Are 3D art styles limited?
What are the greatest differentiating factors in art styles in this medium?
I notice that a lot of 3D games look the same - comparing Overwatch to a lot of other games, or all the games aiming for some kind of photorealism, for example. Even low-poly retro or indie games that everyone spams SOUL over don't look all that different.
Are there that few art styles to work with in 3D, or is it just stagnant? Are there some prominent examples of unique 3D art styles? I'm having trouble naming any.
Pic only somewhat related.
Are 3D art styles limited?
Adrian Gonzalez
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Aaron Hughes
Or after thinking about it more, are the difference in art styles just more difficult to discern than in 2D games?
Brandon Wilson
nobody has any thoughts on this at all? I can't be the only one wondering about it
Jaxson Reed
arcsys and GG immediately comes to mind
Xavier Lewis
arcsys makes a bunch of fighters, right? no idea who gg are
Jaxson Adams
after some looking arcsys does a pretty good job of adapting anime styles to 3D, i like how the animations aren't tweened smoothly
Cameron Sanders
I think that 2D art styles can be many things (and look good) while 3D styles can only aspire to be fotorealistic, thats why they all look similar
Carter Parker
after thinking on it more i started searching up examples of 3D art styles
there are some variations on cartoony, like cel-shaded/anime, overwatch/disney, and i'm not sure what to call styles like league or dota but they remind me of world of warcraft
but otherwise examples that come up just point to the architecture - "It's an art deco art style!" and meanwhile the character designs all look like normal ass real life humans
it seems like it's legitimately much harder to achieve a unique style that looks any good in 3D, or straight up impossible, although i hesitate to call it 'solved'
but there's definitely some other styles out there that aren't photorealism at least
Ayden Perez
I meant guilty gear a fighter game made by arcsys youtube.com
Austin Moore
it looks alright, although i'm not sure if that really differentiates itself from other cel-shaded games
dragonball looked pretty different, but i guess that also looks pretty similar to dragon quest
Landon Reyes
you can make everything 2D into 3D you retard
Ayden Gutierrez
kind of, but it either doesn't always work out or it's billboarded sprites like in doom
for example i think guacamelee would look a lot less visually distinct in 3D
Julian Lopez
You're right, but can you tell that all of those are pretty similar (aspiring to look real)? At least they are way more similar than the 2D artstyles are. These don't try to look real, just pleasing to the eye, I think that's what gives them more "freedom"
Tyler Hill
i don't know if i'd call overwatch 'aspiring to look real' rather than 'aspiring to look like a pixar movie'
Anthony Martin
Maybe somewhat, yeah. It's probably because 3D needs lighting to work well, for you to be able to distinguish objects, perceive forms, etc. You can abstract it somewhat with different shading techniques, cel-shading etc, but it's still gotta follow the basic rules of reality. 2D naturally easier to visually understand, you don't need to communicate depth so you can afford to get more crazy.
Nathaniel Butler
following that, it's also that you can represent shading in 2D in much more ways; in 3D you have to write a shader to do it, i remember seeing one that imitated (or tried to imitate) a comic book's style of shading with the diagonal lines, it probably led to a lot of visual artifacts in real time
Julian Miller
Valkyria Chronicles maybe? Yeah it is kinda cool and soul but doesn't really feel like it adds that much. Actual sketchy artwork in a 2D game would carry the benefits of sketchy artwork, the energy, sense of movement, etc you get from a drawing, but as a shader on some 3D models it just looks like, well a shader on some 3D models.
Nolan Edwards
most AAA devs strive for realism, and the result is game looking boring and similar to each other.
that's why I just don't bother with modern gaming, it has so little to offer. there's maybe 2 or 3 aaa games each year that look interesting and not generic, rest is just meh garbage that only young children and unsophisticated normies will appreciate.
Brandon Russell
They aren't tweened at all. Every pose is done manually
Hunter Brooks
that does look kind of neat but i agree with your assessment
maybe 3D art is just cursed and the main benefits for a videogame are to be found elsewhere (like being able to use 3D space, obviously)
Colton Green
that makes it a lot cooler
Hunter Nelson
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Justin Hill
>comparing Overwatch to a lot of other games
Overwatch is wildly popular and other games are riding its coattails.
>or all the games aiming for some kind of photorealism
This trend is twofold: 1, it shows off your sicc grafficks tekk which has been a major penis measurement since the dawn of the 3D era (although we hit a point of diminishing returns ~10 years ago and the only real shakeup since has been real-time raytracing), and 2, realism is the easiest target for the massively bloated AAA development teams of EA and Ubisoft et al. Everyone knows what it looks like, so you don't need to train 300 artists all to copy the exact same quirky artstyle, potentially even having to re-train them every time you change art directors. All those peons can be completely interchangable with no real downtime when you swap them out, which is perfect for the high burnout and turnover of your endless crunch development cycle.
David Nelson
>2d drawings aren't limited by the physical space they would actually inhabit
>in 2d a character's eyes might be pointing forward, but their nose to the side
>squash and stretch
>physically based rendering
>pbr uses the concept that something is either metal or not and value in between is used to avoid aliasing. These kind of non artist driven physicality's make everything similar
Wyatt Parker
doesn't PBR just deal with approximations of how light bounces off of objects?
Leo Parker
>realism is the easiest target
didn't think about that one for large studios, when i consider doing all that work by myself it's overwhelming
>Overwatch is wildly popular and other games are riding its coattails.
well it's not just overwatch setting the trend, art styles like overwatch's have been around for years, if not just in movies instead of videogames
Ryder Gray
Movies can have vastly different aesthetics so I don't know why 3D vidya couldn't
Camden Anderson
such as?
there are a few different art styles in 3D animated movies, but I think they're representative of the limits of the medium
Parker Foster
Technically, but it has resulted in workflows based on it all being similar. Green plastic has certain known values, and steel has known values. Two developers will have similar looking trolleys.
Previously they both would have had to guess/ decide what was best when creating their materials. I always think Halo 3 is the epitome of this even if some parts look like ass.
Leo Lewis
>old orokin void
so much soul, all lost in time.
Fucking canadian hacks.
Aiden Jones
as someone who hasn't messed with that stuff, what's meant by when an engine supports PBR rendering? is it a shader, or is it down to the person making the materials?
if they have 'known values', does PBR just give you a list of materials to select from, or is it more complicated than that?
Gavin Campbell
I think he's talking about regular movies.
Compare a Panos Cosmatos movie to a Wes Anderson movie. Compare Suspiria (1977) to Suspiria (2018). Compare Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk to Hardcore Henry.
Jordan Wright
that's mostly down to choices of lighting and how the scenes are shot, isn't it?
like how along those lines Uncharted looks vastly different from Detroit Become Human, but i was mostly talking about base art style rather than other more specific artistic choices
Jaxon Hernandez
It's a fair bit more complicated than that, but sure.
Look at the wild differences achieved with "just" lighting, and you think 3D vidya is inherently doomed to being samey despite its exponentially greater freedom?
Angel White
>pbr content is just traditional content but with one more light source
???
Justin Clark
>It's a fair bit more complicated than that, but sure.
it's a gross oversimplification but i was just trying to explain that i meant base art style rather than anything else
like i said i'll admit detroit looks different than uncharted but they're both aiming for some form of photorealism; i meant to discuss whether 3D art is limited in certain respects that can cause a lot of it to seem quite similar to each other, despite differences in artistic choices
Carter Gonzalez
the scope in the PBR shaded version has reflections and the scope in the non-PBR version doesn't, plus the metal is somewhat more reflective on the right