Question about the pros and cons of realistic versus cartoony graphics.

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Actually the title says it all really. I would love to hear insight of any type on this subject, but I will clarify my meaning below. Don’t hesitate to throw in your thoughts, even if it doesn’t actually address my question!! just put yourself in my shoes and if it seems like I would gain from your info on this subject, throw it out there.

First off I am new to game development, and, like a lot of people I have an idea for a game, which I would like to develop.

In my game you would play an animal that wanders around a natural/nature environment. Maybe a small “continent” or island that has a variety of climes like “desert”, “forest”, “mountain”, etc. There would be other animals, but no humans or buildings.(imagine DayZ or H1Z1 except you are an animal, there are natural predators instead of zombies, and it takes place away from all civilization). The game would be full 3D either way.

This is an idea I have had for many years, and I always thought that I would probably need to make the game with very simple graphics, since I would likely be making it alone.
I am a very good non-professional artist and I would be making the art myself most likely.

I imagined my game like these examples. This is what I have thought I would shoot for.
Low Poly / Cartoony:

Take note of the trees and plants:
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/tower-defence-and-moba-pack

I thought if I was lucky I would be able to make a game with graphics closer to this:
**The Witness:**The Witness first official gameplay trailer - YouTube
But instead, perhaps I could make realistic graphics like this, which is something I might prefer.
Realistic:
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/nature-package
Open World Demo Collection in Epic Content - UE Marketplace

So my question is what are the pros and cons of making realistic graphics instead? Especially in terms of time I will spend and complexity or knowledge that I will have to know or learn.

So that’s the question I have pondered some in the past. Here are some pros and cons I have come up with:

  • If I was making a cartoony style I would almost certainly design all the nature art myself. Thus insuring a fair amount of effort.
  • If I did realistic graphics would this actually be a lot more work? Is there terrain generators or plant/flora generators that I could use to quickly make my assets? How complex are they to use and would using them create more work versus handpainting lower poly assets?
  • Would the fact that I would be hand painting the cartoony art actually make it significantly more work than quickly generating a bunch of assets and throwing it into a level?
  • If I do cartoon style I would almost certainly be designing all of the art for my animals to insure consistency of style.
  • It seems plausible that I may be able to find some quality realistic animals out there to buy from someone which might actually save me time.
  • How much will having realistic graphics effect things like frame rate? Assume the “realistic” graphics are not ULTRA realistic, but just run of the mill fairly realistic.
  • Would realistic graphics mean many more hours spent tweaking stuff to get the game to run smoothly than if I were to just do cartoon graphics? (Keep in mind this is single player, there wouldn’t be insane explosions vehicles that would speed quickly through levels)
  • Would realistic graphics significantly affect the size of map I could create? I mean, I would like a big open world to explore. The bigger the better, within reason. So the question is if two game developers simultaneously made the same massive open world game, but one used realistic graphics, would he run into problems making the massive world that the other one wouldn’t? (I know that either way the bigger the level is the more effort it’ll take of course)

Sorry about the wall of text, but its a nuanced and also open-ended question. I am interested in any thoughts anyone has on this, even if I somehow already have 50 replies when you read this!

Thank you in advance, if anyone is actually willing to read this! :smiley:

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Non-Realistic can have the benefit of looking “good”, well, it can have a timeless art style if you’re able to establish a good one. Take the example of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. Wind Waker looks amazing still, Twilight Princess… well, not a as nice.

With a smaller team and a lower budget, stylized art can be much more attainable. Look at Telltale Games, they are able to push out about 10 episodes over at least 2 games in a year.

It also comes down to… what are you good at? Are you good at stylized art styles? Are you good at realistic art styles. When to comes to Terrain there are great products like World Machine which can get you started generating terrains pretty quickly, and when it comes to foliage, there’s SpeedTree, which, you can get a monthly subscription for specifically for UE4 for a mere $19/month, and you only need to pay that while you want to use it, once your done making trees and vegetation for a while, you can just cancel your subscription and keep using the assets you generated, and if you need to make trees again… just resubscribe.

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Thanks for the quality info, !

To answer your question about what I am good at…

Imgur
Imgur

…I drew those drawings using pencil and paper (about 5 years ago). So in traditional media I am not bad at a realistic style. I have never made a piece of 3d art from scratch before, so I imagine it requires it has a lot of skills I don’t currently possess. I have little experience with a stylized cartoony style, but I know I would be able to easily learn, and I’ve always been a bit curious to learn so the effort required wouldn’t bother me, or really factor in. The majority of the learning would be learning how to create 3d art, and very little would be figuring out a style if I did a cartoon style.

A related concern I have is that BELIEVE that realistic style would have many more pitfalls to bad art, like if lighting is off somehow in a cartoony game it probably wont look as bad as if the lighting is off in a realistic looking game. Or any other thing is off. Its related to the uncanny valley, but in a wider scope than is generally applied. For example, hypothetically if a cartoony game and realistic game both have an odd level of gravity or some other wonky physics, the realistic game is going to be immediately noticeable when you start playing, where as the cartoony game, it will very possibly seem like a conscious decision on the part of the developer.

On the other hand, I thought perhaps that would likely be much of an issue, by using various tools like SpeedTree I could resolve the types of issues I described above, because someone else (whoever made SpeedTree or whatever other tool/programs i use) has already figured them out for me, if that makes sense?

5

Thanks for the response ! Yeah I ran a little too long, but wanted people to be able to understand the elements of my question thoroughly enough to give a quality answer that fit my unique situation, instead of just answering whichever type they like most or something…

Which type of demos are you referring too? Is the work you are referring to the building of the actual game, or something to do with setting up the nature environment I choose?

I really enjoy beautiful realistic worlds like Skyrim, and I also really enjoy the specific type of stylized art I linked to:

So I have narrowed it down to the two types of art I am passionate about. So if it came to that it would be a 50/50 split more or less. So if one type would only take 75% of the time than the other one then that would be significant factor in my decision.

Are you saying that whichever type of artwork I choose and set up in my game is going to be a negligible portion of the hours and effort spent on the game considering everything else that has to be done, so I might as well choose which ever I like to look at most?

Thanks again for the reply!

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If you plan on having any humans/creatures, I’d do some research on the Uncanny Valley Uncanny valley - Wikipedia - its a lot easier to make a cute non-realistic thing is the short version.

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Hi OldAccount29, I posted a poll asking a similar question. My poll was gear more towards marketing to players. A majority of votes were towards photorealistics graphics. In my opinion it depends on the game. I appreciate cartoony graphics for games with short game-play objectives: small arenas, puzzlers, arcade action, and tend to favor photorealistic graphics for games with long game-play objectives. However, I’m not convinced that players favor only photo realistic graphics, and its easier now than ever to experiment with both.

As a code-centric game developer with a small budget. I’m tempted to develop game designs that can use simple 3D Artwork I can create myself. Its my belief that one can create complexity with simpler shapes using techniques like this.

I’m also huge fan of the open world survival games. I conducted another poll to use Zombies or Not. Although some may think the genre is getting saturated, I feel there is plenty of room for innovation. Perhaps a open world survival game where photo-realistic survivors battle against becoming digitized voxel zombies.

9

Hi all

hope you all have a great day.

My 2 cents worth.

they all had great thinks but hit it on the head “A better approach would be to ask, where does your passion lie,”
and Techlord had some great things that help me also. thanks

I thing with every thinks that has been said. I 'll add what market are you targeting and age group.

10

Hey OP, found this thread from your post in my WIP so I thought I’d drop by and share my thoughts :slight_smile:

IMO stylized graphics won’t guarantee you will save time just as (semi-)realistic rendering won’t necessarily slow you down or hog your FPS; I think simplicity of workflow is key for one-dev teams with little resources, so with a simple modeling and texturing setup you increase your chances of successfully completing your project all alone.

If you’re relying on marketplace assets, realistic assets do seem more commonplace (at least for foliage and trees). On performance - Unreal’s grass system and HISM (hierarchical instanced static meshes) should make densely populated foliage achievable for small to medium maps at least. Personally I’m using HISM for managing all my flora in a complex setup where plants grow from saplings to full bloom and HISM has allowed me to reach more than 100,000 flora even with dynamically updated transforms at 60 FPS (on a somewhat high-end rig).

Whatever art style you choose, if you’re going to spend hours creating textures and complex shaders in material editor for that perfect look (a mistake I’ve made far too often), that is precious time you you could have spent on core gameplay systems or on modeling and texturing other assets for your game. For many assets even a noise map coupled with appropriate color and roughness nodes can rapidly get you going; it might not satisfy that unique art-style which you may have had in mind, but it is game ready and Unreal does a great job of making nearly everything you throw at it look good!

Best of luck with your project, we need more nature games out there!