Hello everyone, I am Ah Zhao. This article is mainly to talk about my views on game art work. The article is a bit long, and it is estimated that few people have the patience to read it.
Friends who know me well should know that in the few years after I graduated from university, I did art work, 3D modeling, painting textures, K animation, recording and mixing, post-production synthesis, etc. I have done it. The program was changed later. Some friends are very curious about how I switched from art to programming, so I also wrote an article to introduce it, so I won’t go into details here.
Since I have worked in art for several years, I think I still have a relatively good understanding of the thinking mode and mentality of art colleagues. Therefore, although I became a programmer later, there has never been any barrier in cooperating with art colleagues.
In the game industry for more than ten years, I have worked with many different art teams, and I have seen good ones and very bad ones. Here I would like to combine some of my own personal experiences and say something that I personally think is more noteworthy.
1. Correct mentality
Because the art material is the most intuitive thing in front of the player. From the screen that the player can see, 100% are art materials. Players can't see planning documents, players can't see code.
So sometimes artists have a game whose success or failure depends on their own illusions. They always want to solve many problems through art, and personally modify many places that they think are unreasonable.
If an artist has this kind of idea, in fact, there is a problem with his mentality, because he feels that the content of a game is made by the artist, and the planning is only to give some opinions when discussing the design plan, and the programming technology is just Under the guidance of the art, put the art materials where they should be placed.
In fact, it is normal to have this illusion, especially when using a game engine such as Unity, which is more biased towards art planning. Artists who do not understand technology at all can use the Unity engine to quickly build a demo that looks pretty good with art materials, so it is easy to give people the illusion that they are omnipotent.
But the real situation is that a game is jointly developed by many people in positions. Although all the art materials are seen, in fact, these art materials are planned and planned by technicians through various code frameworks. After a technical solution for performance optimization, the art materials that have been processed in a specific way are placed where they should be placed. The planning of these plans, as well as the framework design and optimization of the program, are all knowledge that pure art staff do not have. Just like most planners have ideas, but they can't realize them, and most programming technologies have a way to build the world, but they don't have the ability to draw a map. Every position has something he needs to do, and there is a part that he should think about.
Therefore, no one is a savior, so don't be too nervous.
2. Emphasis on technical art posts
Many game art leaders, such as art directors, main artists, etc., all come from pure art backgrounds, and the most common ones are original painters.
I have always been in favor of this situation, because as a commanding role in art work, you must have excellence in aesthetics and a style that you are good at. Skills are easy to learn, but art is difficult to learn. In terms of expressing artistic accomplishment, I personally think that the original artist is indeed the easiest to reflect the level.
When I was an artist, many 3D modelers and animators came out of training courses, including myself. Although technically it may be relatively good, and it is completely fine to build a model and k actions against the original painting, but it may not even be able to draw a decent painting. I think in this case, people with good skills can do the corresponding type of work, but it is not suitable for controlling the overall art style. In this case, I think that a person at the level of an art supervisor or lead artist does not need to be very skilled in certain aspects. For example, he may not be able to build models, K animation, or special effects, but He can control the overall style, which I think is OK.
So here comes the question, since the leadership position of art can not understand technology, then who will understand technology? When there is a problem, who has the final say? At this time, the position of technical artist (TA) appeared.
There is often a misunderstanding here. From the perspective of pure art game staff, what is technical art? Isn't he just a person who writes Shader? I don’t have much work at ordinary times. When I encounter some effects that cannot be copied online, I ask TA to help write an effect, isn’t that the case? If you really think this way, then this art team should stop making games, and can switch to renderings or film and television work, otherwise it will be disbanded soon.
The work of technical art includes many aspects, such as:
1. Develop a large framework for rendering the entire game according to requirements, such as what rendering pipeline to use and what color space to use
2. Customize the standards of art resources, such as customizing the number of faces of the 3D model according to the positioning of the project and the adaptation of the equipment Standard, bone standard, texture size and quantity, etc.
3. Specify the production method of each special effect, and what technology to use to achieve the special effect. Here, it is not necessarily a shader. For example, a special effect can be made with particles or Do it with Animation, how many cameras are used to superimpose, and finally decide which one to use, or make a new implementation by yourself.
4. Write Shader. This is a part that everyone is familiar with, but many art teams are used to copying shaders from the Internet to modify, so although they think this part is the main work of TA, in fact, it may not be too much for TA. Of course, this kind of thinking is wrong. .
5. Make various art auxiliary tools, including 3D software plug-ins, Photoshop plug-ins, Unity plug-ins, etc. 6.
Directly make some aspects of art resources, such as scene lighting baking, which requires more complicated baking parameter settings and require trial and error to yield results.
7. Check the performance problems of various art resources 8, etc.
To sum up, if a game art team has one or more TA colleagues, I feel that it is impossible for them to have nothing to do.
Having said that, some of the hostesses may have opinions. Don’t these things still be done when there is no TA?
Indeed, there are many pure art teams, but up to now there is not a qualified TA colleague. In these cases, either it is an outsourcing company, and all technical specifications have been specified when the outsourcing is issued. Or it can still be supported for the time being.
Why do you say it can still be supported for the time being? That's because each position is supported by experienced personnel, and they do things based on their own experience. For example, hire a special effects artist with a high salary, who has ten years of work experience in a large factory, and claims to be able to solve most of the problems in special effects.
What is experience? When I encountered a problem, I solved it in this way in the last project, and I used the same method to solve it in this project, and it should be no problem. As for why it should be handled in this way, I don't know, or I only know a general idea.
Experience is a double-edged sword. When encountering familiar situations, you can quickly solve problems. However, if the situation changes and the conditions are already different, the same technical means may not be able to solve the problem. At this time, you can't do things based on experience, but need someone who understands the principles to formulate a plan. TA is exactly such a position.
So, that's also part of the mentality. Regardless of the main artist, modelers, animators, special effects artists, etc. are all good, don't pay too much attention to face and experience, and trust professionals. When encountering principled technical problems, you must consult TA, and TA will solve the problem for you. Choose a solution.
This is not shameful at all, it doesn't mean that as a main artist, or a senior artist, it seems that he has to decide everything, and he will lose face. In fact, although TA has made a plan, the pictures he draws may not be more beautiful than yours, and the animations he makes may not be as vivid and smooth as yours. They just perform their duties.
3. All kinds of norms should start from the details to develop habits
To give a small example related to the habits of details is not to belittle the habits of art workers, but just to illustrate a problem of thinking habits.
For a period of time a few years ago, many companies used Photoshop as the interface. In PS, the art colleagues made layers according to the layers, and then specified the properties of the UI components according to the various names given to the layers, and then wrote a The plug-in is imported into the Unity engine to directly generate UI interface presets. This method has also been tried in my company. After all, it is not a difficult technology, and it can be realized by writing a script.
The reason for the person who proposed this solution is that artists do not know Unity, but they basically use Photoshop, and they are very familiar with Photoshop, so it will definitely be much easier and simpler to make the interface in Photoshop.
In fact, the problem I encountered was that there was no problem at all when the artist used the Photoshop collage layer as the interface. There is a missing space or the like, which leads to problems with the generated UI presets. These things are not difficult, and art colleagues can also teach them well, but the chance of making mistakes is still relatively high. Although you can write scripts to check grammar, you can’t prevent various possible mistakes, and if a new person takes over, it will be difficult. A short-lived disaster.
In my more than ten years of game work experience, the most successful UI production solution is not to use Photoshop as the interface, but in the era of web games, the company itself made a UI editor according to the project situation. UI components and lists can be dragged up by the artist himself and generate code. Such an editor with low error rate and high efficiency is ideal.
Looking back, such an editor already exists in Unity itself. We build a canvas in the scene, drag various controls onto the canvas, layer them, and directly select the alignment method. Then I write a tool. Wouldn't it be great to convert scenes into UI presets and generate UI code directly? Artists can even learn such a complex Photoshop, can't they learn such a simple Unity spell UI function? This is actually just a preconceived mentality of resisting learning. When Unity was just a small engine that was less well-known than Cocos or Flash many years ago, it was normal for an artist to not want to waste time learning Unity operations. Now Unity has become the most The mainstream mobile game R&D engine is now, I don't think it's too much to learn.
Therefore, the plan of using Photoshop as the interface to import into Unity was rejected by me in a short time. The reason is very simple. What the art staff lack is not technology, but various specification details. Photoshop can help them solve only technical problems, and cannot solve the problem of standard habits.
This statement may make many artists find it difficult to accept, but it is true. Because art work itself is a very emotional thing, when I draw a picture, what I pursue is the effect and artistic conception. I would be willing to spend 10 hours to draw a picture, but I might not spend 2 seconds to think about it A reasonable file name is used to store it. If there was a picture called aaa before, then it is almost enough to save a file called aaa2 this time. I think it is normal for art workers to have such a habit of thinking. If the program dares to call me because I named it aaa2, I will definitely scold me back. It’s fine if you don’t praise me for my beautiful paintings, but just because of a name, as for it?
But the premise we are discussing is that what we are going to do is the art resources of the game engine, so for a file, its naming convention, capitalization, storage folder, file category classification, unit used, center point alignment The method, etc., must be followed meticulously according to the regulations. After all, the program is rational. As long as you make a little mistake, it may not be loaded. You don't want to spend 10 hours on a picture that can't be used for the simple reason of being named aaa2, right?
4. Don’t just look at the surface
After a problem is found in the project, the most common sentence I hear is, "It is fine on my computer". This sentence is also often said by programmers, but in fact, artists say it more.
For example, after a model is put into a battle scene, it cannot be seen. The modeler said that it looks good on my computer, and then took a screenshot of the model preset as proof. Upon further inspection, it was found that the model was only 0.01 meters high and was obscured by grass. It is a very common problem that the scaling unit is wrong when making a model. Although everyone may say that this is common sense, there are still people who keep making mistakes.
For another example, after loading a certain scene, the frame rate of the game drops directly from 60fps to 10fps. Then the scene artist said, I don't see any problem with the scene? Then I checked for a long time and found that each tree has tens of thousands of faces, a forest is placed, and a collision body is hung on the grid of each tree. Colliders cannot be attached to non-functional models, and mesh collisions should not be used as much as possible. Mesh collisions with a high number of faces will cause serious frame drops. Once these problems are mentioned, everyone will say that they are common sense, but people still make mistakes.
For another example, when a certain special effect is packaged on the mobile phone, the display is messed up. Then the special effects artist will take screenshots to prove it, and I display it normally in the Windows Unity editor. After checking for a long time, I found that the special effects artist secretly downloaded an unknown Shader from the Internet, which contained a bunch of messy macros, which made it unsupported on some mobile phones.
It is not illegal to write Shader, and it is not shameful. But if you use Shader indiscriminately, after the project is launched, you may have the opportunity to experience various emergency repairs, bug fixes, and bug fixes. So I always don't recommend copying a Shader on the Internet without knowing it. If there is a problem, I may not be able to solve the problem at all.
To sum up, in the game engine, there are many details that need to be paid attention to. It is not like making decoration renderings or film and television animations. As long as the rendered pictures look good, there is no problem. There are still many things worth studying. place. Therefore, a reliable TA is still needed.
5. Enrich your means of realization
In the game, to achieve an effect, there are often more than one means.
For example, if I want to make a small cutscene animation, I can use Unity’s built-in Animation to animate it, use Timeline to do it, use a third-party plot plug-in, or write a control player to do it myself. There are many methods, but different methods have their own pros and cons and may not be suitable for all situations. If there is only one method, what should we do when this method cannot be used?
The more common situation is to do special effects. For some special effects artists, special effects equal particle systems. Even if it is simply to put a picture on it, he also uses particles, just change the number of emission to 1, and then the duration can be connected. Then, if you want to display several pictures in sequence, you also need to set several layers of particle emitters, one triggers one, and each emits one particle.
In fact, this is not necessary. A particle system looks harmless and powerful. In fact, you may not even have 1% of the functions in it, but you still have to create a complete particle system. Memory for all emitter properties, just to render one image, two triangles? It would be nice to just drag a patch up, if you want more than one to appear, it is the same to put up an animation. If you want to superimpose a transparent method, hang a shader ball with a specified Shader on the grid rendering or UI. And the particle system is sometimes not suitable for use, such as special effects placed on the UI, if it is made with particles, there will be a problem of layer superposition, if it is made directly with pictures, there is no problem.
The same problem will also appear in other art positions, such as animation, 2D animation can be sequence frame animation, spine, keel, 3D animation can be bone animation, vertex animation, and the means of animation fusion can also be realized according to different animations. Batch rendering can be static batching, dynamic batching, GPU Instancing, SRP Batcher, etc.
So you can't eat all the fresh tricks. In your spare time, you still have to study more different technologies in the same field, so that you can have more choices.
6. Communication is very important
This seems like nonsense. But in fact, many people really don't like to communicate.
To give an example from personal experience, the planner made an order for the art, and needed to make a map of new functions, with planning documents attached. The cycle is 5 days. After receiving the list, the artist said that there is no problem. Everyone was safe and sound. On the 4th night, the planner came to ask how the map was doing, and then the artist gave a complete high-precision design drawing, telling the planner that it was completed one day ahead of schedule. As a result, after planning, the direction of the design was completely wrong. There was only one day left, and it seemed too late to overthrow and redo it. Then you can only eat it hard and change the planning document according to the wrong design.
Why is there such an embarrassing situation? In fact, the art team designed this map internally, and it was only shown to the planner after discussions, sketches, discussions, revisions, and revisions. Then why not show it directly to the planner at the sketch stage? Then every process of discussion and modification should also involve planning? This may consume a little time in the process, but at least the general direction is not wrong.
Some art teams may think this way, if I show you the sketches, will you think my drawing level is very low? How about I draw until I am satisfied before showing it to you, so that you think my level is good? In fact, there is no need to be like this. Even if you are a non-artist, as a game practitioner, you should at least know what the meaning of the sketch is, and you will not think that your level is low just because you see the sketch.
From the point of view of thinking habits, the direction of thinking of pure artists and the direction of thinking of planners will have deviations, because from the perspective of the overall art performance, artists will set some key performance points and some deficiencies, and According to the degree of aesthetics, strengthen the key points and weaken the shortcomings. But these key points and deficiencies are only aesthetic. From a planning point of view, some information will indeed become unsightly after being added, but this information is the core content of the gameplay, and even if it is unsightly, it must be added.
This kind of contradiction is not impossible to solve, but it requires communication, mutual accommodation and compromise in order to come up with a more satisfactory solution.
Therefore, the artists seem to be very independent in the project, and often an art team is in a room with the door closed. But in fact, the art team needs to communicate in many places, such as communicating the direction of thinking with the planner, discussing the implementation plan and technical standards with the TA, and connecting with the program technology to use resources, and so on.
I have talked a lot of nonsense, and I don’t know if it is right. If you are interested, you can discuss it.