GTA V had a 200 million budget but the models terrain don't even look impressive?

News & General Discussion
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As a modeler environment artist for over 5 years I bought gta5 mainly to analyze their rage engine updates and artwork.
The first thing I noticed was how bad the terrain is. It’s not even hand done in many places to allow for exploring, I mean trails and things you see in fantasy games. I have used worldmachine with mudbox to make terrain way more impressive, and I’m wondering, how can I myself as a single individual make a terrain thats alot better than gta v?

Moving onto the map size in general. Many people were fooled into thinking it was a huge open world. But what I realized is the planes are 10-20 times slower than a normal plane should be, and the helicopters too, which make it seem big. People who have played flight simulators understand. It’s just not really impressive in scale.

The architecture is very basic as well. I understand each building was hand modeled to be unique and that takes alot of people, but I cannot justify a budget this big with what was produced visually. From a modeling perspective I see no more than 1 million.

I can see a group of several talented modelers designing a more interesting world, maybe every building wont be extremely detailed, but something that would impress most people just as much, if not more. And they just pulled from california and real life references, not even designing fantasy from scratch.

I was expecting to be way more impressed with the art with such a big budget, but am I underestimating?
I mean I’ve seen so many individuals from the asset store and art forums make huge progress by themselves, and then I see big budget games and I’m just wondering, where is all this budget going? Certainly doesnt look to be on the concepting / modeling / texturing / environment design side. It seems like 95% is going elsewhere.

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There it goes… 1 million for art, same for programming, $198 million for marketing. :wink:

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lol funny as it is, I think Xaron has a good point. How much of that money really goes into the game… hmmm

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It’s not all about polys and textures. There’s all the voice acting, the mocap (and actors), the music licensing, management and co-ordination, writers, etc etc.

We see a lot of shock comparisons with movie budgets… The game shares a lot of production traits and features you get in a movie… ok so GTA may not be movie quality, but then it’s not 90 minutes of linear footage either.

And yeah, there’s the marketing slice.

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I do agree about the terrain and textures. You’d have to expect more than that for an ending generation game. Sometimes you could even see the texture block patterns, 90’s style … Good thing that the game still feels absolutely awesome.
I wonder if they made it slightly lower quality to make the ps4 / XBone versions look more impressive, without having to implement latest VFX tricks we saw in latest engines.

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The split of the project actually was:

$110 M for production
$150 M for marketing

This makes it look much nicer for the art production but I guess a lot of that budget went into optimization and creation of ‘distinct looking efficient content’ that can work with the streaming and the open world concept (keep in mind we are talking about trash boxes here with 256MB VRAM which even by mobile standards is weak). As such a lot of the art work actually also has to go into benchmarking and refining it, not purely into producing it.
Also producting the whole audio side of things etc is extremely costly for such ‘realworld clones’, as it takes a lot of time and effort, be it the audio effects or the voice.

Its trivial to create impressive looking assets without thinking about the hardware, but its 100 times harder to make assets that look good enough and have a high framerate on an X360 or PS3 (its much easier to create great looking and better performing assets on iPad 3 / 4 or iPhone 5+)

On top of that we don’t know about their staff fluctuations in the light of the bad PR and reputation they have regarding crunch time management, time planning and crediting work properly.

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As Pix10 stated there goes more into games than just graphics and code. it is really a big project with soooo many things coming together so the 110 mill really isnt that much when you think about it.

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The texture resolutions and popping of so much LODs switching is obviously there just so it can even run on 360/ps3. And only 1-2 people could probably handle a tool they have to make automatic lod’s, because the lod’s don’t look very good they are practically boxes along with a very short draw distance and a lot of distant fog.
I’m sure they have like a batch tool that will convert all those textures and change all the lod settings on every model easily for pc / new consoles.
They are probably in the process of doing that as we speak.

The textures aren’t much of concern to me because we all know resolution is easy to change. But I also agree, again, just 1 more texture artist would have made even the low resolution ones their using better.

I’m curious to know how much of the budget actually went into the 3d art pipeline. Maybe I have to re-evaluate my worth if I think I could have made the games terrain 10x better by myself, maybe I should be working at rockstar. Probably not, I suppose many are up to the task, for some reason they just didn’t spend enough time on it.

The overall environment design just seems very novice. The country region of the map is not even laid out and polished to be immersing, I understand its not their strong point and foliage is hard on the system but still, you can tell they didn’t run a 2nd or 3rd or polish pass over the outdoor part. If you have ever tried to make a big open world skyrim type mountainous environment you would know what I mean, they just stuck a bunch of big mountain terrains that are barely even playable on, probably made by only 1 person, and the part that is playable is very small.

If they had 1 more person who specialized in terrain, 1 talented outdoor environment artist, another person designated to making trails and making the terrain more playable, a few talented hard surface architecture modelers to give more diversity and character to the city, and another artist that said, hey we need to open up this map about 30% more and make things a bit more interesting-
the game would visually look ALOT better. Theres only a few tall buildings, and when analyzing the city from a sky view it looks flat with the “nothing to it” thought.

I’m hoping I am not underestimating the time it takes to design an environment this big, because a budget like this is just discouraging as an indie. But from the experience and skill I have now It just makes me wonder why they didn’t take the above into consideration. 4-5 more artists could have taken this to the level it should be at. And with a budget that big, why couldn’t they afford them?

For example: if I had only 5 Michael O’s could they not produce something better?

https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/9905

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Having been a lead on a large open world city based game myself, I can say hand on heart that it’s a lot more work than you’d imagine.

It’s one thing to build a city and say “here you go, I built this”, but there are so many factors that make it more than a simple modelling process. The composition of the city alone is constantly altered and updated throughout development, as designers need to move elements and the art director is saying he doesn’t like the skyline from whatever point in the map. The programmers will most likely want the city to be built from modular components, and you’ll have to work with PSV sets AND get the nice line-of-sight stuff that the art director’s after.

Pathfinding and car AI will have strict rules that have to be catered for in the modelling and layout; texture usage has to be smart, and LOD models on a target platform where every single byte is being accounted for, may well end up being boring boxes - you’ve got to cut your cloth and draw a line somewhere, because you’ve got to share resources and we’ve not even talked about characters yet.

Where it gets hard is when you have a huge team of designers and they’re constantly changes things, making requests that involve art updates… likewise the engine guys. You can’t make all of those changes yourself, so someone else has to take care of them, a team of lesser paid artists (you don’t put your best people on street cleaning duties). Hence a lot of the macro work can’t be guaranteed to be as polished as the larger scale look feel.

Unfortunately throwing more artists at anything doesn’t make things better, it tends to have the opposite effect (this is a long discussed and accepted bit of widsom).

All of this said, artist quality varies widely across the industry, so maybe you are AAA standard (I’ve no way of knowing!). I think GTA’s strengths are in it’s execution - the acting and story telling - not in it’s visual quality. Which may be a by-product of taking so long to make each game: if you’d started working on GTA V when it started, 5 years ago, could you still make the claims you make today? The world moves on…I’m sure whatever they’re starting today will look great by today’s standards, but we could end up having this same conversation in 2018 :slight_smile:

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Must be something wrong with you guys criticising GTA 5’s visuals. I doubt they can actually be improved on.

  1. it’s 8 year old hardware.
  2. with near endless view distance
  3. plus extreme object counts
  4. and very limited video ram
  5. and limited ram

And you’re saying it isn’t impressive? Outrageous comment. To put into perspective, GTA5 will run almost identically on the latest iPhone 5S.

People who work in unity typically haven’t got any idea whatsoever about real development and how tight the budgets are for rendering and design on consoles to squeeze a modern experience out of 8 year old hardware. They think Halo 4 or Last of Us magically appears on the screen and they can do better. They think that because they spot one blurry texture that they would sure do better than that. The grim reality is they would crash the hardware with just a few rooms.

Doing mobile game development and pushing that hard will give people an idea of console budgets. Even the next gen consoles will have budgets that are as tight, because there is always a need to outdo the competition, to make a better looking game or a further view distance or more extreme flexibility for the player. The idea that you can do better must be demonstrated before coming onto a forum and moaning.

This isn’t an observation of the hardware in consoles, it’s an observation of the impressive efforts of professional developers to squeeze every last drop from fixed hardware, and that to me will always be impressive.

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hippo we aren’t talking about the easy to do optimizations. how do you have 8 thousand posts and you are impressed by simple to do LOD’s, culling, fog draw distance? My previous comment describes how easy it is and the techniques they used

Have you even played the game? the view distance is anything but endless. It’s very easy to make a game that looks like this run on 360. I come from optimizing for mobile so I know exactly what I’m talking about, there is nothing new here.

That is not even worthy of discussing, I mean if it wasnt for the hundreds of those little lights it would just be a bunch of box’s with very low res textures in the distance. That is impressive to you?? I dont get it.

The only thing ‘impressive’ to me about the rage engine is the ability to fade between 2 different shadow qualities from a dynamic light. 5 feet away the shadows are very low resolution. It seems unity only has 1 shadow quality, not an ability to fade between 2 like this, but if there is a way I’d love to know.

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Man, how do these people keep their jobs if the best they can do is this on hardware that is comparable to our phones!?

sarcasm

But seriously, I couldn’t even begin to guess if this was easy or hard for them(although I assume it’s the latter). I haven’t worked on a console game and I honestly have no clue if this is the best they could do or the worst. Show me a couple games that look better that are also cross platform for the 360 and PS3 with the same scale.

Maybe I shouldn’t be posting in this thread, too many professionals with huge amounts of experience with console games saying I’m wrong; just making myself look like a fool I guess tehe.

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All of my questions regarding better art still stands, regardless of the optimizing involved. Better terrain that is more playable and polished, a more diverse city with more character, all of this can still be achieved and run on the older consoles, but yet they didn’t go that far and to me it just looks like a lazy use of a budget to impress people who don’t really know how its made. Just grab a plane, fly over the country side and laugh

I was hoping to have a big outdoor world to be immersed in but what I got was a country side that looks like it was thrown together in a week or two by 1-2 artists.
This is NOT due to a limitation from the hardware. An example is when your wandering through the mountains you feel as if you shouldnt even be climbing on them at all, but yet its open and inviting you to do so

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Fair points, but this is a massive game and there are a lot of factors involved. If they were given more time, yeah, they could have maybe made it look better. But can’t pretty much anything look better if it was given more time? I was watching some streams of GTA V and for me, in the outdoor scenes, it looked pretty decent. Most people wouldn’t notice or really pay too much attention and just go on with their game, but for those of us where it’s our job to pay attention to these things it’s a little different and we will notice things most people won’t.

I do agree though, if they were given more time the landscapes would have looked nicer.

When I see someone’s code, I judge them. I try not to, but I do it anyway. I always think “it would have been better if it was done this way”, but the reality is that they probably didn’t do it that way for a reason, they may have had issues I could have never thought of. I’m very guilty of thinking my ways the better way and I have to consciously give them the benefit of the doubt.

Point is, these people are talented and they have produced games that are fantastic and are of massive scale. Everyone’s on a time crunch and they can’t do everything perfect and for most people it will look fine. That is one of the hardest lessons I’m still trying to learn.

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This isn’t any regular game though, this is almost a 300 million budget we’re talking about. I think thats enough for a thread like this to not even have to exist. Code is different, if it works it works. If its optimized enough, no one will really see it. You would think even with this budget they can at least make a better country side than what they made, especially since its 5x bigger than the city.

I don’t think its one of those situations where ‘everything could be better given more time’. Rockstar had the time, and the budget, they just didn’t properly direct a few extra artists where they should have to create a longer lasting world. I got bored of the game before I even finished it simply because of the lack of creativity, environment design wise. I think others will start to feel the same after they play a few weeks of the online mode when it releases.

Strictly for the short single player that it is, I guess its fine, most people probably won’t mind, especially if they aren’t into game dev.
But analyzing it from a strategic multiplayer perspective, something where you are repetitively exploring the world, the map is poorly designed and will become boring pretty quick.
And I doubt any dlc or map addition will be better.
I apologize for sort of ranting on this forum but I think it’s an interesting discussion for anyone who actually analyzes this game and the fact that just 1-2 million more allotted to the art side from that 300 million budget could have made the visuals much better.

I suppose it ultimately didn’t matter to them because they knew even with cutting corners like this, it would still bring them in $1 billion within 3 days was it? So it coulda, woulda, shoulda, but didnt need to be better.

I guess I answered my own question

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I was surprised that the game looked so bad, but i thought it was just because it was running on 8 year old hardware and when the pc or new console versions come out it would look that much better.

If you look at that video the ground texture looks bad, at night the fog effect looks really bad.

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Well its not that its bad, the values are just set to be extremely optimized to run on older consoles. Sure when it comes to pc and newer ones you will have a longer draw distance, less fog, higher res textures higher detailed LOD’s in the distance, but then what?
It’s still suffering from all the same flaws I discussed in this thread.

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The complexity of a game project doesn’t increase linearly as the size and team size increases. You can’t look at your own work, multiply it by 100 and reasonably expect that 100 guys could achieve 100x as much. It’s much more costly than that.

For starters, you need to take a few of those guys out of production to manage the rest of them, so you’re already down several percent at best assuming that they’re perfect managers with perfect teams. Then there’s communication overhead. Some of the guys need to be doing concept art instead of production art if you want it all to look consistent. Documentation, too.

Then there’s optimisation in many, many different ways that you don’t even have to give a thought to when you’re doing stuff for a one man or small team project. And it’s not just rendering performance, there’s also streaming performance (which they seem to be hitting the bleeding edge of, given public announcements about how to counter-intuitively not install the second disk to increase performance by allowing the game to read from both sources at once).

Then you need to consider (as has been pointed out above) that you’re building towards a moving target as the tech and the design shift over time.

So sure, it’s easy to look at what they haven’t done or what didn’t work so well and complain about it. But what about what they did achieve?

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Probably better shaders,higher res textures, better fog models, better everything really, when they scaled it down to run on the ps3 or xbox360 it does look like shit to run on 8 year old hardware. I guess it shows most people dont care about graphics after a certain point.

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All I am allowed to say is that you need to accept the developers have done an awesome job. The amount of texture streaming alone on old hardware never mind meshes is an incredible job. There are very good reasons for the decisions GTA 5’s team made. It could not have realistically been improved upon because the budget for that area would strip textures and meshes from other areas. I hope you are beginning to understand how streaming works.

It is not possible to develop GTA 5 large-to-small format ie big media everywhere then cut it down for consoles efficiently because this generally ends up with a much weaker looking title on the lower hardware. This has the flaw of it not being so good once you go up to higher hardware. In this case I think they made the right call and gave the game the best experience it could be on the last generation.

I’d like to see some of your work under limited budgets. Are you able to improve on it, or is it just a hypothetical discussion given the same constraints?