Grand Theft Non-Auto

In context of my current day job and former career, I had a good look at the latest GTA VI trailer in wonderful 4K resolution. I haven’t been interested in this game since around the 3rd instalment as it’s not a car game anymore. The 26 minutes of footage and action showed some driving, but mostly the story mode is presented as a life/walking/shooting people in the head simulator. This latest iteration does look visually stunning though!

Let’s talk about Game Art not car styling.. just this once.

Of the 1000s of talented artists and modellers on this project there don’t appear to have been many car enthusiasts among them. Not to the level that I would obsess over when I was a lead car designer in the games business (LOL). For years now the cars have been borderline copyright infringements, but with the latest graphical fidelity I spotted some odd details such as these below. In game and movie prop design we call these details “greebles”. A practice perfected by ILM with Star Wars ship models, these random details were added by model makers with no thought or idea of the function. Works great when creating detail on a Death-star trench run at speed, but for a car interior close up? No thanks from an OCD car geek. You had the real car for reference right? Even if you don’t drive you at least sat in the back of an Uber and noticed that you can’t adjust wing mirrors from back there…?

Why are these mirror adjusters on the passenger door? Behind the handle are more random buttons, what do they do?

Why are these mirror adjusters on the REAR DOOR? Arm hair is totally convincing, but this door panel is not…

There is I suspect a reason for this front/rear door similarity, and that’s a modular-asset kit. The door card is identical, and is simply repeated for any door. A modular part labelled “door handle” would make sense for artists to re-use, although it would need to be era-dated for each age of car in the game. There could even be a procedural tool used to achieve this, rather than hand authoring by a human 3D artist. That would be an excellent time saving process but an aspect often overlooked is the UV mapping and texturing (for non professionals this means slapping pictures on 3D models, rather than creating every detail). Re-using this area of a texture map would save memory space over specific front or rear door layouts, but the counter argument to this would be simply not to use this particular modular “door handle” greeble asset. One modular handle asset is flipped for left or right, and re-used front to back. This chunk of the door model/texture could simply be recreated without the mirror controls, for more accuracy. I doubt anyone would notice a lack of mirror controls but surely car nerds will notice the incorrect placement of mirror controls?

Overall a very impressive graphical achievement though, in lighting and details such as the hair physics. The character modelling and animation team are absolutely the best on the world. I’m sure the script and acting will be top notch also. The lighting of the entire world is astonishingly realistic, and the car physics are good too. Every detail in any game of this fidelity will be scrutinised by an expert somewhere in the world but it’s fair to say 95% of players will never notice this issue. This “mistake” does emphasises the level of research/expertise now desirable for working game artists though. The paintwork gleams, but do any petrol heads work on this franchise and does this matter if Grand Theft AUTO is no longer a car game?

If you are interested in some next-level analysis on the actual graphical tech I’d always recommend Digital Foundry.

Of course if you want to study Game Art I will recommend The Games Academy.