Hi everyone
A lot of people already more or less know this on IRC but now I think it's time to write a proper topic on the Forum:
It has been seven years since I started to contribute to SuperTuxKart.
A lot of things happened during those year, SuperTuxKart had an impressive development and compared to what the game looked seven years ago it's day and night.
I also tried to give to SuperTuxKart it's own style with colorful hand painted textures. While I love the hand painted cartoon style there was a massive drawback.
It requires literally to hand paint EVERY SINGLE textures that are in the game. If you count roughly ~5 hours per textures times the number of textures that where made (around 370) it's an impressive 270 days (8h30 per day) spent on just painting and creating textures.
And you have to be aware those are the number without even taking into account
* Creating 3D model
* Creating new track design
* Integration into SuperTuxKart and tweaking.
A lot of things also happened in my private life, new responsibility, new job, I'm not a student anymore. I don't have as much free time as I had in the past.
I'm also afraid I'm one of the few if not the only artist working on a regular basis and with such limited man power I had to rethink how I want to handle this.
If we continue on this way it's not sustainable (or we might wait ~ years to get a new map).
While the previous visual style was fun to play with it had several issues
*We can't reuse objects made by other artist easily from open source repository like open game art
* We are forced to spend hours creating those textures
* The game reuse a lot of them since it takes so much time to create a new one and become a bit boring (the wood is the same everywhere, etc).
That's why for version post 0.9.3 I will change the Style of SuperTuxKart. We are going to use what I call colorful realism.
We are also going to switch to a PBR model in order to have better and easier to use / understand materials.
It also means that we can more easily share models between SuperTuxKart and other artist and they can create more easily content for the game.
Creating realistic texture is way easier and less time consuming. Now I will give in details what does it change for the workflow and explain how PBR works
Stay tuned