The Dirty Truth About Game Art - Part 1

[@WarrenMarshallBiz]

Damn it, I knew I shouldn't have added that techy bit about the decals and texture usage. Thanks to everyone who pointed out my potential wrongitude ... but don't miss the point of the video which was more to remember to put that grunge in. I don't care HOW you do it. Just do it. :)

[@elijahclevenger10]

This is a great video! I wish there was more stuff on this specific topic TBH. I remember specifically being really impressed with how many dirt decals GTA 5 has on the walls and buildings where they meet the ground. I decided to try in my own scene to replicate what they did and had to end up hand modeling my own custom dirt decal meshes that wrap around things like buildings and walls to make them look more authentic and decaying like a lot of real buildings would. It was a lot of work, but in my opinion worth it to push the quality of my scene as far as I could. I'm not sure what you do to optimize that for a massive hyper detailed open world game where these decals are EVERYWHERE, but I noticed they tend to use the same dirt decal texture over and over for grounding buildings and walls and sidewalks so I'm sure that keeps things cheap. Also the resolution of it is pretty low most of the time if you go in first person mode and look at them up close. But there should definitely be more videos on this topic! And that's a good explainer for why most games tend to delete their dirt decals or forego it all together. Never worked in a game studio before yet, but I think maybe it's also because it's a lot of work and time to add custom dirt decal meshes around all of your objects for a big game and maybe some studios don't have the time, money, or man power to have everyone do that even if it's cheaper to render now in the UE5 PS5 Xbox Series X/S RTX card era. I do love the effect though and personally to me, it's totally 100% worth it to sell it's history. Anyways keep up the great work!

[@julienheijmans]

Hm, to me it feels like you are making these tech more heavy than they are. If you are working on a AAA title for last gen platform, decals and vertex color driven material blend are definitely a good choice. I might be biased for working mostly on AAA for the last 6 years, but even before that, when working on a medium budget game for ps3/x360 we had decals. They are not that heavy, memory wise, considering how much you can use a single decal atlas all over the place. (For example I would probably prefer removing a variation of a tiling texture, and keep some decals, if we were reaching the budget limit. Some decals can also be super cheap, memory wise: For some of those dirt on the wall, a single alpha map could already get us nice result, using the texture only for the alpha, and using a single color for the albedo and a simple float value for the smoothness)

[@rickysargulesh1053]

Another great video Warren. Those are the problems you struggle with. Can't wait for part 2.

[@wespenwald1297]

Hey man, when can we expect to see part 2? ;P Just had a talk about this topic and was curious if you planned to add more to this?

[@fragarena9910]

Very fascinating 😮 thank you

[@BigRed4231]

Your videos are very usefull for an amateur like myself, there are a lot of help to get on the technical aspects of game design and using the tools, but very little on good practices that will get you good final results when using these tools.

[@WarrenMarshallBiz]

Thanks Phil, I'm glad you find it useful!

[@AlexTsekot]

Great video, you really have to be subtle with grunge, once again just reference real life!

[@jonathanxdoe]

Another bad habit? Taking tilted pictures for no reason, strong inception vibes XD

[@WarrenMarshallBiz]

Hahaha ... just a habit I think, trying to get more into the iPhone camera frame without shooting landscape. I have no excuse.

[@RobotJeeg]

May I ask you something? It's about decals but in Modo not in videogames. I'm modelling an hallway and now I want to add a little bit of areas with moss. Instead of painting the moss on the textures of the wall I had the idea of using decals like in the videogames. But...in Modo the decals project shadows on the walls behind them..is there a trick to have decal like in videogames...that looks glued to the surface underneath and not on a trasnparent polygon floating on the wall?

[@WarrenMarshallBiz]

Anngh, I'm really not too up on decals in MODO, sorry! I would try asking that on the MODO forums on the Foundry site ... someone there HAS to know. Good luck! Or join my Discord server (link in the description). Someone there may know as well...

[@andrewbyrnes6389]

A dirty patch of dirt

[@massivetree7937]

So is it mostly just all tiled textures? Is vertex painting done much in games?

[@benrainwolf3856]

vertex painting are mostly used for blending between materials like adding sand on top of some stone tile for example these days

[@WarrenMarshallBiz]

Yep, what Ben said. It's definitely used to mix materials. On terrain, in particular.

[@WarrenMarshallBiz]

Oh and, yes, most environment art (buildings and structures) are done with tiling textures with custom bits (like windows and such) added in.

[@3dcgphile]

I use vert painting for blending between materials as much as is feasible (based on target system spec). On static meshes, too, not just on terrain. It's often much better for getting variation on large surfaces, which would otherwise take a crapload of decals to cover.