it looks like it's just a really good DOT3 bump
on
E3 Doom III Preview
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· Score: 1
That's very close to how the Doom 3 tech works. All the characteristics that others have pointed out, like polies visible in the silhouette but an apparently smooth mesh on the front-facing geometry, are clear indicators of DOT3 bump mapping.
But everyone since Planet Moon has bump mapping in their engines, why does Doom 3 look hotter that hell if they're just using the same stuff? There are two reasons why:
1) As an artist in the game industry, I can tell you that painting actual forms on a bump map by hand is virtually impossible, the subtleties of the shape are just too difficult to conceptualize in grayscale. Id's artists aren't painting these bump maps, instead they model an very high poly version of a character, decimate it down to a low-poly game model, and then use a Carmack-special utility to determine the difference in the forms and generate a DOT3 bump map. They use that bump map in game with the low poly model and get the same smooth shading that they would have with the high-poly version. The only noticeable artifact is jaggy silhouette.
The innovation is in this DOT3 bump map generation utility. AFAIK, nobody's done this before (the film industry would have no use for it).
2) Since they're using the same lighting technique from the characters on the environments and world objects (watch the video, there are bump maps on everything), the characters fit with the world. Since nothing stands out visually from anything else, the technique goes a long way towards increasing the realism of the scene.
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That's very close to how the Doom 3 tech works. All the characteristics that others have pointed out, like polies visible in the silhouette but an apparently smooth mesh on the front-facing geometry, are clear indicators of DOT3 bump mapping.
But everyone since Planet Moon has bump mapping in their engines, why does Doom 3 look hotter that hell if they're just using the same stuff? There are two reasons why:
1) As an artist in the game industry, I can tell you that painting actual forms on a bump map by hand is virtually impossible, the subtleties of the shape are just too difficult to conceptualize in grayscale. Id's artists aren't painting these bump maps, instead they model an very high poly version of a character, decimate it down to a low-poly game model, and then use a Carmack-special utility to determine the difference in the forms and generate a DOT3 bump map. They use that bump map in game with the low poly model and get the same smooth shading that they would have with the high-poly version. The only noticeable artifact is jaggy silhouette.
The innovation is in this DOT3 bump map generation utility. AFAIK, nobody's done this before (the film industry would have no use for it).
2) Since they're using the same lighting technique from the characters on the environments and world objects (watch the video, there are bump maps on everything), the characters fit with the world. Since nothing stands out visually from anything else, the technique goes a long way towards increasing the realism of the scene.