CG Industry Standards - An Introduction to Computer Graphics for Artists - page 284

• Art style; there has been considerable latitude in this area with some games, but
as games become more mainstream and more money is spent developing them,
style standards are becoming more strictly enforced. When making a model for
a client, you will demonstrate superior skill not by changing the style to suit your
taste, but by matching exactly the style you are asked to work within.

• Art quality; although the “art” quality standard is rapidly being raised, video games

still lag behind feature fi lm due to the limitations of real time renderers. Another
limitation that affects this standard is that art directors in games generally have a
different type of experience than their counterparts in fi lm and industrial design,
both of which have a longer history as industries than video games.

• UVs; Games have a very high standard for UV layouts, possibly because in fi lm,

the use of high resolution texture maps and 3D paint tools allow good textures to
be painted on weak UVs. Another factor is that many fi lm studios had NURBS-
centric model pipelines that limit opportunities to practice UV editing.

16.3 Film FX Criteria

Unlike games, the fi nal output in an animation created for fi lm is a rendered frame,
a digital image fi le. The high standard for effi ciency in modeling used for games
is not required in fi lm for two reasons. First, the ability to edit the fi nished image
itself allows artists some fl exibility with their models, and secondly, fi lm FX art-
ists are not limited to the rendering power of a game console. Instead, they can use
dozens of high-speed processors working simultaneously to render a single frame
of animation.
Film studios have about a hundred years of experience fi nding and recruiting
highly skilled art talent for the fi lm industry. This has created a large pool of talented
artists in the Hollywood community, and this has in turn helped create a very high
standard of aesthetic quality for the fi nal product. In fi lm, very little less than perfec-
tion is considered acceptable.

• Technical criteria: The clean geometry rule applies to fi lm work as well as games,
though there are some differences. In fi lm, texture maps are used much more
heavily than in games, and at much higher resolutions. Maps that are not accept-
able in games for technical reasons may well be acceptable in a fi lm, as long as
the end result is a better image. The same is true of geometry. Whether it is
NURBS, polys, sub-division surfaces, or something else, the primary concern is
that it is renderable. Therefore, although clean geometry is always appreciated, it
is possible to be praised for work that contains numerous technical errors, as long
as the errors do not affect the fi nal render quality.
• Aesthetic standards: Sometimes the standard is “photo-real.” A Photoreal stan-
dard implies that all dimensions are accurate, all colors are accurate, and all
material properties are perfectly described. This is not usually possible to
achieve, so the standard in practice is simply that the object in question is credi-
ble enough to be considered photoreal. To test this, objects are composited into