About High Quality Textures in Skyrim (somewhat a rant)

[ecirbaf]

Okay this isn't a factual, or affirmative post. Somewhat of a rant, but mostly I thought I'd post this here as I am curious as to what your opinions are.

 

So... we have a lot of low res textures in Skyrim.

 

Thankfully some of these have been fixed by mods such as "No More Blocky Faces" as an example.

 

Other mods completely remake the textures in higher detail.

 

If I was an artist this is what I would be thinking: WHAT THE HELL. Bethesda almost certainly have ALL these textures in high quality. They obviously do not work on textures at the size that is seen in the BSA files. They work in high res and then sample down. And then they happily let the modders work countless hours resizing the textures from the low res version.

 

It seems so silly to me. I guess this gives a chance to modders to get experience in texturing and who knows someday work in the industry.. but doesn't this bother you? Has any one ever tried to pressure Bethesda to simply release high quality textures with a Creative Commons license perhaps to save you so much work? It just seems absurd that they have all these files in hires, but the modders are left to re-do them all by hand.

 

Also if I was a Bethesda artist I would be pretty pissed of. I mean they know, right from the beginning, that their work will be sampled down, and then compressed in order to optimize better for the graphics card memory. Possily some of these textures are not that good at orioginal res because they are made with that in mind (a good trick for creating icons for example is to make a rough at 200% or more, then sample down, to get started).

 

Still as a Bethesda artist, would you not be pisssed that all your work is never gonna be seen in its best quality ?

 

Muc hrambling as I said, maybe this topic has been beaten to death? I'm kinda new to this, so my apologies.

[Matth85]

One word: Console.

 

The reason the quality is lower, is since the Xbox and Playstation got as much graphic capability as my toaster.

They also did a Console to PC port, isntead of a PC to Console port -- which is odd, consider the models and texture as optimized for the PC before they fit it for the game.

 

Oh well, we'll fix it. We always do.

[dazzerfong]

Well, as an amateur artist myself, I cringe at the fact that a lot of the textures have to be down-sized. Still, in the end, it's a fact in life.

[Matth85]

Any artist will grind their teeth when they see it, but there is very little we can do. Console is where they get the money, so they make their game for them in the first place. Even though that is outdated hardware with worse technology than my Iphone.

Bleh, I really should stop bashing on the consoles, consider I got them all myself >.>

[ecirbaf]

@Matth85

 

That's true. Although as a programmer myself I imagine they have scripts to batch process all textures into BSA files. I don't see why they would have to use the exact same settings as for the console versions. Do we know for a fact that the PC version textures are 100% identical to that of XBox or PS3. Logic would say no, as each system has specific limitations.

 

To be fair, it's not possible for the PC version to use double res textures everywhere. It might run, say, on your 2GB card, but on my 512mb card it would hurt the performance. I suppose they could have had the installer offer two or three texture quality choices. Seeing as one can simply replace the textures with modding tools. It does not require any special game code.

 

PS: Yes, it isn't about console. Unless we can say for a fact that the gold version BSA files are IDENTICAL between console and PC version. As I said, that would not make logical sense as it is easy to rerun scripts to compile textures based on different criteria. On the other hand, they might not have bothered, because the lower end PC system would match the consoles.

Edited December 20, 2011 by ecirbaf

[darthsloth74]

Actually looking at the originals a lot I wonder if they ever did them at high res. Theres a lot of artifacts from the compression and considering how many textures are 512x512, I don't honesty think the originals were ever higher than 1024x1024. Of course I could be wrong.

 

I know a lot of companies work at higher res and reduce them down but not all. Some people still paint textures at the intended resolution which can also be a good way of working.

 

To be honest there have always been inconsistences in Bethesda's mesh and texture departments. I don't want to point the finger here but they are guilty of many errors. An example was a sandbag barricade mesh in Fallout 3, if I remember it had 18,000 polys in it. Why? Other things like FNV (Yes I know its Obsidian) really poor rigging for the NCR Combat Ranger Coat and the Starlet Dress in Dead Money. Stuff a modder would be crucified for if releasing on Nexus. I personally think its just due to poor QA at Bethesdas end.

 

Skyrim is no bed of roses either. Normal maps without a specular map. Poor compression on diffuse textures. Throwing a bunch of nasty grunge texture overlays on a robe and calling it finished.

 

To be fair I really enjoy their games despite their buggy nature, but the graphics always fall short in certain areas. I fix what I can myself and look to fellow modders to fill in the missing pieces. ;)

[Matth85]

I know a lot of companies work at higher res and reduce them down but not all.

Depends on timeframe and what asset. I know for a fact that smaller models, like a barrel and a crate, would be made in 512x512 and no high poly bake. I also know that a important model would be made with 2048x2048 and downscaled to 1024x1024.

 

Normal maps without a specular map

I swear, every time I see the lack of a specularity map I want to shoot somebody. Half the models in Oblivion had no Specularity, half the models from Bethesda in general got no specularity, half the people here don't know what specularity map or gloss map is >.<

But, they were in a bad position. They had set a "cool" date, and it was aimed for the consoles. That meant they couldn't do half of what they wanted.

Edited December 20, 2011 by Matth85

[darthsloth74]

Matth85: I agree entirely they always seem to be rushing to the deadline and leaving stuff half finished. Understandable in these large open ended games they make I suppose. My issue is they never go back and fix broken meshes and half done textures.

 

The thing is I'm sure a lot of it is the accountant/leading executive who insists on release and thats why everything is somewhat flaky. It seems obvious looking at the mismatch of texturing in New Vegas that it was rushed into release. How much better would the game have looked if Obsidian had been granted more time?

[red33mer666]

one thing that hasn't been mentioned really is designing for architecture.

I am uncertain if the PC, Xbox, and PS3 versions of the textures are identical but lets face it. When Designing for Consoles you have only to deal with two different types of video architecture which at this point are absolutely known variables.

When designing for PC there are as many different cards and different proc/ram configurations out there as there are gamers, and all of them have their up and downsides. It would be impossible to put out a game that ran perfectly on everyone's machine with highres textures.

 

The reason we even have Awesome TES games is because Bethesda has for the past little while been able to walk the tightrope of offering very close to the same game on all platforms and we should be grateful for the console users because it allows them to fund such an ambitious project like Skyrim.

 

In the end I totally understand the gripe but since the Elder scrolls franchise has an incredibly adept and ambitious modding community. its possible that for pc users they knew they couldn't please everyone so they figured they would release as is and let us sort it out.

 

I mean after all its only been a month since and I have an extremely hi res modded copy of skyrim running on my machine, and it doesn't even slow it down. Not to mention that we don't even have the CK yet.

But that all comes with custom settings and tweeks that Beth soft probably doesn't have the testing resources to deal with.

Edited December 21, 2011 by red33mer666

[Matth85]

The reason we even have Awesome TES games is because Bethesda has for the past little while been able to walk the tightrope of offering very close to the same game on all platforms and we should be grateful for the console users because it allows them to fund such an ambitious project like Skyrim

The consoles are 5 years old. Any guy with a job can buy a PC ten times better than that in a month, and then change the graphic card and RAM once every 3rd year to keep it up to date.

 

The textures was downscaled to fit the consoles, THEN ported over. Why would you do that? Instead of making all high ress, releasing for the PC, then downgrading for the old hardware? It is very common to work with textures at 2048x2048 or 1024x1024 and downscaling. It is not normal to texture anything at 256x256. A few times they might texture 512x512 diectly, if they are in a rush.