WoW is not good rendering, but good art.

I was having a discussion with a senior enigineer at a major online games company, and we were dicussing low polygon bandwidth, rendering, and WoW.

Apparentely, what they have discovered, is that you do not need an advanced rendering engine to do great work.

WoW, for example, does not rely on your graphics card but insteads relies on great texture artists and the pre-baking in the actual art itself.

What does this mean for SecondLife?

I believe that means we have all the tools at our fingertips to do great stuff. New rendering tricks are not necessary from the powers that be.

So the next time you curse the lack of lighting or shadows or some cool rendering trick - I suggest you log on to WoW and take a look around and realise that the problem is not SL, but rather a lack of advanced texturing skills amongst those who are building in SL.

Many of us have already been going in this direction. Groups like Bedazzle, Neil and Neph, some folks at The Port, and somebody named Aimee Weber have been baking textures for quite some time.

I have also been hard at work ramping up on third party rendering tools to produce dramatic and accurate lighting, shadow, and texturing effects. The new RadioRadio club in Midnight City is the first major example of an SL build with all textures rendered in Maya.

Here are a few snaps of Midnight City that show my creative use of texturing to create the illusion of live illumination:

Please help the uninformed, what is pre-baking?

I disagree with your statement of "lack of advanced texturing skills" as the sole issue with the graphics of SL. SL was not designed to handle a bunch of images that need to be downloaded to be seen.

Rather than letting the rendering engine do all the work, you use photoshop or whatever to do the lighting effects, and similar things.

For example, dynamically rendering shadows with the sun is a lot trickier than just putting a shadow on the ground statically.

My point here is that we need to recognize that other efforts are beating us, but not because of some lack of programming skill on the part of our LL development team, but rather because we (the builders) aren't creating the textures to compete with these other efforts.

Aimee, that's amazing, it looks like parts of my Half Life2 game. Nice!

One more (sorry 5 was the max per post)

While it is true that it is mainly the high quality of the artwork in WoW that accounts for its beauty, that is overly simplifying it. I have played WoW on several different video cards, and the quality does change as you go higher end. It takes advantage of video card hardware to make it look even better on high end systems, while maintaining an acceptable compromise between visual quality and performance on the low end. Great textures are one thing. A great game that manages to look beautiful on a Geforce 2 and a Geforce 7800, at 800X600 or 1600X1200, and still manage to throw in a lot of visual effects on the latter card definitely has a graphics engine that is not just about painting pretty textures.

I believe you are right on some fronts, but you seem to have overlooked another issue altogether...
SL is also an economic sim; the market rate for a texture is subject to elasticity issues.

Please read past the <RANT> tags to get to a potential solution


<RANT>
Most people I have talked to are not interested in paying scale for a texture, no matter how spectacularly rendered. Most people are not willing to pay more than $L15 - L$20 for a single texture, or L$250 for a bundle. This is not to say that no-one is so willing, only that the market will not bear a luxury item of that sort in sufficient quantity to make it worth the artists' time.

Keep in mind, also, that textures larger than 256^2pixels, such as those needed for such luxury work, are also immensely slow to load and very subject to detail loss in the current format used (JPEG 2000 I believe.)

In the end, if people were willing to pay for expensive high-end, slow to load, lossy graphics, they would already have done so.
</RANT>


OK! Now for the potential solution:
Gradual market introduction... called progressive exposure...
In general, people are generally not willing to pay L$100 for a single texture, though they will pay that much for a three prim plant where they can't even USE that texture in other things...silly? Yes... Real? Yes.

BUT: If texture makers gradually introduce more and more sophisticated (and time consuming) techniques gradually... slowly bumping up the expected quality for a texture, the requisite price can increase equally gradually to accommodate. As long as the jump in price is not too severe, people can get used to paying the new (higher rate)

For a RL example of this phenomenon, look at what has happened to the price of gas...

Since 1976, the cost of gas had more than doubled with very little grumbling from the populace... the change was gradual, and the economy absorbed it... more importantly, the proportion of consumer spending on said gas actually increased...and still epople didn't grumble too badly.

Recently, however, there was a BIG jump in the price of gas... and people grumbled a LOT. Although this is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison, because the quality of the gas has not increased, the somparison is still suitable for our purposes here... which is to show that a consumer base can absorb significant amounts of change as long as the homeostatic nature of economics is respected... make a small change, allow the system to restore equilibrium... make another change... wait for equilibrium... and so on.

as aimee pointed out, there are a number of builders/builds in SL using baking techniques to take their builds to the next level. Of course this forces you to fix a time of day, while actual clients can change the height of the sun at will, but that's a small price to pay for a visually richer build.

(Dnate, I'm pretty sure he's talking about drawing the shadows you need directly into your textures, rather than expecting the 3D to create dynamic shadows based on your prim placement)

Even though the majority of builds do not use this technique, I am sure that it will spread. I am also hoping that builders also do their part to improve performance by using smaller textures where possible. I wrote about this here:

You can texture a great game environment in SL right now, but can you really build it without running into massive performance problems? This is why SL is still largely for building or for socializing, but hasn't yet really become a place for entertaining outside of those two areas.

So I think it would be great to improve the overall look of SL, but we still need to see performance, stability, and physics improvement before we are anywhere close to where you want us to be. (and a programmer would probably have a whole list of scripting/communication additions that are necessary too)

alain, I would just note that you don't need to use massive images to create a great build with atmospheric textures / immersive lighting effects.

I think aimee does a huge amount of her work in 256x256, and it still looks awesome.

If you're suggesting that SL is somehow in direct competition with WoW or that SL users have some inherent duty of being as good as a *PAID*, *professional* content team... well, I want some of that shit you've been smoking

I should actually point out, lower resolution often looks better (probably something subconcious), however, 95% of textures should be 256x256. A tip I should offer:

Shrink to 256x256, then emboss very slightly -- the combined effect will look good, and keep framerates high.

-Adam

Doesn't prebaking come with it's own problems?

And by the way, the SL client needs to be faster period, if nobody did any dynamic light or stuff like that in the game, then the client would still have subpar performance.

Anyway, sure, you take a lot of CPU load off by "prebaking" textures, because clients don't have to render shadows on the fly, which has always killed performance, however by using the pre-baking technique you would either drastically reduce size and thus quality of textures to keep the same load for rezzing a scene.

After all if I use 1 texture for 90% of a house that's gonna rez a lot faster than 50 variations of that single texture, each its own texture, to prebake the whole house, no?

Also prebaking doesn't take into account decorations and such and therefore is really only doable if you know already what you're going to build, the entire scene so to speak. Adding a new table to a prebaked room will make the table stand out like a sore thumb. You can fix that by doing shadows not by baking them into textures, but by using them as alpha textures on a special prim overlayed on the walls/floors etc. Of course that means more prims, and a lot of alpha blending which is buggy and not the fastest process ever either.

But one thing I -am- sure about wether prebaking is the end-all-solution for texturers, Aimee's texturing she posted above look awesome and a great deal more life-like than most scenes I've witnessed in SL.

EDIT: By the way I'd like to know more about how people do their prebaking. Do most simply use tricks in photoshop, or do most actually make their build in a 3d program first, render out all the textures, then rebuild in SL?

DNA Prototype uses a technique he calls "Prim Shading"... which essentials involves an alpha layer texture that gets darker towards the bottom. Put this on top of your 1 texture where it applies and you have shading effects. This provides great shadow effects in Response under things like awnings...

I agree with Aimee. People have been pre baking textures in SL for a long time. Whenever you see those jaw dropping builds, look closely to see whats going on.

Sure, that would work, but what if you're on a budget? Lord knows I can't double or worse my prims on my little piece of land.

Got a pic of WOW? I've never seen it.

Great textures can go a long way. I love the baking. But I prefer building that includes a lot of prim work, the more the better, if it's done well.


Combine them both and you'd have a winning combo!

Layered textures...

World of Warcraft has a hand drawn artistic style. In terms of actual visual and texture quality, Everquest 2 actually is much more detailed and has an engine that scales from low end to high end. WoW gets all of the attention because the art is so visually appealing, but EQ2 is definitely superior from a technical standpoint. Either way, it is not just about the textures - it is about the ability of the graphics engine to scale and to utilise the hardware effectively.

EQ2 RUNS.. i guess you could say on a lower end machine, but its not the same game experaince I have on my 6800.. I have 2 machines one with at 5200, and one with a 6800, WoW looks close, EQ2 is vastly different because of how then engine scales back.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/screenshots/screenshot.aspx?imageindex=1&Set=0

for some wow screen shots.

Yeah EQ2 is not nearly as lower end friendly as WoW is, though you do have a huge amount of control in EQ2 over your graphics settings. I think Sony missed the boat in so many ways with EQ2, which is a shame, since WoW nailed it and EQ2 is actually interesting once you get past the crappy interface and stratospheric system requirements.

I had a friend go tell me he would never pay eq2 again, it looked so bad.. i am like dude..you have a 4600.. of course it did..hehe

I play wow cause thats what i have time for, EQ2 is to much time.. i like SL for just chating and playing with textures and photoshop..hehe Its a nice change of pace.

Texture baking by itself is not a solution in SL. SL's engine doesn't work the same way that others do. Most are either doing real time shadows or their engine renders everything in two passes, one for textures and the other for lighting. To get the same kind of look in SL requires every surface to have its own custom texture with the lighting already baked in. Trying to keep all those individual textures straight and put in the right spots is tedius and frustrating. When you're done you have a gorgeous looking build that eats texture bandwidth like a black hole. I'm working on incorporating more of these tricks in my builds but for it to be useful it needs to be done as a mix between cutom baked and standard techniques. You still need to figure out how to reuse every texture in as many places as possible to keep the number of textures down, and this gets even more challenging because it will look wrong anywhere it doesn't match the direction of the implied light sources of the surrounding textures.

Here are some more examples of baked textures in SL. I would love to do this on a full size build (I have a small store in Aqua that's 100% baked textures... shelves cast shadows and so on). Not coming from a game design background, optimizing isn't exactly my forte

Here's some examples of my experiments with baked textures...

Since nobody answered my question, I'll go on assuming I was right about prebaking raising both prim count and texture load, probably a lot at that.


So this is kinda false. Why is this false? Because what if you can't tripple or quadruple your primcount to add shadows for everything? I can be much more prim conservative if I don't use pre-baked textures whatsoever and create things that are not so visually appealing. If you try and prebake a house for someone on First Land then well, you'll have a very visually appealing house and nothing to put in it because you just blew through your prim allowance, hurray!

The increased texture load can't possible be desirable in all cases either.

So yes, sometimes the problem is SL and that little bit up there can only really be 100% true when the builder in question has no prim allowance to take into consideration and doesn't care a bit about load for rezzing and can thus make as many textures as they damn well please. I can assure you though that no matter how skilled, every builder has to take into account load and prim counts unless they're a Linden.

Alpha texture tricks for shadows and the like are similar to, in the world of techno music, using "frozen" samples of an analogue synth instead of actually playing the instrument itself: it's effective on a static level (i.e. playing a single note of a one-shot clip over and over), but once things really get dynamic and tones modulate and pitches bend wildly, you can easily see where the cracks of the illusion end.

Well it doesn't need to increase prim count, however, yes, texture load does increase.

Though, the trick Adam mentioned above should not be ignored.

I think it would be cool if LL could have a texture layer and a lighting layer to all surfaces, and you should be able to use your client to bake in the lighting layer statically by pressing a button and setting your lighting preferences.

When people visit your build they see the lighting layers that you have baked in.

The only problem is that this might get overused and suddenly the asset server doubles in size.