I play a fair amount of video games, you may be unsurprised to hear. Far from the blocky Atari 2600 graphics I played as a kid, almost all video games now are visually based on 3D models of things, like most of the special effects in modern movies. Generally, as I understand it, they made a 3D model in the computer and wrap a digital image (called a texture, which may or may not tile like web pages c. 1996) around it, like you'd wrap a box for a present.
They get it just
almost right enough to be distracting. (
Clive, for one, has gone on about the "uncanny valley" plenty.) I think he said about some game or other that witnessing the humans moving in the game was like watching zombies move around. Almost convincing, but just dead enough to look reanimated instead of actually alive.
The last couple of years have seen a few different tacks show up. There's
cel shading, using 3D models but rendering them in a limited-color, outlined comic-book-like style. The game
XIII, for one, uses this style and looks great (though it isn't that great a game--I sold my copy back to EB Games without finishing it).
Last night I was glazedly stumbling around the Web, as I do, and came across
this interesting forum topic about how they make the illustrations for the Wall Street Journal. Someone there then linked to the following, which made my jaw drop.
Click the hand and go to the bottom of the page and watch the .WMV video. "Guh," you will say, as I did.
This is a 3D model of a hand, in a computer, with a pretty clever setup to render convincing cross-hatching shading onto it.
FOUR YEARS AGO the beautiful eggheads at Princeton figured out how to do this. Why can I not play a game that uses this? You bastards. Gimme a friggin'
dream-sequence level, at least.
The movie
Sin City came out recently. It's been shot to look
as close as possible to the (excellent, violent) comic book series that spawned it. (Here's
an interview with co-director Robert Rodriguez.) The inevitable movie tie-in game better use the same style, or I will cry.
What does all this have to do with painting? I dunno, it's not unrelated to that whole
Van Eyck vs. David Park thing: trying to come closer to reality versus going off on your own tangent. And I have a video-game-related series of paintings in the works. More on those later.
I demand to see more video games rendered in non-realistic styles.
Paper Mario supposedly looks like paper cutouts. There's a version of Space Invaders called
Notepad Invaders where every frame of animation is hand-drawn and looks like ballpoint pen on a pad. Is there more of this? And why not?
Hit the comments if you know about more 3D-based video games (whatever platform they run on) that don't try and look "real." I wanna see some more.
