GDC 2007: More Than Just A Pretty Map – Creating Next-Generation Materials for LAIR

Speaker: Matthias Worch (Game Designer / Technical Art Director, Factor 5, LLC)
Date/Time: Wednesday (March 7, 2007)   9:00am — 10:00am
Location (room): Room 3007, West Hall
Track: Visual Arts
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Experience Level: All

Session Description: Next-generation materials are more than just an accumulation of color and normal maps. Join us as we take an in-depth look at the techniques that were used to create the highly detailed materials in LAIR. The focus of this session is on the artist. It will present multiple ways to quickly and efficiently create color, normal and height maps for realistic materials. It will also demonstrate different ways of acquiring source data for these maps, for example by scanning real world surfaces. To address the bigger picture, we will look at the material creation process from a technical art director’s perspective. We will review different approaches to a company-wide shader authoring system, and discuss ways to spread authoring knowledge throughout the team.

Idea Takeaway: Attendees will acquire techniques that help them to quickly and efficiently create realistic-looking materials for next-generation games.

Intended Audience: Texture artists and art department managers working on next-generation 3D games.

GDC 2007 Downloads

Local Shockwave Version
Adobe Acrobat .pdf (2.4MB)
Original OpenOffice Impress File (4.5MB)
Powerpoint File (4.7MB)

GDC Downloads

Powerpoint presentations have been added to the Articles page, but I haven’t had a chance to finish the workflow video. Been battling a cold for the last week and my voice still isn’t exactly where it should be. I don’t want to sniff every 10 seconds

GDC Downloads

The Shockwave and Acrobat versions of my GDC slides are now posted on the Articles page. Expect the Powerpoint files and workflow videos during the weekend!

God of War II

Wow. If anybody had been shown this game in 2000 and had been told “This is a Playstation 2 game. This is what this console is capable off!” they wouldn’t have believed it. God of War II looks and plays fantstatic. Of course the game doesn’t look as good as a true PS3 game, but who cares when one is so sucked into the experience? I think I’ll be ready to completely move over to PS3 after God of War II – if this isn’t the swan song for the Playstation 2, I don’t know what is. Awesome job, guys!

Clarification

Maybe, while we wait for the GDC downloads to get finalized, I should clear up some confusion. Various people, after reading summeries of my session on the Interweb tubes, seem to have gotten the impression that my session could be easily summerized as “Lair didn’t look good until we used normal maps – you should all use normal maps!”

I did indeed make that comment in the beginning – as a quip to demonstrate that if it really was that simple, I wouldn’t have anything to talk about in the first place. Normal mapping is a widely used (and not all that complicated) technique that has been been applied successfully in many of the greatest blockbuster games we have played over the past few years. My talk concentrated on the fact that in the end, normal mapping is not a big wonder weapon, as some people might think. Your visual results always depend on the quality of the normal maps that are applied to a game, not the simple fact that you can do it in the first place. I did the session to present a few ways to increase that quality.

I just thought that it would be worthwhile to point out the distinction. Keep in mind that GDC is a developer conference. It’s all about the behind the scenes stuff, and about sharing knowledge that will help our industry to become better at what we do – so that we can all learn, evolve…and get the fuck off this planet. I’m not sure about that last part. But hey, any chance to quote the late great Bill Hicks

Home is…

• Finding a blue feather from one of your parakeets in the freshly washed socks that you’re putting on in a San Francisco hotel room.
• Finding one of her hair rubber bands, which she always leaves all over the house, on your computer desk in the morning.