Asset library textures: soul or soulless?

Video Games
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The use of photo and image libraries was prevelent throughout 3D rendered graphics and images from the mid-90s onward. While I knew Rare scanned in books to make textures for GoldenEye 007, I hadn’t realised this practice was commonplace.

The Render96 Video Game Texture Preservation project posts findings sourced by itself and the community, and it’s fascinating (and simultaneously childhood memory destroying stuff):

Render96 | creating asset library archives | Patreon

(1) Render96 VGTP (@Render96VGTP) / X

Certainly a huge shift from the hand crafted dot art that was used up until the age of prerendered and realtime CGI graphics!

Having seen a hundred of these examples over a period of months, it’s clearly a huge part of the fabric of graphic design throughout many of the games we love, and I’m tempted to lean on the “soul” side, as it’s simply another tool in the designers’ toolkit, and it’s often employed in games that are aiming for realism with their backgrounds (GoldenEye 007 is another great example).

3D games like Mega Man Legends still relied on dot artists for their textures so it’s evidently a case of the right tool for the right job.

I think this style of graphics peaked on Dreamcast as a means of being able to assemble environments and locations that look very realistic in a small budget. Maken X, a game I hadn’t played until this year, uses it to great effect. The game plasters very detailed photographs over its low polygon environments, but it manages to come together and create a very believable, and richly detailed world, despite ultimately being very simple.

What are your thoughts on this approach to graphics design in games?

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Personally, I love this.

I think it’s such an efficient way to do things. Back then, digital cameras weren’t accessible.

This is to graphics as what sample CDs are in game music. Part of the fabric.

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I’d assume that even today most developers buy the majority of their textures rather than going out into the wild and taking pictures.

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For large developers these days there are specific roles: texture artist or environmental artist.

Of course they may still buy stuff in or use existing assets.

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Yep, it’s certainly another tool in the developers’ toolkit, and I think in the right hands it produces great results.

I always liked the Pokemon Card backgrounds that had Ken Sugimori’s classic art on top of photographs - it was almost always tastefully composed, and has aged far better than the Pokemon card art that used full CGI which is very much “of the era”.

I think this method falls apart when it veers into programmer art territory, but that’s true of almost any method. I need to think of examples of games that use it which I think look terrible, rather than classics that I think are endearing!

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Love Render96 and the texture letting in mind blowing to me. I can’t imagine how some textures are ID’d and matched to the games that use them.

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They’re not doing it using screenshots, even though that’s how they show the result to us.

They extract the texture images from the game and run automated and manual comparisons against a bank of source images from all three period CD ROMs.

Very cool, lots of effort