(After having typed all this out… well… sorry for the wall of text.)
So, I used to work at a simulations company back in central Florida. I have friends who still do. I also have non-fond memories of dealing with the two environmental artists and their complete unwillingness to listen to reason.
Don’t get me wrong. They’re damned good at what they’re doing. They’re just not doing anyone any favors by the way they’re doing it.
Neither of these guys has ever worked in the games industry. The sum total of their experience seems to be having worked at this simulations company… probably going on 8 years now. At least one of them is technically minded enough to noodle with shaders in Unity. They work extremely well together and, therefore, have a habit of reinforcing eachother’s stubbornness.
Here’s the deal:
They bake all their lighting. This doesn’t sound so bad at first, but it gets there quickly.
They bake all their lighting in 3DStudio, and then discard all the dynamic lights. The lights never even make it to the game engine. They also have separate light baking passes for props and the interiors of buildings. The props see a lot of reuse and they each have their own lightmap, so the lightmaps have to be generic (eg. crate is made, textured, placed on a flat plane, then an AO pass is baked for it). They then use a vertex coloring script to tone the props to best fit the lighting where they are placed.
This means that the props have no lighting on them that is informed by the actual scene in which they are placed. Nothing looks like it belongs.
Then they use all the baked lighting to bake out their light probes. They slap the lightmaps into a self-illumination shader and scrap all the other textures. This means no colored bounce lighting gets into the light probes.
Everything in the scene looks flat. The character artist that got hired after I left complains that the bad lighting ruins all his sculpting and shader efforts, since the flat light-probes makes the character art also look flat.
And here’s what kills me. They literally spend weeks at 10-12 hours a day doing this. They map out the lightmap UVs by hand, packing the UVs in such a way as to not lose a single pixel of the lightmap textures. They utilize every pixel. Let that sink in. In order to not end up with light leaks, then then disable mip mapping on the lightmaps. This also means that, post baking, they have to go back in and touch up every UV edge to account for the fact that many edges from different parts accidentally shared a row of texels on the lightmap.
When I argued with them about this, they told me “a lot of games do this.” With what I know of rendering, I would assume that that statement is complete BS, but they clung to it like their lives depended on it. I even spent about three days taking one of their scenes, adding in proper lights, automapping UV2, and then rebaking everything to show them the improvements they would get (as well as the minimal cost it imposed in terms of performance). It only took 3 days because I had to figure out what they were doing so that I could undo it, and then start from scratch having never used Beast inside of Unity before. They looked at my results and dismissed them as “not having the lighting resolution that they can get.” I seriously wanted to scream, especially as the lighting pass (when I did it) took less than 5% of the time they put in to it and multiple people argued that my version looked better.
So, to wrap up this tale and avoid dredging up too much of the anger that still remains a year after having left that job, I request any time you guys might be willing to devote. My friends who still work there are still suffering under this tyranny.
If any of you would be so kind as to enumerate all the reasons why their approach is wrong (or if I am for some reason wrong to think they’re being dumb about this. I’m willing to have you guys tell me I’m an idiot), I will pass those arguments on to my friends still there. The environment artists wouldn’t listen to me because they knew me and had spent most of their careers with me (and because, technically, I was never a superb artist anyway. I was always a technical artist at heart). I think it might help if the explanation comes from a bunch of technical artists they don’t know who have a bit of history in the gaming world.
Help a guy help out his friends?