3D modeling was outsourced to foreign sweat shops on par with fiver. We had 3 artists on staff who's job it was to fix all the fuckups the foreign artists were doing. The foreign artists never hit target polycounts and always turned in work that was full of flaws like unwelded verts or being set up in the wrong scaling / wrong world orientation. Those artists spent most of their time creating entirely new low poly models and then baking the details of the high poly down onto that model to make it compliant with our metrics.
We had many people who were SJWs who got into games as a fall back when things like their fine arts degree didn't get them a job the way they were hoping. No doubt their foot in the door was some kind of nepotism.
Basically, the guys we had in house on staff were just focused on low poly and fixing bad topo.
Max, Maya, Zbrush and substance painter all made auto-magic re-topology tools. Whatever that shit out went through minimal editing before it was baked and considered good. Lots of broken "difficult" areas like bad topo around tits, bad topo around the corner of lips. Weird as hell lighting artifacts thanks to that.
You know how you'd have topo that is like /\ in the middle of a symmetrical line? If the retopo pass made it / / they'd not even bother to turn the triangles. Oh, giant 8 edge n-gon? Fuck it. It's flat. Surely the engine will get it right. Let's not solve that pre-emptively!
The dumbest topo tool is zbrush though. Smear red and blue to indicate where you need more texture density and hit the easy button. Others in the office didn't even know you could premark texture seams to make the tool at least a little more intelligent.
Legacy is legacy, y'know? More ready made tool and scripts, tutorials and video learning. What makes them better than blender is just the fact that there's more money behind it. Whenever blender comes up with something truly unique, the major players just copycat them.
Opensource tenders to be by the people, for the people, but like most projects that are quasi-communism, there is no real motivation to have high production values in training seminars or said training in the first place.
If you are a self guided learner, this is fine. If you have the free time, this is fine... but where commercial software wins is when the industry makes a major shift. Like in recent memory, the change to PBR materials. When you have to change the entire way you bake materials to accommodate ray tracing or change the way you model something to accommodate nanite, there will be professional training in person you can buy from one of the big 3.
With blender. . . you don't really have that crack team of "We need to train the entire studio on nextgen pipelines THIS MONTH" groups.
Speaking as an ex game industry worker.
3D modeling was outsourced to foreign sweat shops on par with fiver. We had 3 artists on staff who's job it was to fix all the fuckups the foreign artists were doing. The foreign artists never hit target polycounts and always turned in work that was full of flaws like unwelded verts or being set up in the wrong scaling / wrong world orientation. Those artists spent most of their time creating entirely new low poly models and then baking the details of the high poly down onto that model to make it compliant with our metrics.
We had many people who were SJWs who got into games as a fall back when things like their fine arts degree didn't get them a job the way they were hoping. No doubt their foot in the door was some kind of nepotism.
Basically, the guys we had in house on staff were just focused on low poly and fixing bad topo.
Max, Maya, Zbrush and substance painter all made auto-magic re-topology tools. Whatever that shit out went through minimal editing before it was baked and considered good. Lots of broken "difficult" areas like bad topo around tits, bad topo around the corner of lips. Weird as hell lighting artifacts thanks to that.
You know how you'd have topo that is like /\ in the middle of a symmetrical line? If the retopo pass made it / / they'd not even bother to turn the triangles. Oh, giant 8 edge n-gon? Fuck it. It's flat. Surely the engine will get it right. Let's not solve that pre-emptively!
The dumbest topo tool is zbrush though. Smear red and blue to indicate where you need more texture density and hit the easy button. Others in the office didn't even know you could premark texture seams to make the tool at least a little more intelligent.
I do some hobby 3d rendering in blender. How does that tool compare to the professional ones?
Legacy is legacy, y'know? More ready made tool and scripts, tutorials and video learning. What makes them better than blender is just the fact that there's more money behind it. Whenever blender comes up with something truly unique, the major players just copycat them.
Opensource tenders to be by the people, for the people, but like most projects that are quasi-communism, there is no real motivation to have high production values in training seminars or said training in the first place.
If you are a self guided learner, this is fine. If you have the free time, this is fine... but where commercial software wins is when the industry makes a major shift. Like in recent memory, the change to PBR materials. When you have to change the entire way you bake materials to accommodate ray tracing or change the way you model something to accommodate nanite, there will be professional training in person you can buy from one of the big 3.
With blender. . . you don't really have that crack team of "We need to train the entire studio on nextgen pipelines THIS MONTH" groups.