And right after spending a week perfecting and optimizing the procedures to create assets for a Raw 3D look, and further hours putting everything into short but in-depth explanations to share for posterity, I think I am not actually going to use any of that for Iridium Moons.
Low-polygon models and extremely crunched down textures have never been used because they are easy and quick to produce, but because they can be made to take up extremely low storage and memory space. And I have found that recreating that look now in a way that I find appealing, it actually causes me a significant amount of more work to create assets, not less.
The kind of graphics I really dreamed about doing 2 years ago was something that looks like Morrowind with the rendering and lighting engine of OpenMW. And with the practice I’ve made in Blender in the last two months, I already have the skills that I can. OpenMW gives the game a serious boost through its more advanced rendering and lighting technology, but all the ingame models are still the same and all the textures are the same. Creating assets for this is still the same as for the game from 2002.
When I am creating models, this is the level of detail that I am already instinctively going for before I pull myself back when I remember that I wanted to make these assets low-poly. And while working on a wall model to create a 2D texture of a wall over the weekend, I quickly grabbed a free PBR material to see if I can get some surface shadows to mix up the flat colors, and this stuff turns out to be stupidly easy to use. And with the kind of building materials used on the planets of the Galia Cluster, basically everything I’ll ever need can be done with a simple Hue shift in GIMP. Almost no texture rendering or painting required.
The main thing that had me decide against trying to go for a bit more advanced graphics style has always been faces. Painting faces is hard and intimidating. If all lines aren’t perfect, the whole face will look terrible, and you have to do it all in freehand. But looking a bit around for faces from various games of the early 2000s, I found that Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy have pretty decent looking faces that are based almost entirely on head geometry and barely have any detail in the textures. I extracted some of the character models and opened them in Blender, and the meshes for the faces are really very simple, and the face textures are as simple as it gets. I can do that.
Another thing that was making me stay away from this style for now was that it has always been clear my game will not have any voice acting. When the fidelity of the character models and the game world goes up, eventually it gets really weird if nobody speaks a word and everything is text to read. But Morrowind is a good example of how far you can go with visual fidelity and it still working without voiced dialogs. And I feel these character models from the Jedi Knight games are still just below that threshhold. I feel confident I can make this work.
And while on the topic of inspirational graphics styles, I think Knights of the Old Republic also sits just at that level of detail as the other two references, having come out at the same time in game graphics development. And it’s been one of the most important influences behind the whole concept of Iridium Moons from the start.
While this is an increase of the targeted level of graphics fidelity, I think that this is not a case of feature creep. Given how I’ve developed with my asset creation skills, I think this change should actually lead to a significant decrease in the workload. This is the level of detail I am already working in. Downgrading everything from this to Raw 3D graphics is an extra step, and as I am now able to say, not an insignificant one.
Really looking forward to see how this reorientation of the visual style will play out in the coming weeks.