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people are so jaded now
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It’s a post Ratatouille world. Has been for 13 years.
That’s kind of true - game engines intended to do AAA games increasingly have entirely separate workflows for that kind of work as opposed to doing small, hand-crafted games. On the other hand, I see a surprising number of small teams (and even individuals)* doing photo-realistic games with relatively tiny budgets. They just rely a lot on capturing the real world (motion capture, photogrammetry, etc.) which can now be done with open-source tools and cheap equipment, and procedural tools. Anyone using Unreal to make games has free access to Megascans and their… mega-scans of environments. Making stuff from scratch requires bigger and bigger teams, though, and even that is increasingly reliant on tools that use neural networks and physics simulations.**
*What a small team can do:
Here’s a game being done by one person:
https://mobile.twitter.com/fadedthegame
**What’s required for a single, “hand-made” asset, now, the kind of thing that previously someone might have knocked-off in an hour using a simple model and a hand-painted texture:
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Thanks for your response. Have only had a brief look at the links you’ve provided and see some encouraging steps in the right direction as far as being able to handle larger assets.
I am encouraged to see this kind of stuff but am always wanting it to be within the reach of all the up and coming players in the field which is why I expressed an anxiety of the Unreal platform becoming out of reach to the young people without the appropriate hardware to practice their skills on.
Personally I think it is always good thing to have access to an overview of the medium before you specialize which is what I appreciated about UR and Unity making their development platforms free for beginners… Just hoping they don’t go the rout of Adobe!
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The move is absolutely towards making the engines more accessible to beginning developers, at least financially. (And ever-improving support from the community makes them more accessible in terms of working with them.) Unity started it off, but Unreal ran with it. Unreal used to be enormously expensive to license, but they just changed their terms with the newest version making it completely free to anyone with less than a million dollars in sales (i.e. almost every single indie developer ever). Now you’ve got free, open source engines like Godot getting more impressive, nipping at their heels, pushing them towards keeping things free (and offering more for free). Anyone demanding monthly licensing fees has to really give something of value in return, beyond just access to the engine.
Plus, other costs are going down as free, open-source tools are getting better, too - Blender is absolutely a competitor now of traditionally-hugely-expensive commercial 3D modeling software. Big game companies have been donating money to develop it, and the end result is democratizing game development.
I very much love the opensource ethos and the only thing missing is an accessible compositor that will bury AE, I so much prefer using it over PS but the limited knowledge I have from using Shake, Nuke and Fusion has me wanting some sort of accessible crossover that is light weight on resources but fun to use on the front end.
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