Today, games increasingly incorporate vast, complex 3D worlds. Players can move through cityscapes, or even across entire planets, with as much fluidity as in the real, physical world. Environments are immersive and breathtaking. Games are appreciated not only for their playability or compelling mechanics, but also for their sheer beauty.
There’s some debate as to what was the first true 3D game. Some would award the title to 1980’s Battlezone, which used wireframe vector graphics to render 3D tanks — though the tanks themselves could only move in two dimensions. Others might give this title to 1996’s Quake, arguably the first game that featured levels composed of rooms on top of rooms, truly giving the player the possibility to move through a 3D space. There are as many candidates as there are definitions of true 3D, and so the discussion continues.
How times have changed.
And the characters within these games are deeper and more credible than ever, too. A great deal of effort goes into writing characters with plausible motivation and development. But just as in real life, a huge amount of detail is also conveyed by a character’s appearance: their facial expression; the style and cut of their clothes; the smoothness or ruggedness of their skin; whether their clothing is crisp and immaculate, or ragged and worn. The characters in today’s games are as detailed and beautiful as the world they inhabit.
The assembly of these visual elements makes for 3D games that are emotive, almost cinematic experiences. Today’s games are not yet quite as detailed as the real world — but they aren’t so far away.
This modern level of visual detail and complexity in 3D games is largely the result of the skill and commitment of the visual artists working in the sector today. But another vital component to the visual quality of games today is the ever-evolving sophistication of the software tools that are used to create these games.
This is where Adobe comes in.
“We chose Substance Painter for its ease of use and speed of iteration while being nondestructive, baking and painting all in one package, and the ability to customize the overall setup to match our in-game PBR-spec gloss shading method.”
— BRIAN BURNELL, RESPAWN ENTERTAINMENT
“We used Substance Designer to create almost all our...tileable textures....Almost every...art asset in Forza Horizon 4 had some part of it run through Substance Designer or Substance Painter.”
— DON ARCETA, PLAYGROUND GAMES
“Overall, we felt that the Substance toolset helped us to ship the game in time, with good quality, and with a relatively small environment art team.”
— MIRO VESTERINEN, REMEDY ENTERTAINMENT
“Thanks to Substance, with a small team of artists we were able to make the productivity rise, creating 1,500 materials to make the world of Ancient Greece back to life.”
— VINCENT DEROZIER, UBISOFT QUEBEC
The Substance 3D asset library provides video game artists thousands of parametric materials. Each material is individually modifiable, allowing limitless variations overall. And downloadable node graphs allow 3D artists to see how these phenomenal materials are constructed, providing a valuable learning resource.
The library also includes more than 1,000 game-ready 3D models, each carefully curated to provide consistent topology and UVs throughout.
All assets in the 3D asset library are included as part of the Substance 3D subscriptions to download and modify as a component of any commercial project.
The Substance 3D toolset continues to evolve and improve, reaching beyond the remit of texturing applications. Substance 3D Modeler will open up new avenues for asset creation, both on desktop and in VR, and Substance 3D Stager allows artists to lay out and render high-quality 3D scenes, or their portfolios.
Interested in getting your company to use Substance 3D? Learn more.
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