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.
Most people heading up studios had a backround in QA or production. So management has a familiarity and connection to the tools that are legacy. They can easily call bullshit when a hireling starts saying "Oh, my texture bake for a gun is going to occupy my computer for the next 8 hours. I'm going to leave it to cook, see you tomorrow boss!"
That's the big reason. Getting new tools for the staff would mean having to learn themselves.
Another thing is the "good enough, lets just get it done" mindset. That'd have a guy struggling and grunting to drive in some wood screws by hand because he doesn't want to climb through a messy garage to retrieve a powerdrill.
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.
Most people heading up studios had a backround in QA or production. So management has a familiarity and connection to the tools that are legacy. They can easily call bullshit when a hireling starts saying "Oh, my texture bake for a gun is going to occupy my computer for the next 8 hours. I'm going to leave it to cook, see you tomorrow boss!"
That's the big reason. Getting new tools for the staff would mean having to learn themselves.
Another thing is the "good enough, lets just get it done" mindset. That'd have a guy struggling and grunting to drive in some wood screws by hand because he doesn't want to climb through a messy garage to retrieve a powerdrill.