3 hours ago, hplus0603 said:

All the Borderlands games look great, and none of them were made to look "realistic."

Perhaps you meant "the ABILITY to do realism only adds options ..." because "trying to look realistic" absolutely removes options that don't try to look realistic.

No, i mean it's possible to utilize realism for example like Pixar does.

Now you can argue we already do that, look ant Kingdom Hearts or something - but i answer it would still look MUCH better with infinite indirect bounces or correct reflections or proper DOF etc.

To further add variation and style, one can decide to add subsurface scattering to every material to generate an overall soft look, or desaturate just the indirect light for film noir, ... Just to list some options we do not have yet, but offscreen rendering already has.

So i think it's primarily the word 'realism' that's wrong here. Usually i use the term 'realltime GI', which sounds less restrictive i hope.

BTW, Borderlands / Telltale games do not look great IMO. They bake the cartoon strokes into the textures, which is exactly the same as baking lighting into textures we did decades ago when there was no per pixel lighting. To me this looks totally terrible. I can't play those games because it makes me constantly upset, while i'm fine with 'proper' cartoon rendering that adds the strokes at the silhouette. 

It depends on a scale of the project you are working on and how many different people are working on it.

If your main concern is the 3D modeling, i would get in depth in whatever it takes to achieve the goal of just enough perfectionism.

And if you have a bigger scale project that you are working on, i would skip the realism part, and stick to the simple solution until i get the whole design working, and only then patch things up.

Well, anyway, when the whole design is put into place, i would say it's worth the time implementing whatever your inner designer aims at. Please fix me on that if there's a better approach, thank you

3D modeling for games is an insane amount of work! I would never seriously attempt it alone.

1 hour ago, Thaumaturge said:

However, conversely, constraints can drive creativity and thus also produce a more varied range of art-styles.

Agree, but removing constraints has an even larger boost on creativity, especially after those constraints exist for decades.

But it takes time to utilize the new possibilities, to see their potential. While working on new tech i often think about what to do with it, what becomes possible, how it it could change games... but those are difficult questions. There is a need for new ideas, and likely they won't pop up in one day.

1 hour ago, Thaumaturge said:

For one thing, the easy availability of realistic graphics produces a trap (or a local minimum): since realistic art is already appealing, it may be that fewer artists will feel inclined to seek out a more distinct style.

I don't think that will become worse. Currently games use pretty similar graphics tech. Years ago you could often even tell the engine a game was using - 'No baked GI - Cryengine', 'Hard shadows - Doom3 engine', 'a bit of everything - UE3'... that's gone. But many games now manage to have a unique art style, and that's worth much more. Further, now we see many titles with pixel, low poly or minimalistic art - more variety than ever. This proofs progress towards realism did not hinder any alternatives.

In general i'm very happy with art in current games - it's the field that has improved the most the last two decades.

I'm also fine with progress in tech.

But i'm totally bored about gameplay, and narratives / characters are mostly ridiculous. Maybe i've just grown out and i would not know how to fix that either.

21 minutes ago, Thaumaturge said:

But how often is this because of the cost of producing assets for a realistic art-style? A sprite needn't call for several textures per model, after all.

Yes, but there is also another reason: Retro gaming. Some people just want old school games or art. We have now what exists in Music for a long time: Some people prefer Led Zeppelin against Nickelback.

24 minutes ago, Thaumaturge said:

I do think that the increased graphical power of widely-available engines likely has helped, indeed, but I'm not fully in agreement with you on its effects.

I think the root of all evil is that production costs have exploded. Indies can't compete with AAA, AAA can't afford risks to drive innovation in gameplay (so they say). 

It's a death spiral. But there are some solutions: Better software for content creation (options are really infinite in this field), and... the asset store? 

30 minutes ago, Thaumaturge said:

I think that there are some interesting things being done here, both narratively and mechanically--perhaps especially coming from indies.

Yeah, 95% of games i like are indie titles. If i try to be objective, still all progress in gameplay of the last decade comes from there. I really believe in the idea to develop games with very small teams and costs (even by a single man).

19 hours ago, RPTD said:

(I look at you UE4 and your "incorrect" PBR (metalness... *shudder*))

Why bother with such details if all your enviroment probes and screenspace fakery provides wrong / incomplete data?

42 minutes ago, cowsarenotevil said:

Is yours objectively more important?

Haha, no, but i think it's worth to mention. Everybody knows some people dislike chromatic aberation, DOF, blur from TAA, motion blur... But i assume few are aware that cartoon strokes in texture hurt someones eyes too. (I also hate rim lighting, and highlighting interactive objects for example, while i like CA and blur.)

46 minutes ago, cowsarenotevil said:

I don't think this is a good analogy at all

Sure it is. Artists paint strokes at the silhouette, at shallow angles and in shadow. So it depends on normal and lighting. Strokes everywhere ignore this the same way than baked lighting does.

I agree it's the only option for the shown art style, but simply blending out certain strokes if the normal faces the eye would make me happy already (If it's worth additional stroke textures).