Why are video games graphics challenging? Productionizing rendering algorithms
Such a good write up. It’s mind boggling the amount of problems you have to solve with fakes, hacks, trickery to fool the human player’s eye.<p>What’s worse is that all of these techniques across <i>all</i> of the mentioned areas are evolving and changing as hardware changes. It’s impossible for one person to keep up anymore.<p>The art pipeline is pretty much cookie cutter from films with an added step of simplification of the mesh and baking normals. The rest is up to the engine and graphics programmers to get working as intended, the downstream of this is the design team.<p>It’s gotten easier in the animation department. Easier in the texturing department. Easier due to painting and PBR, but it’s gotten exponentially more difficult in the core engineering, engine level department. It’s a murder pit of the mind.<p>I’ve written a few game engines. I don’t write game engines.