@VisariLoyalist: That's more the fault of using Vanilla textures/normal maps. If this were a normal CG character with a massive polycount, there would be a lot more detail to it, which would catch the light in more interesting ways. The SSS was also part of that, I just didn't do much to tweak it to help retain sharpness.
Also, adding more lighting/sharpening it up helps with that. But that wasn't the point of this. It was to show that soft lighting has a place in gaming. High contrast lighting is cool, but that's not what this is about. It's the idea of sneaking through a dungeon with a creepy creature just at the edge of the light of a small fire or torch, half shrouded in shadows. Skyrim looks fine, but I think sharp contrast needs to come with a sort of aesthetic that embraces it. Skyrim just feels like a nor terribly advanced engine, without cool Post processing, just lots of hard, simple, jagged things. I think the games looks great. But I like games with a more organic look. Things like Ambient Occlusion and limited ambient lighting may not make things as "sharp" but they are more akin to a real world scene.
It looks a lot different now that I've started on a scene for things to end up in (A bridge over a river, simple but lets me play with day/night and other lighting).
A matter of taste, at the end of the day I think. I just want to make a point that games don't have to look like FEAR with severe ass lighting. They don't need to have some silly ambient light flooding into your eyeballs when you're in a damn cave underground with hardly any source of light.
Also, I did this in a night, and most of the time was spent getting importing meshes/getting UVs to work properly/ remembering to recalculate normals and figuring out to remove doubles.
@sideshow: I know how Skyrim works. I've spent 150+ hours :p But I don't need to do interiors. Just the city itself. But even then, it's a bunch of meshes and textures set together according to some code, so either way it'll probably be a bunch of pieces being brought together in an attempt to keep things accurate. I can't imagine there's a way to import it all together as it is in the game.
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