Quote:Original post by Yann L
Quote:Original post by Numsgil
Do your artists create their art in huge canvases of 8192x8192, feed it in to your pipeline, and have your pipeline set a more sane resolution?
Yes, pretty much. Not 8k, but usually around 4k, and never below 2k. Our artists are not allowed to make any decision for the final texture resolution used in the 3D scene. The technical team does that.
Heh, that's... not the way things are where I work :) Not that all our artists are all that technically minded, of course, but generally they're the ones deciding on compression and resolution.
Yeah, I guess if you're insulating your artists entirely from all technical considerations, DXT compression would be included in that.
Quote:
And it gets worse if you let them mess around with shaders. Never let your artists mess with actual shader code. Artists do not understand if you tell them 'look, we have these great new curved local reflections ! But they're quite heavy on the pipeline, so please use them sparingly and only where they're really well visible !'. Yeah, right... After two minutes, every single object in your 3D scene uses blurred curved reflections, because the artists thought they'd look better than glossy speculars...
Yes, I'm familiar with this phenomenon. The trick we use here is to pull up perfhud, check which draw commands are taking too long, and ream the artist(s) responsible. It's usually the same one or two artists, and they (slowly) learn their lessons and don't do that again.
But we're a small company. In a larger project, I'm sure it quickly gets out of hand. If only the demand for artists wasn't higher than the supply, and we could afford to be picky and only pick artists with some basic technical understanding. I mean, these are real time programs. They have technical limitations. It's different from working for Pixar or doing graphic design.
Ultimately the best pipeline is where artists don't make the mistakes in the first place. Whether because they can't (but then you have to burn programmer time (which is more expensive than artist time) setting texture resolutions and shaders. And then the artists come whining to you when their model doesn't look the same in the game as it does in Max.), or because they're just smart enough not to (hard to find artists like this).
Quote:Original post by frob
You don't need to interpret the entire PSD file, just the parts you need. Extracting images based on layer names isn't *THAT* hard. Time consuming to write for the first time, yes, but once you've got the basic psd reading done, it's a very simple process.
The problem is that most PSD readers I've seen never
quite read the PSD the same way that photoshop does. Opening a PSD in Gimp, for instance, is always a pain. There's always some layer or effect that gets gimped (pun intended).
Is there a way to automate Photoshop on the command line? I could see doing something like: photoshop -convert someFile.PSD someFile.PNG