So far Mass Effect redux seems to be using higher resolution textures and injected shaders, but I am seeing a lot of the little uv bake errors (we all did at the time as the techniques where new), so perhaps the team didn't get to remaster them.
I would have loved to see the team do things like layering tiled trims on the piping and collars so that the clothes are super crisp in close ups.

Uprezzing the textures hasn't been able to achieve that, because ultimately they are smaller than our HD screens.
But this isn't a criticism of the work, rather I just wanna chat about what I see, what I would have liked to have seen and tochat about techniques.
Things I desperately want to do to the characters is work on their teeth and sclera (whites) of the eyes so they don't glow so much, tone down the punctum (the thick band between eyeball and eyelashes), and fit the eyes with ao caps (spheres of polys that shadow the eyes)
Collars are an example. The caps and sides if the thin cloth have a hard edge, so the normals are razor sharp. Face weighted normals would make them bevel nicely.
Tile the maps of the piping over these edges and you get a crisp trim.

Back when ME2 was madez the bakes would...
...have been fairly hexagonal low polys baking a rounded cloth collar... so you get these little jagged ray misses. Again, I did the exact same thing at the time, probably way worse too :)
I am sure the artists themselves wanted to do that kind of stuff too, but didn't get the chance. The games have a huge amount of content.
I dream of being able to take a team of devs to a much loved game with carte blanch to polish it to the nth degree. That would just be amazing.
Given the limitations of an older engine, what they have done is great. I am just buzzing with ideas on what I would have done and pushed for on the task.
One thing that bugs me is the sight lines. Everyone seems to be looking at everyone else's chins so far in ME2 legendary. Ensuring a strong sight line for the camera angles and cuts is super important.
People tend to alternate looking at left and right eyes, reading their face, glancing away, down, etc.
Here they remain fairly locked on a mid point.
Another eyebissue is in character generation, when we look down our upper eyelids sit just touching the iris (colored bit). When shep looks down, her eyes roll without the lids, flashing the whites above the eyes.
We only do this when...
..in a flight or fight state. So white flashing above eyes signals to us something is very wrong.
Excuse typos, my phone is older and the screen keyboard sensitivity is nerfed. Time for a new one.
See?
Eyes actually have a lot of shadow on them from the upper eyelid, eyelashes and as the eye turns away from the front. Sclera are subtly bumpy compared to the lens.
Here you can see an example of not having that shadow. The eyes kinda jump forward. You hafta compensate by dimming the sclera. Image
Eyes are bastard hard to do. Hellblade did a very high end solve for them, look at these results. ImageImage
My personal solutions involve a few shader tricks. Unfortunately the current project doesn't need em, so I am kinda hoping nobody else figures out my trick so I can lay claim ;)
Another thing I noticed was baked open eyelids. Miranda in ME2 legendary suffers from this. The problem is when a character blinks or looks down. The upper eye folds travel with them, because the normal map has the folds baked in.

This isn't trivial.
Ideally you bake the eyes open, so when you LOD, your eye textures stay intact without needing an eyeball. Also the folds go into the normal map.

Downside is you also want the upper eyelid texture when you blink. So do you bake eye shut or eye open?

See? Tricky.
My take is that this series could have really benefitted from porting all the assets to a fully PBR engine, such as Unreal 4, because it isn't texture resolution that matters, it is the play of light across surfaces that sells a game of this pacing.
That way, older textures could have been batched into crisp masks, and those processed through Substance Designer to create masks for layered blended materials in Unreal.

That would mean extremely high resolution for webbing, clothes, armour panels and environments.
But they deliberately didn't go this route because they want the next ME to shine.

Reduxes are not meant to be better than sequals.

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More from @delaneykingrox

19 May
Pride March is not a tourist event, it is a protest. It is not something to slap your corporate logo on or sanitise to sell tickets.
It is a protest.
It will be until we are included completely, indivisible and equal.
The police are not welcome as they are part of what we are protesting against.

Pride started as a riot, that was triggered because of a violent, dehumanising police raid.

The police cannot be part of pride until all that stops.
Seeing businesses support us as we march is fantastic. But it is not about them. It is about us.

They either support us year round, or they don't deserve to advertise there.
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19 May
#Gamedev quicktip. Scene organisation plug ins are worth the money for most editors.
Being able to color code game objects in the browsers, organise them into folders (that remove their transforms on load to save overhead), group and tag assets and make collections is gold.
Sometimes scenes can include a huge number of assets to scroll through. Organising these as children of game objects seems like a great idea, but it means each object has to be transformed by its parents. This slows things down considerably.
A simple solve is to create a script that sits on a parent and dumps the children to the scene root when you start the game, before batching of static objects occurs.

Plug ins exist that do this. So have a look around.
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18 May
So here is the solve I was talking about for jaggies when baking a rounded model to a chonky one. (A tutorial thread)...

#gamdev #gameart #techart
Here is the problem. You have to bake the left mesh to the middle mesh. As you can see, they dont overlap well.

I got ya fam. Image
Step one. Unwrap your low. Then add some guiding edges to the model- DO NOT smooth your uv out- leave it as is.
Step two, move the guide edges so that they wrap around the model snugly. ImageImage
Read 13 tweets
17 May
Say you have a round tube as your high poly (black), and a chunky hexagonal tube as your low res (blue with green interior) your ray casts will miss at the corners (red). Image
You can see this here Image
You get wonky lines and little dark dents where the rays hit unevenly Image
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So Valheim was a great experience, but I would strongly disagree with anyone saying the game is finely balanced... or balanced at all.
Progression comes more from item purchase than skill, and enemies either are hopelessly easy or one shot you.
Don't get me wrong, it is fun on so many fronts and I give it two thumbs up. But balanced? I can't say that.

A lot of the shades of growth and variety needed to feel progress just aren't there yet, and the values often seem arbitrary.
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Fingers crossed the devs get a handle on it over the coming year.
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My optometrist says I need bifocals. Which is nice because I spend most of my time looking at a bi woman.
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