Where is Klein when you need him?

    Dear Klein,

    You call yourself a texture and shader artist. And since you are our resident guy in the know, a few questions about the future is in order.

    I keep hearing from my buddies involved with next gen development that we will see a lot of procedural shaders instead of textures in next gen. Any truth to that?

    And since making a procedural texture is very different from painting one or manipulating a photo into one, we need to start practising. Can you recommend any tools to pick up? Been looking at DarkTree for procedural textures. Do anybody use that in the industry?

    Basically I want to make sure I will not get left behind in next gen texturing, because of procedurals. Got any advice for us all Klein?

    But when you think about it, something has to be done, memory requirements keep increasing and already it becomes a bottleneck at 256 on a graphics card.

    I'm working on a next-gen title and it's not that different from current-gen games like Splinter Cell and the like. There are normal, diffuse, specular, cube maps and then from time to time you get to create a fancy shader for a particular surface/material. Some things are completely shaderbased without any painting done at all but thats pretty rare... so...don't worry about it now.

    There actually is very little good resources on making materials, I have learned from various tutorials across internet, and one valuable resource was Brazil R/S manual that came with it. I was lucky to get my hands on it through a friend.

    Quote from marque_pierre

    Okay, so how do you suggest one goes about learning to make shaders then? Any ressources out there, or just trial and error?

    well hmm good questions, its different from engine to engine anyway... I'd just wait till UE3 is made available to public

    It's pretty safe bet to start working on UE since the volume UE3 is on use as we speak, there is not going to be a shortage on jobs in the future.

    UE3 is teh winnar!

    Hmmm. I think I might be barking up the wrong tree here. Perhaps the future of texture art in gamerdom is not gonna play out this way anyway... Just want to be prepared, is all. :roll:

    Hey Pierre..

    I think it is a safe bet that real time procedural textures used everywhere in games is alittle off in the future yet (if it ends up happening at all).

    Basically, it boils down to shaders. So yeah, once Unreal 3 comes out.. have a look at it.. The shader system is simply awesome. After playing around with it for a while, you'll know what I mean. But thats what I would advise forcusing on for sure... the shader aspect of things, and not to worry too much on the procedural side for now.

    Cheers,

    NRG

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