendered, textured look that people love. I was once one of them, but I got over it.
The first person game world is where you find it still very strong. I've noticed that people will just drool over something laden with pre-made, over-saturated texturing where something more subtle and realist would be overlooked.

[Setherial]

I agree as well. It has become such a hype thing that it's become mandatory to use 3d, even cheap ugly looking 3d.
I love 3d, yet I've been fed up with the over use of it in games and publictions for a long long time now !!

the only positive side to it is that there are more 3d jobs, which is a good thing for 3d artists like me ) but still I do not approve how things are going these days...

[DiXter]

Damn, I miss those classic 2D games!

[starfish]

Yo ceenda!

yupyup, as much as it's painful to see a bad
2d or 3d rendering of whatever subject,
it's wonderful to see the result of someone
who can use a 2d or 3d program to output
whatever the mind decides to come up with.
an interesting surprise lately is the site
www.rustboy.com.
=)

[ May 10, 2001: Message edited by: starfish ]