This is neat and I always find myself coming back to these sort of topics year after year, learning stuff I’ll never actually use, about how to make a video game. I bet there’s a lot of people here like me who got into programming as a teenager because they wanted to recreate their favorite 2D video games, ending up having a useful career skill instead and almost no video games to show for it for lack of time. The issue was only made worse when the industry went toward much more math heavy 3D games which has logic my mind just can’t wrap its head around. Maybe that explains why Kickstarter and Steam saw a ton of retro 2D games in the past few years... some people just went for it.
> Maybe that explains why Kickstarter and Steam saw a ton of retro 2D games in the past few years
I actually think (as someone with gamedev experience) that the explanation has to do with the difficulty of creating art assets for 3d games rather than complex math (as other users have pointed out, current widely used engines take care of mostly).
Indeed, even indie games that are made in 3d generally take a low poly style as they are easier to make (and obviously easier to achieve performant results).
> the difficulty of creating art assets for 3d games
As somebody who is a hobbyist at best, this is my biggest sticking point. Anybody can learn to slam together some pixel art in Paint, and even doing more advanced work in Photoshop is not out of reach with a little time and practice. But learning a 3D modeling tool is orders of magnitude harder - I've made a couple runs at Blender and older versions of 3D Max, and there's just so much to making meshes that look decent, and then you have to skin them. And then there is the question of adding animations. My hat is off to people who have developed those skills.
My only hope is that technology to make this process easier will advance. I've seen some demos of people using their phone cameras to scan real objects and generate 3D models, but even if that worked perfectly, it appears to me that there would be a lot of work to process that into passable 3D art assets.
I think the difficulty in 3D polygon modelling is partially a tooling problem, and also a learning curve problem. The usual workflows I've seen/used that didn't involve sculpting (which requires being good at that too) all involve blocking out the model in several steps and applying semi-irreversible transformations, making it really hard to go back and fix a dumb mistake. Some editors like Blender are also notorious for having completely impenetreble interfaces, and even 3ds max and similar probably aren't too straightforward either. Ontop of all that, you're required to know a ton of technical details (skinning, normal smoothing, etc) that aren't explained properly for modellers anywhere I know of (building an engine/renderer is a fairly direct way to pick up that knowledge though).
3D sculpting and CAD modelling are entirely different beasts however (I've never actually seen CAD tools involved in a game asset workflow, but it could be done and would be fairly useful for inorganic assets). Sculpting is dead simple in principle, in the same sense that drawing is; meaning you don't need to worry about the tools in the same way. CAD is a different beast, but still works on some pretty simple principles (constraint-driven CSG).
I think the only real "hard" part right now is getting low-poly versions of assets that can be used inside of your engine. Making the high-poly assets might require more actual work (and 3D scanning could help there), but it's nonetheless fairly straightforward.
edit: "low-poly" here meaning "reasonable number of polygons", not visibly low-poly.
I'm from an art background - and honestly, I couldn't disagree more.
The reason why most people are bad at 3d modeling is that most people are bad at art. Reproducing shapes from real life to any medium, if it's charcoal, or clay, or 3d, is very difficult. People who are good at it typically spent tens of thousands of hours practicing.
Part of what you learn in this practice is patience. Part of what you learn is a good eye. However, unless you're fundamentally allergic to tech - tools like Blender are simply way faster and more powerful than any other medium.
Consider an 'art' skill like making woodcuts. There's no 'undo'. Mistakes are very easy to make, and often involve stabbing yourself through the web of your thumb with a chisel. It takes days of painful, physically tiring work, that is very bad for your hands, to simply make the lines. It's like that because real material processes don't care about user-friendliness.
For me, learning Blender as an interface was enjoyable because I could see how much easier it was going to make my life. It's neither large, nor unduly complicated - I'd consider it similar to learning vim, or photoshop. The real problems - the hard problems, are art problems.
VR might make waves here (and there are some interesting VR demos out there) though that's a long way out. Creating 3D structures on a 2D surface is always going to be a fundamentally difficult problem.
It isn’t just that it is more difficult, it takes much longer to produce a final art asset. If you are doing a 3D game you won’t be able to get away with one artist, you’ll need a team.
A good pixel or 2D artist may have more skill in many dimensions than an average 3D artist, but given the fidelity of what is being created they will be able to produce more in a given set of time. Ideally, as an independent game developer you want to have one artist. You can do that if you choose 2D.
"My only hope is that technology to make this process easier will advance."
If you just want to source art assets using 'standard' definitions used in CG and games you
a. Subcontract them
b. Purchase them from some store or source free ones
c. Use generator programs like Poser
and any combination of those.
If you want to learn modeling and art in general,you learn modeling. The trick is it's partly art, so unlike, say, woodworking, the number of free parameters to master is quite large.
To my understand, some 3D artists are currently building things using VR to create the rough mesh layout, and fine tuning it after in a program like blender
There's also modelmakers that scan real objects as well too
Have you tried Unity or Unreal? I think they're relatively easy for a programmer to get into, and they are great fun to tinker with as well as enormously powerful.
Yep. Started teaching Unity to my kids. I have neither the imagination nor the patience and time I had when I was their ages and wanted to make video games. Figured it’d be a better use of time to give them the tools and time and opportunity to try their hand at it. They’ve made some cool small things in it so far.
32 here and I don’t think it’s going to happen for me and probably not my kids either realistically. But at least I got decent career skills out of it. So that’s how I’m trying to look at it.
