Schrompf, on 04 Mar 2013 - 04:29, said:
For non-artist programmers, creating a game was always easy.

Not really.

There is more to making a game than implementing a few algorithms. There is a unity between programming, design, and art. Most people tend to get stuck at square one and screw around without making any progress.

Even a roguelike requires good design and a good personality.

Using random pieces of purchased stock art will also produce a disjointed, soulless, eyesore of a turd. Art is like a recipe. Just like food, if you throw random stuff into a bowl and mix it up, something foul is come out of it.

A good game manages to be greater than then sum of it's parts. Programmer-only produced stuff tends to be much less than the sum of it's parts. They create a delivery method with nothing to actually deliver.

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I was really surprised at what I managed to achieve with Blender and a tutorial showing how to box model and rig a character using blueprints.

People who don't do art tend to highly misunderstand it. Like it's some insanely difficult skill that is out of reach, and a fairy visits artists in the night to dump magical talent dust all over them. No different than the first time we all looked at C code and it looked like a giant mess of nonsense and random brackets. Soon enough it all makes sense.

It's a skill. You build it up by spending the time required to do a good job. Learn your shapes, color theory, proportions and composition rules, and you're half done. Also build up a good reference library to assemble mood boards to work from. Once you understand those you can start to make great looking art.

Most modeling and drawing is done with guides. It's not cheating, as some people think.

Most characters start out as posed stick figures, and then volume is added later: http://0.tqn.com/d/np/cartooning/9781593371456_0084_001.jpg

Most models are done on top of reference images.
http://www.creativecrash.com/tutorialimages/300/genshape_04.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ToUxG-guwm0/Tp7ZWGgw9UI/AAAAAAAAAFg/99oEpYYVM0s/s1600/FinishedMesh.jpg
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzthnksrCS1r9xxuwo1_1280.jpg

A lot of games with nice graphics have had characters which were nothing more than 12 cubes mapped to a simple skeleton, with texturing that make it look like the cubes weren't actually cubes. Just like 2D art, that model can be refined over time to create something extremely nice.

Everyone is capable of creating some nice art for their games IF THEY WANT TO PUT THE TIME IN. Which most don't. It's always about shortcuts, and algorithms that add rendering techniques that bring out the flaws in their work even more.

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dunno about now, but last I checked the free 3D modeling apps situation was still lame, and in my case ended up mostly writing my own tools for my uses, but they turned out to not really be "good" either.

Nonsense.

Blender is awesome. It's gotten so awesome since the 2.5 release that Autodesk (Max, Maya, SoftImage) has been in damage control mode at the recent CG trade shows. http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7032/6511671325_9d1bc358b6_z.jpg

All the old criticisms of Blender were valid before then. I hated it too, and used to call it Blunder. But that time is gone. They started a company that runs on donations, and they treat it like a commercial project, even doing big new feature releases every 2 months. They went and started projects (a 3D game, cgi movies, and a live action movie using blender for all the motion tracking, compositing and VFX). Every time there was something about the program that caused them problems or prevented progress, they fixed it.

The old interface is dead (yes, it SUCKED and didn't make sense prior to 2.5), and the new one is awesome and modern. It's 100% customizable layout wise. It's no longer all hotkey based and everything is easy to find with your mouse. If you can't find something, hit space and type it. There are radial style menus coming in the next release.

The modeler has been redone from scratch, and can now handle n-gons, and several other features it used to be missing. It's also extremely easy, and fun to use.

The UV editor is super easy to use, and one of the best available. It can do multiple channels, auto generate optimized lightmap layouts, and you can even go in and paint on your UV mapped model in real time. Very useful for fixing texture seams. It can also auto unwrap your model while you just choose where to place the seams.

Making skeletons, editing bones, and rigging characters has been refined to the point of being retardedly easy. Their are several options for rigging and weighing automatically that work extremely well, and they added the rigify plugin that makes it even easier and includes a pre-defined skeleton. You can even sketch a skeleton by free drawing in the 3D viewport and then having it turned into a set of bones automatically.

The animator can handle game style editing, where you build individual animations, and even build pose libraries. This was a problem you mentioned above, where you said programs could only do deal with whole scenes. I'm doing it as I type this.

Texture baking works extremely well. It can do normals, lighting, ambient occlusion, vertex colors (this is good for a base color layer on UV maps that you can later add detail to!)

It also does a bunch of other stuff outside the scope of making game content, so I won't mention it.

I just turned 31 and I have been fooling around with tools like these since I was about 10. That's about 21 years of modeling. I've gone through dozens of programs in that span of time. Blender has become so good that I uninstalled everything else and use Blender exclusively for all my graphics needs now.

I don't praise Blender because it's OSS or any other stupid religious reason. I say it as someone whose spent the last 20 years sitting in front of 3D editors, and put in thousands of hours. It's mature and high quality. It's so easy to use I honestly don't know what more anyone could want from it.

People who blame Blender for anything at this point are like people who blame Visual Studio for not being able to code. Both programs are mature and do their job extremely well, but they are only tools, and can't create for you!

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But what of the other side of the coin? What if you're a non-artistic programmer instead?

Blender.org
BlenderCookie.com <-- watch all the videos

http://www.the-blueprints.com/ <-- insane blueprints collection. I wish I had this years ago
Google image search

On deviant art, people post templates and photo references by the gigabyte. eg: http://browse.deviantart.com/art/Free-3D-Model-Reference-Pack-F-Pose-1-126304205

That's everything you need to start pumping out art. Free, easy to use 3D editors, never ending free or cheap reference materials, etc.. didn't exist 10-15 years ago. There isn't such thing as someone who can't create art. Just people who don't want to put the time in.

This is no different from enabling tech like Unity3D. Unity does everything possible to help you and give you opportunity, but you still have to put the time in to learn how to create something.

I'd agree with you if the question would have been about "good" games. But without the term, if we're really just talking about games as interactive media where you can do things and see the resulting changes in the game world. And that's the one fucking core task of a game programmer.

I stand by my words: coders always had it easier, and in my opinion the opportunities for non-coders only start to catch up in the recent years. That says nothing about the quality of the game, though.

I'm not sure that learning game engines and scripting is trivial for someone with no programming knowledge, they still need to learn plenty about game programming, even if only higher level stuff. You might as well say that all a programmer has to do is open up a paint program and start using it, or use a 3D renderer.

Procedural generation is a good idea, and I'd extend that to "programmable" solutions in general, e.g., particle systems, things like shadowing, lighting, texture splatting - things that can be done in software rather than needing an artist.

Art and programming and music and other aspects of games are there.

An individual game developer will probably try to make the best that he is passionate about in games. He will try to reflect what he had in mind to the best possible way in limited time. Hence in general the artist can make good graphics and sync with code. And a programmer with his skill, rather will be inclined in the way the game play proceeds.

Hence both the games can be unique and attract a specific audience. Basically if the idea is great it can be felt. The wavelength of the developer be it artist or programmer , should match with the kind of audience they are targeting for gaining popularity. And monetization yet again is another skillset.

Individual game developers mostly end up missing details in various aspects just because they could not find enough time to create it as they were preoccupied. Such as background music and effects are pretty much ignored by everyone. They end up using something that was freely available or quickly googled on the net.

I think any game to succeed requires a bigger time to develop and a lot of time to match the wavelength with end user requirement at every step of game.

For creating a a game that is unique and can get the player hooked to the game, it has to have unique characteristics that are forged in the valleys of complex concepts of art and programming, technical designing, localization, music, effects, monetization, etc, etc etc..and there are enough valleys and traps that even large gaming companies have to tread safely. Individuals can tread better sometimes.

S

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dunno about now, but last I checked the free 3D modeling apps situation was still lame, and in my case ended up mostly writing my own tools for my uses, but they turned out to not really be "good" either.

Nonsense.

Blender is awesome. It's gotten so awesome since the 2.5 release that Autodesk (Max, Maya, SoftImage) has been in damage control mode at the recent CG trade shows. http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7032/6511671325_9d1bc358b6_z.jpg

All the old criticisms of Blender were valid before then. I hated it too, and used to call it Blunder. But that time is gone. They started a company that runs on donations, and they treat it like a commercial project, even doing big new feature releases every 2 months. They went and started projects (a 3D game, cgi movies, and a live action movie using blender for all the motion tracking, compositing and VFX). Every time there was something about the program that caused them problems or prevented progress, they fixed it.

The old interface is dead (yes, it SUCKED and didn't make sense prior to 2.5), and the new one is awesome and modern. It's 100% customizable layout wise. It's no longer all hotkey based and everything is easy to find with your mouse. If you can't find something, hit space and type it. There are radial style menus coming in the next release.

The modeler has been redone from scratch, and can now handle n-gons, and several other features it used to be missing. It's also extremely easy, and fun to use.

The UV editor is super easy to use, and one of the best available. It can do multiple channels, auto generate optimized lightmap layouts, and you can even go in and paint on your UV mapped model in real time. Very useful for fixing texture seams. It can also auto unwrap your model while you just choose where to place the seams.

Making skeletons, editing bones, and rigging characters has been refined to the point of being retardedly easy. Their are several options for rigging and weighing automatically that work extremely well, and they added the rigify plugin that makes it even easier and includes a pre-defined skeleton. You can even sketch a skeleton by free drawing in the 3D viewport and then having it turned into a set of bones automatically.

The animator can handle game style editing, where you build individual animations, and even build pose libraries. This was a problem you mentioned above, where you said programs could only do deal with whole scenes. I'm doing it as I type this.

Texture baking works extremely well. It can do normals, lighting, ambient occlusion, vertex colors (this is good for a base color layer on UV maps that you can later add detail to!)

It also does a bunch of other stuff outside the scope of making game content, so I won't mention it.

I just turned 31 and I have been fooling around with tools like these since I was about 10. That's about 21 years of modeling. I've gone through dozens of programs in that span of time. Blender has become so good that I uninstalled everything else and use Blender exclusively for all my graphics needs now.

I don't praise Blender because it's OSS or any other stupid religious reason. I say it as someone whose spent the last 20 years sitting in front of 3D editors, and put in thousands of hours. It's mature and high quality. It's so easy to use I honestly don't know what more anyone could want from it.

People who blame Blender for anything at this point are like people who blame Visual Studio for not being able to code. Both programs are mature and do their job extremely well, but they are only tools, and can't create for you!

well, "last I checked" in this case, was formally, over half a decade ago (~ 2005), which is about when I went and wrote my own 3D modeling stuff...

I checked again more recently (since posting this), and Blender has apparently gotten a lot better since then, at least as far as being more useable and not giving Python-related error messages whenever I clicked on something, ...

of course, they seem to have dropped support for some of the 3D model formats I use, ...

of course, they seem to have dropped support for some of the 3D model formats I use, ...

Have you checked the Add-Ons settings? Most of the import/export formats, and other add-ons, aren't enabled by default.

went and checked...
they are not in the addons list.

the main format in question is AC3D / ".AC" files.


in any case, my engine uses a modified AC3D as its main model format, with it being a slightly fudged WRT how it handles textures (uses material names rather than raw files), also has skeletons and animations glued on (as separate files, with the ".ac" file holding the basic mesh, a ".bone" file to define the skeleton, a file for each animation, a file to define the combined contents of a model, ..., pretty much all text files), though my engine can also load Valve SMD as well (just didn't like as much as the models were triangles-only and the format used angles-based funkiness, whereas I prefer matrices or quats, and modeling with polygons, ...).

I had briefly looked at IQM at one point, but didn't get around to adding support for it (didn't seem to be a huge need).


it appears though that if really needed, Valve has a script available to allow Blender to use SMD.
there are also scripts for the AC3D format as well, at least according to the internet...

Thanks for all the replies and links, I'm actually quite aware of most of these tools and have indeed dabbled with photoshop/GIMP as well as blender. But I'm not talking about "making art" vs. "programming", but rather, the availability of existing art vs. easily customizable engines/tools. As an artist, the tools almost let me make any game I want with virtually no coding at all (FPS, TPP, exploration, point and click, narrative, side-scroller, JRPG etc.) with any artstyle; but as programmer, the free art assets out there only allow for very narrow categories - 2D isometric medieval fantasy or 3D office space is basically all I can do.

Yes I could make art myself, but that's not the point of this thread, I wanted to focus on using what is already out there.

But so you guys don't call me lazy, I have dabbled with photoshops and blenders quite a bit. Have a look at this little scene from my game engine that is wholly made of my own "programmer art." But that's as far as I can get with my own skills - cartoony little models or neon-glowy abstract art. I just found that pretty... limiting? But I guess it's my own fault for preferring more realistic styles rather than abstract/pixel/cartoony :/

And the sheer amount of time required to model, uv unwrap and texture even a simple model vs. connecting a few kismet nodes in UDK...