That explains everything
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Foliage artist? As in, your whole job was designing leaves and bushes and such? Thinking back to the Sony thread from earlier today, another useless job identified.
Isn't that also pretty much pointless, as the big studio games just reuse assets and engines? I thought they largely didn't even do "foliage design" anymore.
Nah, always making new foliage assets. Its actually a real job and very useful on big games. But too specific to be useful in a smaller team.
blizzard hired one guy to do the water costal effects in warcraft 3. I remember some panel they had where he was drug along and he was just like.. 'yeah.. I just do the water..' or something, then didn't answer any questions. I got a really good laugh about it at the time, as the water was pretty bad then. It was just a flat transparent animated png of wave foam.. but I guess he could be like a pixel artist and it took him several years to draw out those animations one pixel at a time.
It makes me wounder how complicated we make these frameworks and projects and how much busy work it all generates, and instead of hiring engineers to rework the systems into something more sane, they are just like FUCK IT, It's to expensive to hire a couple of engineers... lets hire 1000 unskilled people righto out of school and brute force it instead.
and those every game now has team and team of people dedicated to making oil barrels, crates, yellow stairways, leaves trees and bushes, over and over and over again on game after identical game.
Then at the end they are so proud. look! my bushes look almost as good as the bushes in all the other mediocre games.
I hear it really depressing to work for these game studios. They make it so that only the idealistic agenda pushers will tolerate the oppressive soul crushing environment.
Wasn't it mentioned here that a program called RealTree or something is responsible for most foliage in modern games?
Speedtree from IDV handles a lot of it as well; anyone who isn't using middleware for procedural foliage is just wasting time and money, unless it's a game using a very specific kind of art-style where those suites don't fit.
I am pretty sure that SpeedTree just takes your art assets and uses them to display trees in the best performance and most immersive way possible. It probably has some default art included, but you would normally still need to supply the art (textures, bump maps, etc.). Compare Skyrim LE, Skyrim SE and then say a really well modded version of the game using the latest mods. You'll see an evolution in progress from barely passable to stuff that is truly incredible.
However, this all depends on their artists being any good.
I could be mistaken, but I believe at its core Speedtree uses a fast fractal algorithm to generate realistic trees, their leaves, and tree movement quickly.
So yes the graphical assets are likely separate from the shape algorithm, but I find it hard to believe you need a foliage artist rather than simply licensing some existing assets and spending a couple weeks tweaking algorithm seeds to get the look you want.
It's probably called something else. Realtree makes camouflage and has licensed their patterns to appear in games in the past.
That, and the gaming industry is notoriously a horrible place to work, so most of the good engineers are already making better money for less stress elsewhere and aren't going to jump at the opportunity to optimize the spaghetti code a gaggle of retards made under crunch time conditions.
Nature already did the hard part.
At most you would make different LODs for the leaves to improve performance, but knowing how shit performance is in modern games, I don't think they do that.
Bloated budget.. 1/2 in marketing. 1/4 on dei hires that do bullshit, and probably if lucky remaining 1/4 to actual devs doing actual work.
Its literally the mafia. Mafia demands no show and no work jobs.