Halo 2: Anniversary art production talk

[GSH]

One of my coworkers had a GDC presentation on how art went from concept to in-game in a day. Good slice of life for modern game development.

-- GSH

[MrTwosheds]

Zbrush $795 for a single user licence. Hobbyists, teenagers and 4/5 of world population not welcome.
Clearly the concept of $79.5 and 10 times more sales has not occurred to them. Why so mean with the cool toys?

[LtFEED]

extremely cool

[TheJamsh]

Great stuff, I'll take a look later! Is Halo joining/already on the PBR bandwagon? Frostbite, Unreal and I think Ubisofts 'Snowdrop' engine are all on that road now. I imagine a lot of other in-house engines are too.

Zbrush $795 for a single user licence. Hobbyists, teenagers and 4/5 of world population not welcome.
Clearly the concept of $79.5 and 10 times more sales has not occurred to them. Why so mean with the cool toys?

Yeah Software (especially for artists) always seems to be the most expensive part (hence why they're so bloody expensive to hire). I'm surprised Pixologic haven't gone down the Subscription route yet, which is slightly more reasonable. Problem is if you're not making the cash to pay it off every month it becomes kind of a moot point :/ While nobody likes the idea of piracy, you can see the motive for it.

[MrTwosheds]

I just cannot see the economic sense of the pricing. The producers have nothing to gain from limiting the uptake of their technology, but they can (and almost certainly will) easily loose their market to competitors or indeed pirates. The more customers you have, the stronger your position, the economic power of software is in it's ability to be distributed to millions of customers for very little real cost.

[GSH]

I can't speak to other Halo titles, but what my company worked on (Halo 2: Anniversary), which is part of the Halo: Master Chief Collection, used PBR. It's one of many bag of tricks to getting things looking good. Good artists help PBR shine; lousy artists can make PBR look lousy.

-- GSH

[MrTwosheds]

It takes a lot of effort and practice to become a good artist in any medium and natural talent counts even less when using software, exposure to the medium is essential to the supply of good artists.

[Shadow Knight]

I just cannot see the economic sense of the pricing. The producers have nothing to gain from limiting the uptake of their technology, but they can (and almost certainly will) easily loose their market to competitors or indeed pirates. The more customers you have, the stronger your position, the economic power of software is in it's ability to be distributed to millions of customers for very little real cost.

It's because when you have a team of even 10 people, the cost of a couple $795 licenses is peanuts compared to what you'll already be paying the employees. It also tends to include support and a good amount of documentation, which means the time spent training new users is minimised as much as possible.

[MrTwosheds]

But this limit's sales of the software to the few thousand involved in professional sw development and thus income in terms of only hundreds of thousands, Millions of private individuals would gladly pay a more reasonable price for software such as this, most of them would probably never make any money out of it, or even a decent model, but their cash input would multiply the eventual profits and nurture a skill base from which future developments can grow. Only someone with their head in the sand can fail to have seen how these things evolve. In 10 years time this tech will be history, someone else will be supplying the cutting edge to the game industry, someone else will be supplying an equivalent tech to the public and the opportunity for it to make a serious profit will have simply passed by.

Of course it is "traditional" for artists to work, live and die in poverty, only then to have the wealthy pay offensively large amounts of money to each other for their work. I guess it isn't even going to work that way for IT-Art.