Course Description
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Games like Prince of Persia and Battlefield Heroes deliver artistic visions beyond standard photo-realistic 3D. In this course, game developers teach the challenges of creating distinctive visual styles for interactive environments and some of their own solutions. Topics include the art pipeline, rendering algorithms, and integrating visuals with gameplay. Why stylized rendering? As they matured, the visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture) all developed new visual-abstraction mechanisms to go beyond "realism". Recent advances in visual effects have put film and games into this transitional state. In a sense, we're like artists at the end of the Renaissance: we've nearly mastered photorealism, but are only at the beginning of our discoveries about expression and perception. Some effects are subtle, like the color shifts and post-processing in Mirror's Edge. Others, such as the graphic-novel look of Mad World, dominate the entire rendering style. In games, real-time and interactive constraints require more efficient and robust solutions than are employed elsewhere in computer graphics. And to be successful, a stylized renderer must integrate with appropriately stylized models, animation, and audio to form a coherent virtual world and ultimately enhance game play. |
Prince of Persia (Win, Xbox 360, PS3) Developed by Ubisoft Montreal Published by Ubisoft 2008 |
In this course, leading game developers candidly discuss the challenges of creating and implementing a stylized artistic vision for a game. Each speaker covers a specific game aspect, such as the art pipeline, rendering algorithms, art direction, and modeling.
