Game Companies Do NOT Use Polygons To Model 3D Game Assets?

#1

I was discussing the cost of AAA games with a software engineer, and he said this:

  • “Major game companies don’t use Polygons to model 3D assets. They use much faster 3D technology.”

  • I said “What do you mean they don’t use polygons to model? Don’t they use Max, Maya, Modo, ZBrush and so forth to model the 3D game assets?”

  • He said “Fifteen years ago a major game developer hired me to program them an algorithm that takes NURBS, voxels, pointclouds, volumes and other non-polygon 3D models and auto-converts to clean triangle polygon topology for use in 3D games. Modeling all the assets in game with polygons would take way too much time, money and manpower. Its too slow and expensive. The big game development guys thus avoid polygon modeling wherever possible.”

I’m stunned by this information. Are we being sold expensive, slow polygon tools like 3DMax, Maya and so forth while the big guys use much faster non-polygon 3D asset creation tools and just hit convert-to-poly ???

Does anyone here know more about this ??? Precisely what technology do big game developers use to 3D model their stuff ??? Is it proprietary in-house volumetric 3D modeling tools and such that auto-convert to polygons when needed?

#2

Indeed.
I was also stunned to find out that big-name companies actually use clay and magic pixie dust for that sort of things.

#3

When Blizzard posts a job opening, which requires the knowledge of Maya, Photoshop, Zbrush or Mudbox (here) – it doesn’t really mean anything.

But then again Blizzard might not be big enough :slight_smile:

#4

NOW you’ve dunnit!

…secret’s out in the open, dammit!

#5

Was the guy who told you this 10 feet tall and harry?
Or 6 inches tall and green?

#6

Perhaps this bloke traveled here from the future …where such technology
already exists.
Was he sitting in a "tricked out " flying, Delorean when you spoke??

#7

Hyperbole aside, isn’t this kind of correct? While the models may still be stored as polygons, we’re a long way from the days of adding each polygon one vertex at a time. ZBrush’s zSpheres and 3D-Coat’s voxels, as well as metaball type tools allow for shape creation without “using” polygons. And isn’t it common to convert those shapes, as well as high-res meshes to more optimized assets? Unless you need topology for character animation, aren’t the auto retopology tools adequate for hard surface and non-deforming mesh creation?
Fifteen years ago seems a bit ahead of the curve, but aren’t we essentially doing now what that person claims to have implemented? Just because an object is stored in memory and displayed using polygons doesn’t mean it was modeled in polygons. I’ve built models one polygon at a time when there were no brush sculpting tools, dynamic tessellation or decimation as we know it now was hardly widespread if it existed at all. Who is doing that now?

#8

Not really, while sculpting in high detail can sometimes disregard polygon counts and edge flow, the vast majority of the pipeline does require it. And I haven’t seen any auto retopolgy tools that do a good job with hard surface models and even the organic meshes get better results with some manual help. For games in particular everything is very particularly modeled with polygons.

#9

Trust me modelers still do a massive amount of traditional polygonal modeling still at any feature studio. Very little goes through the pipe as a simple sculpt and auto retopo. A lot of stuff simply doesn’t need Zbrush amd a lot of things require a precision to match that Zbrush still doesn’t suit. I see assets on an recent movie still being done with traditional polygon tools in maya on a daily basis.

Polygon density is less and less of a concern in rendering, especially in mass instancing cases but memory and scene loading times are still a concern amd often looked at especially as scenes become more massive and complex.

#10

The CG industry led us to think - in the early 2000s - that everything we see on the big screen is “Maya, Maya, Maya”.

So everybody rushed to buy/learn the overpriced POS that is Maya. Autodesk made Billions from this over the years and dominated everything 3D related.

It took over a decade for the truth to come out in full - that many of the bigger CG/VFX shops not only develop and use in-house 3D modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, animation and simulation tools, but that they also never SHOWED those tools in behind-the-scenes featurettes of films and such.

The lied to us and told us “that’s done in Maya”.

The tools were there. We mere mortals never got see them, touch them or buy them - we bought Max, Maya, XSI and so forth thinking that THAT is what the big guys use too.

AAA Games is MUUUUCH bigger revenue wise than CG/VFX ever was. AAA Game companies also have TOP 3D PROGRAMMERS working for them.

So somehow Pixar, BUF, ILM, WETA, Digital Domain ALL developed proprietary tools, but the BIGGER, WEALTHIER game industry full of highly qualified 3D programmers did not???

Giants like Valve, EPIC, UBISOFT, CRYTEK, ACTIVISION all just use vanilla 3DMax, Maya, Modo, Houdini, ZBrush and don’t develop anything of their own that would CUT THEIR COSTS AND INCREASE THEIR PROFITS?

:rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

That is HILARIOUS - the game industry employing thousands of top-notch 3D literate programmers DOES NOT DEVELOP MORE EFFICIENT 3D TOOLS TO INCREASE ITS PROFITS.

No sir. Their ONLY OPTION is to sit at a desk and click-click-click poly model like the rest of us.

Dozens of industries around the world use proprietary in-house CAD/CAM tools that NOBODY outside the company ever sees.

From Space/Aerospace to Jewelry Design, to Medical to Automotive, ALL SORTS OF COOL SOFTWARE exists that you can neither buy, nor try, nor will ever even see a screenshot of.

But somehow the MASSIVE GAME INDUSTRY FULL OF 3D PROGRAMMERS COULDN’T PULL THIS OFF - WHAAAAAAH !!!

I haven’t laughed this hard in a while. :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:

#11

Relax Mate,
The gaming industry has been eclipsing Hollywood & the music industry combined
for years now (largely due to micro transactions I would imagine).

The end users dont care about how game assets are modeled.

You are sounding a bit like the shrill bleating of a “victim” in search of an oppressor.

Even if game companies (or any company) had some secret proprietary tech, protected by
NDA ,they are under no obligation to share it with the general public.

Just as your mum is not obligated to share her secret recipe for her peach
cobbler.

In either case I dont see a venue for such moral outrage.

#12

I don’t think it’s the case that VFX studios have some kind of crazy advanced modeling tools, while it’s very common for studios to develop some tools when they need something that doesn’t exist, usually it’s something for a very specific problem. Probably most studios these days use an existing 3D software like Maya and then program some extra tools that they use in their pipeline, if there’s something they’re adding in for modeling then it’s going to be very minor, usually it’s stuff like simulation and rendering tools.
For games, the existing modeling programs work pretty well, where most of the development goes is into the game engine, if they do any other tools it’s usually related to trying to translate something from a 3D program into their game engine, like how Unreal Engine has the Datasmith tool for converting scenes.

#14

Pretty much it. I have worked in Games, VFX and Feature Animation studios. A lot proprietary stuff are tools and more so pipeline related. And polygons are a good comprehensive base to work with so not leaving them behind at all. And frankly I think its these big studios and the rent they pay that keeps folks like Autodesk going so its more than just lip service. It costs money.

Really SIGGRAPH white papers are where the leading edge is being shown. Not some Games Area 51 studio.
Just look how many games are running on Unity or Unreal. You can’t just be throwing ‘magic geometry’ around and hope it sticks. And don’t forget phone apps.

#15

Sounds like someone doing a bad translation of using zbrush or mudbox to sculpt prior to creating the low poly.

#16

Georgie3D, I respect your opinion, but I think that you’re grossly misinformed.

  1. Yes. The big studios all develop their own tools. That’s a no-brainer. However, this is almost always done with an eye toward making their current workflow more efficient. No studio is going to outright code a full on Maya or ZBrush replacement. No. They’re more likely to create custom scripts and plugins to make the more mundane tasks easier and/or quicker. (Also, given the “here today, gone tomorrow” nature of studio life relative to the massive cost and time involved in tool development, creating a full blown in-house Maya killer is risky at best.)

  2. Being a game artist, every skill you cultivate will have you squeezing out the fastest possible performance. Game artists are much like demo scene programmers. They’re not going to get that extreme performance by staying high level. The more layers of abstraction they place between the creator and the end product, the greater the risk of inefficiency. The more you take the creator out of the loop… same. IMO, a game artist working in NURBS might as well be like a 64k demo scene coder working Python. You want tools that put you closer to the primitives, not further away.

  3. Beyond simple modeling, there are SO many other tasks in game art that depend on polygons. Being that close to the hardware, ultimately, you’re going to want MORE control, not less. Exposing the low level stuff is much more beneficial than not.

  4. Working with higher order primitives such as NURBS or patches is cumbersome. Parametric modeling might be more efficient in the early going, but the process itself becomes much more tedious as the level of detail increases. You’re not actually going to save time. If anything, you may just end up slowing things down as you creep into the finer details. That has far less to do with the tool and more to do with the math. Parametric modeling is scalable. That’s it’s real benefit, not speed. It is for that reason why it is used much more for industrial modeling.

  5. Do yourself a favor. Find some actual in-game models to study. ArtStation is full of such examples, all from studio employed artists working on real world projects. What you’re going to instantly see are models that are either text book cases of carefullty hand crafted topology or meticulous hand optimization. Just because a modern game artist employs the likes of ZBrush doesn’t mean that they’ve eschewed polygons for other things. There is no such thing as an unlimited polygon budget. Every asset modeler is (and should be) a master of the polygon.

  6. How long do you think games actually take to make? How many people do you think are involved behind the scenes? A typical game might take 2 years to make. However, a marquee AAA game can easily take 4 years (or more) and literally involve several dozen modelers each working 60+ hour weeks. In short, there is NO quick path to quality.

  7. IMO, it’s clear that you are not now, nor have you ever been involved in the creation of real-time assets or real world production. Just about every tool, core or supplementary, has the humble polygon in mind. Are you saying that every single app developer is lying to artists just to scam some bucks out of them? If you’re a real-time artist, you can’t escape polys. Period. It doesn’t matter if you’re a modeler, rigger, or texture artist. Polys are the currency of real-time art. If you’re a studio artist then you’re also industry compliant. Maya/3dsmax, if you’re a 3D artist, is the currency of employability.

  8. What’s the point of cultivating a workforce with specific skills that you won’t actually use? There’s a good reason why all of these schools and all of the training material focuses on some very specific techniques. This is what the industry uses. No company in their right mind is going to want to retrain their incoming employees. Time is money and you have to hit the ground running. This is usually the very reason why a Maya-centric studio won’t hire somebody who uses Blender, no matter how amazing their reel is. If you have spent the better part of your 10k hour journey toward mastery focusing on the art of the polygon, imagine being told that everything you know is a lie and now you have to learn NURBS, Coons Patches, or whatever. It’s stupid and entirely unrealistic.

  9. A key reason why a custom in-house tool is so efficient isn’t because it’s a so-called “Maya Killer.” No. It’s often because it’s reused, built to task, and battle tested. A company might develop a custom level or scenario editor for Project A and then refine it for Project B and then refine it some more for Project C. In the end, however, these tools are still designed to work in concert with existing tools and formats. They’re not designed as replacements.

  10. Again, do yourself a favor. Go back and see some behind the scenes documentaries, read some industry interviews/articles, or pick up an industry magazine. The more of this stuff you see, the quicker you’re going to realize how wrong you are. It doesn’t matter if you’re as big as EA or Nintendo. You may have custom in-house helper apps or tricked out plugins to speed up the process, but you’re still going to rely on time honored techniques and common tools. By and large, you seem to be describing practices that were MUCH more common in the pre-Windows era of game development. Back during the SGI days, there was a lot more proprietary tech. The industry was dripping with “trade secrets” that would go unshared. Things have changed in the past 20-25 years though.

  11. Custom or off the shelf… Standard or non-standard… Studios will use whatever gets the job done. (Techland’s use of Blender, for example, is a good example of this ethic.)

Honestly? Your whole “they lied to us” schtick is misguided. Tools - custom or otherwise - are small parts of a larger pipeline, not the entirety of the pipeline itself. Just because a studio uses a custom tool doesn’t mean that they don’t use Maya. Just because they use Maya doesn’t mean that they don’t also use custom tools.

It seems to me that you’re another conspiracy theorist who’s convinced that the industry has a secret cabal that’s going out of the way to hide the “Make Cool 3D” button from you.

Great games take a LOT of time. They employ a lot of artists who sacrifice family and health. There may be time saving shortcuts, which is all a custom tool is designed to be, but there are NO quick and easy solutions. Games are art and art is often a painfully involved process.

When a game can take upwards of 500k+ man hours to produce, it’s pretty clear that nobody’s hiding a magic wand.