It’s rare to see commercial games deviate from the pixel-art / photo-real mode, but in the past few years you see more and more non-photoreal games with a distinctive art style like The Blob, Team Fortress 2, Paper Mario, Okami, No More Heroes, etc.
Madworld by Capcom (Sin City / line art style):
Two weekends ago, I played Team Fortress 2 for the first time as part of Steam’s free TF2 weekend. I think the global illumination-like lighting and illustrative shaders are amazing.
Menus in AAA games have become as fancy as TV shows.
Colin McRae’s DIRT’s UI is out of this world:
GameTap has a nice 3D UI:
Psychonauts + Katamari + The Simpson’s movie game all have stylish menus.
Another approach is to get rid of menus altogether like Burnout Paradise and GTA IV and throw the player into the game using a montage:
Like films, I believe the first 5-10 minutes sets the tone for the entire game. If you plan the game to be exciting and fast, then throw the player into the game ASAP.
After some back and forth with my modelers about PolyCube maps and how that influences their workflow, I’ve resigned myself to that fact that modelers will be using UVs (even though they hate them) for another 10 years for a couple of reasons:
UV mapping tools are now fantastic + cheap + widely available. See UVlayout, Unwrap3D, Unfold3D, built-in tools in Maya, 3DS Max, XSI, etc.
Smart UV mapping saves tons of texture space by intelligently mirroring / folding UVs - although this causes major problems with normal + light mapping where mirroring UV will cause normals to be flipped.
All modelers are taught how to UV map and have developed extensive UV mapping experience by now.
UV mappers / texture artists are so efficient at using texture space with UVs and understand all the normal + lighting mapping problems now. I doubt they’d be willing to move to a 3D projection paint + PolyCube methodology until we have more texture memory and Zbrush (or apps like it) becomes the standard modeling tool.
