• PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The crazy thing is that a lot of today’s models are actually much more simple than they used to be. Look at comparisons for old games like Mario Galaxy versus Mario Odyssey for good examples. But this is done because it allows for more detailed environments; The lack of polygons means that (as long as the textures can be loaded fast enough) your rendering goes much faster. You’re not being bottlenecked by polygon counts anymore, because there are fewer polygons.

    But this has caused texture sizes to balloon, because now you’re shifting nearly all the heavy lifting over to those textures instead of the polygons.

    • PoetSII@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      For more graphically intensive games actually, this is shifting back bc polys are a lot cheaper than texel density these days. Games like Star Citizen, Alien Isolation, Cyberpunk and Starfield (or other hardsurface elements in games like firearms or vehicles) with insanely intricate hardsurface elements that the player needs to be able to be up close all around and inside can’t use baked normals due to the fact it’d just be impossible to get a decent texel density and bake, so now games are shifting to something called ‘face weighted normals’ which basically means that all the big bevels and chamfers are actually part of the model’s geo instead of being baked down. Smaller stuff like greebling will be a flat plane shrink wrapped to the curvature of a surface with baked detail as a displacement or normal map.