Mass Effect 2/Unreal 3 Engine

[Ilyich Valken]

Alright, so I know this will probably generate some... obvious comments about graphics.. but I noticed something weird in Mass Effect 2. One character, Grunt, has a character model that has like 100x the amount of polys (polygons, the more there are, the smoother/better something generally looks) than all of the other characters, even those in the same species/race as him.

For example, this (http://chud.com/articles/content_images/106/ME2/Mass-Effect-2-Grunt-Trailer-HD_3.jpg) is a picture of his in-game model, and this (http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/419062-mass-effect-2-windows-screenshot-the-krogan-grunt-looks-especially.jpg) is from a "cinematic/conversation."

Notice how nice that looks? Lets take a look at Wrex (http://images.wikia.com/masseffect/images/a/a4/Wrex_Throne.png), your Krogan companion from the first game.. Not so pretty looking, is he?

Here's Commander Shepherd (http://static2.videogamer.com/videogamer/images/xbox360/mass_effect_2/screens/mass_effect_2_46.jpg) (player). It still looks good, but not quite as good as Grunt.

So.. my question is (I guess this is more of a "What do you think" question than anything) why, if you can make a character model look that good, do you not do it for the rest of them? Or at least make all of the same race look that good. Doesn't make much sense to me. D:

[EpsilonX]

Maybe the one character looked super good on accident or something. They were making it and it turned out better than they were hoping. That's about the only thing I can think of lol

[Muffincat]

someone on the art team has a fetish~

[Havoc]

Haha, I see what they did there. And I really doubt that was intentional.

Thing is, you get to see Grunt up close a lot(unless you like me are racist against korgans and blow him out the airlock) and his heads structure is different from the pure-breed korgans who have a smoother head.

Grunt doesn't have many more polygons unless someone proves me wrong via Editor.
His head is just rough and has an excellent bump-map and parallax occlusion map.
It looks extremely dynamic and responds to all the great dynamic lighting in the game.

The reason why other Krogan may actually have less details and polygons would be because you hardly spend much face-to-face time with them, especially the fighting krogan, when there are a lot, should not produce a massive gpu load due to many, many polys.

And human faces are just not spectacular, what do you expect? Also they suffer from the terribly f'cked up self-shadowing in ME...

http://www.pixologic.com/interview/mass-effect2/5/img_lrg/Grunt02.jpg
Here you can see the normal map, normal map and diffuse map with wireframe.
Grunt has actually very, very few polygons.

[Exentenzed]

What Havoc said.

But they did put a great deal of effort into texturing in ME2.

And if done well, textures can make it look like something has more polygons than it actually does. :)

[Ilyich Valken]

Haha, I see what they did there. And I really doubt that was intentional.

Thing is, you get to see Grunt up close a lot(unless you like me are racist against korgans and blow him out the airlock) and his heads structure is different from the pure-breed korgans who have a smoother head.

Grunt doesn't have many more polygons unless someone proves me wrong via Editor.
His head is just rough and has an excellent bump-map and parallax occlusion map.
It looks extremely dynamic and responds to all the great dynamic lighting in the game.

The reason why other Krogan may actually have less details and polygons would be because you hardly spend much face-to-face time with them, especially the fighting krogan, when there are a lot, should not produce a massive gpu load due to many, many polys.

And human faces are just not spectacular, what do you expect? Also they suffer from the terribly f'cked up self-shadowing in ME...

Here you can see the normal map, normal map and diffuse map with wireframe.
Grunt has actually very, very few polygons.
Er yeah.. I don't know why I said polygons. But I remember watching or reading something that stated they'd done something special with him. I guess I'll edit this if I can find it.

And technically speaking, Grunt was a pure-bred Krogan.. to a point. He was bred in a tube to have the best traits of the race.

[Havoc]

He got the DNA for the greatest Krogan warlords... I'm... not sure how mixing a bunch of DNA makes him a pure bred. I mean he was the ultimate Krogan specifically created to be the strongest, but he didn't have any pure bloodline he descended from, that's all I'm saying. ^^