Walking the graphical Walk in The Witcher 3

This is an hour long love-fest about the graphical and artistic techniques used in Witcher 3. For someone who would like to do game art, there's so much to think about in this video. Everything from texture layering in a landscape to 'gait' in an walk-cycle. What do you think?

 

I think it's mostly irrelevant unless you have their budget - like most AAA slides, workflows etc are incompatible between different developers.

To do well you have to work a bit smarter with a bit less freedom than they have, and focus on the biggest bang for buck things you can do.

 

I think he does a better job selling the game than the reviews.

 

Agree, but a fair bit of the world in Witcher 3 you can buy from the Unity asset store via Manufaktura 4K's stuff (who worked on Witcher 3). Also you could tell a lot of the land was World Machine / SpeedTree.. Nothing particularly taxing and / or time consuming about copying that path.

Of course the city's / clutter must of taken ages, the character artists must of been stressed as the sheer amount of cut scenes / characters is silly and the AAA part of Witcher is the "living world" not so much the static artwork.. So in conclusion holistically it's too much for us mere indies to handle, but quite a bit of it was easily do-able..

Now if you look at Arkham Knight for example, sure the world is vastly smaller. But the amount of bespoke / fluid / intricate artwork is insane, that is AAA grunt in all it's glory...

 

We have it but upon examination, it's not usable in it's present form, and needs a lot more processing: one, the materials are set up for unusable shaders on consoles. These shaders blitz through your bandwidth like nobody's business. Two, they require further processing if you're making an open world or larger title (we are in this theoretical scenario as the context is the witcher 3). So you'll need totally new shaders, simple as that.

Further processing would be to make a lot of the LOD redundant and merge for further distances, ie simplygon. The fact is you can't have hundreds of separate lod cross fading objects. That's a majorly poor way to make Unity sing. What Unity wants is for you to merge your far geometry into single large chunks which are optimised as much as possible. Culling groups feature is ideal for this - distance bands.

So that's quite a bit of work, asset store or no.

Of course you can just use them as-is but you'd be getting a lot less detail on screen before you run out of frame budget. In my book, that is unusable, as in, I would not use it without lots of processing assets.

 

If Unity was to be used, you'd have far more issues than basic things like LOD'ing and shaders. Like there is no current support for Dynamic Navmesh / AI especially in the suited bounds of a game that large, the current GI system can't be used procedurally "on the fly" at run time.. This is only to name one of MANY challenges..

You'd be far better off using UE4..

 

Well, open a discussion about art on a dev forum and you inevitably descend into a discussion about how to shuffle pixels most efficiently, LOD distance and draw calls, and so on. Sorry, was joking there.

I find it interesting because down here in the dirt, Witcher 3 seems like the top of my chosen craft. I think I can learn a few things. Like including gravity in a mere simple walk cycle. I mean, Geralt flexing his leg muscles when he walks uphill, and him leaning a little bit forward when he stomps toward the next monster? Who wudda thunk. Haha.

Sometimes the best art is the art that obscures itself so that you don't see the technique. You just live inside the art, and don't notice it in any other way than how it makes you feel. Then someone comes along with a "Did you notice that?" and you go "Whoa. I didn't. That's so good".

That's true whether you're making a small level in a linear game, or if you're one little cog in a huge Triple-A machine. One can always learn. One can always admire. One can always aspire.

 

That's what professional artists shoot for! The goal is to be so accurate that nobody realizes they are looking at a game world. TF2 doesn't look anything like reality but its charicatures serve their purpose. You don't have to aim for perfect realism, indeed sometimes its easier, much cheaper, and more realistic to what you can achieve if you aim for a style or aesthetic.

Something which struck me in awe at the beginning of the video was his mention of Skyrim. I don't own/have never played it but I instantly knew what he was talking about. That something bothered me when I played Oblivion but I never knew what it was. Erosion is key. Everything in those elder scrolls games is too perfect! There's virtually no indication of weathering which comes to mind.

The Witcher 3 is so god damn impressive. The sheer number of features and complexity boggles my mind, I wonder how they got it right. They didn't just do it, they did it well! BF4 is complex but DICE managed to screw it up for a good year and a half past launch day. They must have hired some real pro's to do everything.

 

One of my team members, who is a music guy, not art or programming, used an example of one of the Witcher screenshots he took in-game as an example of how our game should look. Now..this is purely visual, not anything other than that...not the models, or the textures, but he was pointing out the palette, the colors.

I took a look at a number of screenshots. Some of what he showed me is possible. Witcher seems to be very saturated and uses a strong AO. Personally, I am not fond of the colors. Too dark and grim, and over saturated, for me and probably too dark and grim for our particular game. I think I would feel this "itch" to lighten my screen if I played Witcher III. I don't mind dark on a cloudy day, but when the sun is shining, I want it too look like a sunny day.

Of course, we also discussed the fact that palettes are first of all very subjective and second that you can't use the same palette for different types of game. You need to match the atmosphere to the setting.

We also had a long discussion about post processing and how that can help, including tone mapping and color correction.

I don't think one needs Manufaktura 4K's stuff to make a visually stunning game. I have some of his stuff and don't care for it. I think that a lot of it is style, consistency, and knowing the mood of your game.

I have not played Witcher III or any of those games, but I suspect the grim palette suits the mood of the game and creates a very immersive environment. It fits with the story and the game play. It is that melding of style/mood/atmosphere that makes the art amazing.

 

The great thing about that video is that it wasn't really talking about graphics from a technical perspective. LODs and such don't really come into play with most of what he was talking about. It was things like having timbers on certain landscape features because they would be placed there in real life to prevent erosion. Or having less larger rocks in areas where they are more likely to be washed or pushed away. Maybe it's just because I never knew to go looking for them, or where to find them, but I don't see many breakdowns of game graphics coming from that artistic perspective. It certainly gave me some things to think about regarding the design of the landscape in a project I'm working on, and I'm sure I'll revisit it a few times as I start on and finalize my design.

 

Yeah, that is one I notice due to my geology background. It is interesting how a little realism like that make such a big difference. I remember working on a game where they handed me a map of the world, and the rivers went from sea to sea...that does not happen unless it is an artificial canal.

 

He has other videos as well. The one about Watchdogs was interesting because he pointed out how all these games have entities moving around in the world. Some on foot, some in cars, some in trains, etc but none of them transition between those modes of transportation. They never get out or in of cars or trains. It's an interesting point I never really thought about.

Unfortunately despite how he occasionally mentioned Skyrim (and Morrowind too) in his video I don't believe he has a video for it. Would have loved to see one.

 

Sometimes though, he reminds me of fans who don't really understand the issues in games and nitpicks stuff that most gamers don't care about. However, he says he has used Unity and Unreal. So not sure....

I actually didn't watch the video until after I posted above, but now I have. I agree with him that all the same models in the city was ridiculous. However, I thought there was plenty of talking so not sure why that is a problem, unless it had more to do with the fact that they had "talk" above their heads but didn't talk when targeted?

 

He strikes me as the same type of gamer as myself. A large part of why I play open worlds games is to explore the world and immerse myself in the lore. Actual gameplay mechanics rarely draw me in that deeply.

I think he was primarily complaining about the fact that he couldn't hear their discussions as he was walking along. I know with Bethesda's games the NPCs will often move around and engage each other in discussions regardless of whether you're close enough to make out what they're saying or not.

 

I can certainly relate. With over 3 days of game time play into Fallout 4 I still have only completed 1 main story quest. And I haven't built any buildings in my settlements. Just explored and done side quests.

 

I am the same way...but I don't want to get chased down and attacked by bloodthirsty monsters. I just want to wander and take screenshots. I don't need any game mechanics to enjoy myself.

Tempting to buy the game for that, but I know the first time something attacks me, I would quit. I wish that game developers would put a switch in the game..exploration mode, kind of like Minecraft.

 

At that point it really becomes less of a game and more of a simulation.

 

Haven't tried modding before. It makes me curious how difficult it'd be to remove the enemies from some of these games.

Alternatively you could open the console (at least on Bethesda's games) and kill the mob.

It might work fairly well for taking screenshots when you don't want entities in the way.

 

Or (In Gamebryo games) you can open the console and use the command TCAI. That turns off the combat AI. Mobs go about their peaceful business, and won't attack you. I'm not sure if they'll attack other mobs, but I think not.

 

I like simulations!

 

You can use osme old method that would work great for general cases (not for indoor complex navigation)

There is interesting articles if you want to dig

http://www.dualshockers.com/2014/04/10/the-witcher-3-impressive-new-wip-videos-and-screenshots-show-the-world-and-advanced-occlusion-tech/?utm_content=buffer6389c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/GDC2014/Presentations/Bushnaief_Jasin_Solving_Visibility_In.pdf

 

Looking at that initial video you don't get too far into it before they overextend themselves and ruin the initial realism of being in the shadow of mountains. It's rare that you'd see a hiking path built up with such materials and the building materials for the paths are out of scale too. They tend to be narrow dirt paths. The man's gait was a bit of a military parade gait. The sunny scene at the water with trees in a wind zone is not so good. Then they get back to placing the character in shade again and it does a pretty good job of fooling the eye. The water is too overwrought for a place like where that place looks to be. Trees are not so realistically placed and forget the wind zones already until more effort is put in the trees. Too much wood. That's not to say it doesn't look really, really good but less would have been more in this case for realism.

 

Could be fun to make the shader that does the snow/puddles!

IMO Unity should have more asset store competitions like "replicate the graphical features of the Witcher 3" with a few good prizes like say a first prize of $5000 second prize of $2500 and a few Unity Pro licenses. This could give some good direction to asset store creators, add a tag so if you're looking for particular things you could look through the asset store and remove some of the risk involved.
Lots of these features wouldn't cost a lot of person hours to implement. The shader that does the snow/puddle might take someone who knows how to write shaders a few days(Or months in my case ). The changing foot step noise would be easy to implement and a version that's fully compatible with Mecanim humanoids would be really cool! Even generating maps for the water based on wind zones wouldn't be that hard.

 

You can use whatever you want it doesn't have to be old methods either, I already have Navmesh / AI scripts for Unity.. Takes a fair bit of work to get it right though..

 

By the way, just in case someone doesn't have it already, the Witcher 3 is on sale half off on Steam till Jan 4th.

 

There is also some few small interesting games like Ori for example.

 

True, but those don't normally cost $60. I don't mind paying full price for indie as it's about the same as AAA on-sale.