Asked on ark’s official forums, but I figured might have better luck here.
While playing I used to bash the devs for game not being bugless/lagless as much as the next guy, but still I played it a lot and Ark’s art was one thing I never complained about. It is very cool and well done.
Can anyone share info on how art for dinos works?
I have few assumptions, correct me if I’m wrong:
PBR workflow probably. Albedo, roughness, metalness, normal (strange additional specular map which UE4 games use sometime?), emission for sure for all those bionic and tek variations, AO?
Color regions are probably set via color map. If so, is it rough transition between colors or blended? Also I remember something going on with fur and feather lighting, wonder if it was edited vertex normals, luminosity map or something else to achieve that effect.
I have no idea about average polycount and number of textures. Is it one per dino or few? If later, those textures use different UV channels or all go to UV0?
Using dodo as an example if possible. I guess best advice would be to install devkit and check for myself, but I uninstalled it a long time ago and Ark is too huge for my little experiment.
EDIT: Yeah, just checked it and I just don’t have free 200gb of space on all my drives combined.
Thanks in advance. Any info is appreciated.