Thread by @delaneykingrox

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.

Eyes are bastard hard to do. Hellblade did a very high end solve for them, look at these results.

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.