Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 04:00:51 UTC No. 850585

>>850583
/v/ here, im gonna tell you something
DO NOT use that money to make a game if you don't have any game dev experience, you wil throw the money away, mae something small first. Also from what i remember, old ps2 game textures were drawn/produced at higher quality and then shrank down to fit into the ps2 memory.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 04:39:14 UTC No. 850595

>>850583
>has 100K
>ask to randoms instead of contacting a professional
OP is going to get fucking scammed lmao

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 04:55:05 UTC No. 850598

>>850585
this ^

op, be careful
beware of scams and do not waste your money
also, plan things carefully

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 05:17:13 UTC No. 850602

How big you going OP and what parts are you doing yourself?

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 05:52:01 UTC No. 850610

>>850583
>he thinks making quality PS2-era graphics are any less intensive than making current gen graphics
If anything they're more intensive. There's so many shortcuts and software that makes current stuff easy compared to the manual fine-tuning and rigorous effort required for proper PS2 tier stuff. Even today it'll be a lot of manual labor without modern software giving much of an edge.

There's a reason why even the most high budget AAA games of the era look the way they do. It's not something that any jackoff can just pick up and replicate 20 years later.
There's a craftsmanship to it that's tied to the people who did these types of models all those years ago. Or at least someone willing to dig through archives of tutorials from 2001.

You're honestly better off just trying something modern than trying to retread old ground for the sake of nostalgia.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 06:30:18 UTC No. 850613

Based xenosaga poster.
Also, give up for your own sake

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 06:31:27 UTC No. 850614

ill make the looogo

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 06:59:33 UTC No. 850624

You crazy person, your best bet is to find an actual freelancer and negotiate.

Also you should be more worried about getting a prototype ready before you even consider the art.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 11:38:45 UTC No. 850669

>>850610
>If anything they're more intensive.

It's not, the level of artistry you need to be able to do may is similarish to pull it off well but if you have the idea making
some handpainted diffuse only characters is as involved as a current day AAA, well...

Having done both thruout the years here's a somewhat comprehensible list of what it entails:

>PS2 era 2doList:
-placing some 2000 polygons. Modeling, UVmapping no problem at all.
-painting a single lowdetail texturemap just directly to canvas in your fav paint editor (spoiler: it's photoshop).
-diffuse only selflit shader.
-Create simple rig that only articulates at the main joints.
-skinweighting can be perfected within a couple of hours.

Time: 1-2 weeks, weekends non included.

>Contemporary AAA 2doList:
-Create a high res character sculpt with impecable detail.
-retoplogize high detail sculpt into ~100K polygons.
-UV Unwrap and relax 100K polygons into a texture sheet without any obv stretching.
-Create multiple highresolution texturemaps (diffuse/albedo,specular/reflective,gloss/roughness, bake AO+normals)
-Spend time aquiring good source textures and cleaning up and adjusting any photosources etc. Mattepaint + photobash several 4K textures.
-Create several different PBR shaders for gear, skin, hair, eyes etc (maybe you use some stock ones, if so this step is simplified).
-Create an advanced rig that articulates at all the main joints and have several helper bones to drive deformation in problem areas.
-Create a face rig of another few dozen bones.
-Write several custom scripts to drive helper bones and aid in animation tasks.
-weight paint a 100K polygons to ensure good deformation.
>Oh yeah, did your AAA character have hair?
-welcome to polyplane haircard hell, your adventure is about to start - 1week of haircut fuckery angling polygons and editing normals by hand coming ur way.

Time: 1-3 months, prob end up working weekends fixing/tweaking the unforeseen.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 12:20:55 UTC No. 850675

Don't drop 100k on your first game. Spend as little as possible.

Use stock assets until all of your core coding is feature complete and your game loop is fully playable.

Get a mixamo rig. Hand it to some pajeets on Fiverr along with some reference images of what you want. You will be able to get something presentable for sub $100 per character.

Don't get hung up on emulating the exact look of the PS2 era. It will be a time and resource sink and it won't translate into sales. Go with whatever aesthetic your artists can produce cheaply.

>>850669
>placing some 2000 polygons.

Is a slow process compared to sculpting, doing some automatic retopo and calling it a day. That's not AAA, but it IS contemporary for low budget games.

>painting a single lowdetail texturemap just directly to canvas in your fav paint editor (spoiler: it's photoshop).

Again, slow as hell compared to slapping some PBR materials onto a model and optionally clicking 'bake'.

You can work much much faster if you find your own aesthetic rather than trying to emulate the best, highest quality work from 20 years ago.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 12:42:09 UTC No. 850685

>inb4 OP fucks off and forgets whatever whim he has today

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 13:27:31 UTC No. 850699

>>850675
Ya PS2 models aren't exactly easy to make. You cant throw poly's to fix bad deformations. You either have to be a good painter or photosource everything for textures. I think modern art is way more lenient is some ways. With all the bashing pixel art games get there has never been such good quality pixelart games out there so that's a competitive field now too.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 14:08:22 UTC No. 850712

>>850675
>slapping some PBR materials onto a model and optionally clicking 'bake'.

Yeah dude, that is how it works magical PBR materials that appear ontop of your creation.
You think you fucking tile-map everything with stock materials from some texture library?

Making a quality texture map for a AAA character is about a hundred times more involved than anything we did during the PS2 days.
Your painting skills and photoediting skills have to be very nextlevel from what's necessary for working PS2 stuff.

And 'clicking bake'? Even setting up the projection cage for a bake can be a bit of an involved process.
By the time you get to click 'bake' you've already spent tens to hundreds of hours to even reach that point.

> doing some automatic retopo and calling it a day.

What is this automatic retopo of which you speak that creates character geometry suitable for rigging?
Retopo for film or games is done manually polygon by polygon, it's not a super time consuming process but it's a day or three.
Esp with all the re-rigging and adjusting to improve deformation at problem joints.

You have no clue how much work goes into all this stuff you handwave away as being automatic.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 14:47:36 UTC No. 850731

>>850712
Thank you big guy. Back in the wage cage now.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 14:51:07 UTC No. 850733

>>850712
Maybe for some bespoke Naughty dog game but you know deep down the pipeline is like this.

Heads
Get headscan of some uggo.
Use zwrap to bind it to a basemesh provided.
Clean up headscan or make it more ugly whatever they want.
Drag pores and wrinkles.jpg all over it or use some scanned 2d facemaps.
Texture it by projecting photo textures.
Bake normals, ao etc in seconds
combine it all.
Hair they either have some super specialised artist doing it or it's outsourced.

Clothes
Get photogrammetry of some garmant use a combination of zremsher and an existing basemesh.
Model in some of the folds.
Use seams.jpg to make it look like a garment.
Project the existing photo texture from the high poly or just drag jeans.procedural on it.
Bake as normal
Add a few grunges and use ao to make everything stand out.
Rince and repeat with other elements.
Did I miss something.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 17:37:46 UTC No. 850765

>>850733
What kind of hack outfit go about it like you describe and somehow counts as AAA?

What you describe sounds like something some entry level coomer kitbasher posting on this board dreams of doing yet
somehow never ends up realizing, because even that is way too advanced for them to actually pull off.

I suspect you are someone drawn to the simpler times because you're salty about high level artwork
and how increasingly technical and difficult it is to engage with.

>Drag pores and wrinkles.jpg all over it or use some scanned 2d facemaps.
>Texture it by projecting photo textures.

You very much underestimate how much time and skill and work goes into even taking that approach.
Photosourcing textures and matching them to a surface to form a finished seamless texture
without glaring shadow artifacts and discoloration isn't very easy work, if you can do that you're expert level at image editing.
Draping a character in photosourced skin to a level where you can see all the pores is many times more time consuming
and demanding than what is required to simply handpaint lowres skin like we did on characters at the turn of the millennium.

You're shitting on things here that works very differently than what you imagine them to.

Anonymous at Tue, 14 Sep 2021 22:54:47 UTC No. 850841

>>850712
>Making a quality texture map for a AAA character

>>850765
>What kind of hack outfit go about it like you describe and somehow counts as AAA?

No one but you is talking about "AAA" best of the best top quality game art assets. 'contemporary workflow' is not restricted to "AAA".

What we are saying is that making PS2 styled graphics is more time consuming than making modern styled assets for a production that is lower budget. It simply takes more time to get good looking results of PS2 polycounts and 256 square px of texture resolution than it does to get good looking results out of spitting 40k tris at every and 2048 square px of texture reslution with PBR shaders.

Anonymous at Sat, 25 Sep 2021 12:26:32 UTC No. 852972

No one knows how to that kind of graphics anymore, it's a lost art.

Anonymous at Sat, 25 Sep 2021 12:47:00 UTC No. 852994

>>852972
Anyone who work gameart can open the game files to old games and go "oh, like that?" and replicate it.
Things where so simple then compared to now you have no fucking clue.

Because If you did you would have a lot higher appreciation for the work
small armies of people put in to make current day tiles look as good as they do.

>Nostalgia fags are one thing, but 'paradise lost' nostalgia fags are the worst.