Matth85 Posted December 21, 2011 Share Posted December 21, 2011 If you know your target resolution, you don't waste time creating details that are going to be smudged away when downsampled. Baking larger maps and downsizing them is a huge waste of processor time, not to mention that you're probably killing quality on a normal map, introducing more problems. If the goal is quality, you take the long route. We all expected quality. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JohannMohr Posted December 21, 2011 Share Posted December 21, 2011 The reason the quality is lower, is since the Xbox and Playstation got as much graphic capability as my toaster. lmao! love this line! xD but yea, pc's can be upgraded all the time, wheras you can't do that with consoles, and not everyone is fond of buying a new console if they upgrade them, so the companies don't even bother doing it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
throttlekitty Posted December 21, 2011 Share Posted December 21, 2011 If the goal is quality, you take the long route. We all expected quality.Sure, and we could list many expectations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
red33mer666 Posted December 21, 2011 Share Posted December 21, 2011 we should also consider that Bethesda did all this on purpose. Not only to give the modding community something to do before the CK comes out, but also to give everyone something to *censored* about on the internet :D, I mean what would we do with our lives if everything was perfect LoL Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sunnie Posted December 21, 2011 Share Posted December 21, 2011 If you know your target resolution, you don't waste time creating details that are going to be smudged away when downsampled. Baking larger maps and downsizing them is a huge waste of processor time, not to mention that you're probably killing quality on a normal map, introducing more problems. If the goal is quality, you take the long route. We all expected quality. In an ideal setting, this should be the case. But game dev is never in an ideal state. There are always budget and time limitations and Execs, shareholders, and publishers aren't ones to wait around for a project to fail because it's running over budget and 6-12 behind schedule. Decisions will always be made in favor of middle of the road quality if it falls within budget and time frames, especially when your target platforms are consoles. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ecirbaf Posted December 21, 2011 Author Share Posted December 21, 2011 (edited) I think we are focusing too much on texture dimensions. In fact the very first thing I noticed after installing the game, were the ugly blotches on the nose of the Imperials. I didn't even reach the character creation screen yet! When I came here and found the No More Blocky Faces mod, and saw the screenshot of the normal map, I couldn't believe it. The texture/normal map size is fine imho. What was unbelievable to me, is that they would have compressed textures so badly, textures that are used on one area that is possibly the most important in any PC games: character faces. You see it 100% of your game time. The only technical reason I can think of, is that they used a batch process to filter all textures with an algorithm that makes them better compressed both in filesize and GPU storage (if I'm not mistaken they can be stored on the graphics card memory in compressed form). It's similar to the Photoshop option to move pixels around a little bit to allow a GIF to compress further. (edit: to be clear my explanation is just speculation. it may be that they are simply optimized for filesize, which is more important for console releases, I suppose for download time, and limited harddrive storage). So on this character face normals, huge freaking JPEG-like compression artefacts that have nothing to do with the texture dimensions. Edited December 21, 2011 by ecirbaf Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matth85 Posted December 21, 2011 Share Posted December 21, 2011 In an ideal setting, this should be the case. But game dev is never in an ideal state. There are always budget and time limitations and Execs, shareholders, and publishers aren't ones to wait around for a project to fail because it's running over budget and 6-12 behind schedule. Decisions will always be made in favor of middle of the road quality if it falls within budget and time frames, especially when your target platforms are consoles. My point was: We expected quality, and we did not get it. We then saw they crushed the quality into hardware as good as todays phones. I believe we are allowed to ask for better? Sure, and we could list many expectations. Who are we? I surely expected decent graphic, and that alone. I knew that it was a TES game, and it was different from the others. I didn't expect anything else. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghogiel Posted December 21, 2011 Share Posted December 21, 2011 not to mention that you're probably killing quality on a normal map, introducing more problems. I used to think that. But having read the poly count wiki I have changed my mind about that on anti aliasing: "One trick to speed this up is to render 2x the intended image size then scale the normal map down 1/2 in a paint program like Photoshop. The reduction's pixel resampling will add anti-aliasing for you in a very quick process. After scaling, make sure to re-normalize the map if your game doesn't do that already, because the un-normalized pixels in your normalmap may cause pixelly artifacts in your specular highlights. Re-normalizing can be done with NVIDIA's normal map filter for Photoshop. " Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
throttlekitty Posted December 21, 2011 Share Posted December 21, 2011 I think we are focusing too much on texture dimensions. In fact the very first thing I noticed after installing the game, were the ugly blotches on the nose of the Imperials. I didn't even reach the character creation screen yet! When I came here and found the No More Blocky Faces mod, and saw the screenshot of the normal map, I couldn't believe it. The texture/normal map size is fine imho. What was unbelievable to me, is that they would have compressed textures so badly, textures that are used on one area that is possibly the most important in any PC games: character faces. You see it 100% of your game time. The only technical reason I can think of, is that they used a batch process to filter all textures with an algorithm that makes them better compressed both in filesize and GPU storage (if I'm not mistaken they can be stored on the graphics card memory in compressed form). It's similar to the Photoshop option to move pixels around a little bit to allow a GIF to compress further. (edit: to be clear my explanation is just speculation. it may be that they are simply optimized for filesize, which is more important for console releases, I suppose for download time, and limited harddrive storage). So on this character face normals, huge freaking JPEG-like compression artefacts that have nothing to do with the texture dimensions.Some parts, like the normal maps on characters are actually uncompressed, which is awesome. There's no over-compression with .dds textures like you can with .gif, but it does introduce artifacts. The nose issue is simply not enough texture space given to that area of the model, at least I assume, I haven't looked that hard yet. I haven't actually used any character texture mods either though :) not to mention that you're probably killing quality on a normal map, introducing more problems. I used to think that. But having read the poly count wiki I have changed my mind about that on anti aliasing: "One trick to speed this up is to render 2x the intended image size then scale the normal map down 1/2 in a paint program like Photoshop. The reduction's pixel resampling will add anti-aliasing for you in a very quick process. After scaling, make sure to re-normalize the map if your game doesn't do that already, because the un-normalized pixels in your normalmap may cause pixelly artifacts in your specular highlights. Re-normalizing can be done with NVIDIA's normal map filter for Photoshop. " True, but it's really a case-by-case sort of thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ghogiel Posted December 21, 2011 Share Posted December 21, 2011 I think we are focusing too much on texture dimensions. In fact the very first thing I noticed after installing the game, were the ugly blotches on the nose of the Imperials. I didn't even reach the character creation screen yet! When I came here and found the No More Blocky Faces mod, and saw the screenshot of the normal map, I couldn't believe it. The texture/normal map size is fine imho. What was unbelievable to me, is that they would have compressed textures so badly, textures that are used on one area that is possibly the most important in any PC games: character faces. You see it 100% of your game time. The only technical reason I can think of, is that they used a batch process to filter all textures with an algorithm that makes them better compressed both in filesize and GPU storage (if I'm not mistaken they can be stored on the graphics card memory in compressed form). It's similar to the Photoshop option to move pixels around a little bit to allow a GIF to compress further. (edit: to be clear my explanation is just speculation. it may be that they are simply optimized for filesize, which is more important for console releases, I suppose for download time, and limited harddrive storage). So on this character face normals, huge freaking JPEG-like compression artefacts that have nothing to do with the texture dimensions.Some parts, like the normal maps on characters are actually uncompressed, which is awesome. There's no over-compression with .dds textures like you can with .gif, but it does introduce artifacts. The nose issue is simply not enough texture space given to that area of the model, at least I assume, I haven't looked that hard yet. I haven't actually used any character texture mods either though :) Nah dude, they are compressed dxt1, it says so right in the corner of my explorer, DXT1 bitdepth 32. Not to mention the file sizes are a dead give away. The body normals are 2048x2048, you don't think they'd hand out 15meg uncompressed maps.... :unsure: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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