Tailor Archive
Thread: Pardon me Mr. Vader, but who is your tailor?
The problem with true black is that you can't get any texturing at all if you have true black. All you get is the outline of the clothes with a big empty black space where the rest of the clothes should be. I know that true black sounds nice, but it does *not* look good. It would just make you look like you are wearing a little black blob instead of clothes. You don't see true black in real life either. There is always light reflecting off of any black clothing you happen to have. For example, Darth Vader's outfit is very shiny, so although it is very dark, it has some definition from the reflections coming off of it. If it was matte it would look terrible!
Another problem is that probably every single person playing the game has different monitor brands and settings. Something that looks black on my montior may not look black on yours.
A lot of folks changed their display settings to make it easier to see around your character (as opposed to the tiny ctrl+l light radius) at night. This makes most everything else washed out. Every time I've had a customer who claims that something I see on my monitor as a fairly reasonable black looks completely grey to them, I've asked them about their monitor settings only to hear a big "d'oh!"
People always use Vader as their in-game example, but I'm sure each of the actual SW characters had many many many hours of work put in on them. So his outfit could be perfectly black and still look fantastic because of the large amount of design time that had to go into that one character. But I doubt the art team is going to be able to spend all the time they spent working on Vader on each and everyone of our hundreds of schems to make it be perfect black, still have a texture, and be decent looking in the wide variety of lighting that you're going to see your clothes under.
Besides, I for one am a little glad we can't make clothes as black as Vader's outfit. If they changed it so that our cloaks could reach that perfect black, there'd be an instant trend and every d00d would be after me for a "Vader outfit." Vader is supposed to be the biggest, baddest looking guy in game, we as characters are supposed to be the regular people of the SW universe. People like Vader are supposed to look cooler than anyone else!
I have in his room at the Emperors retreat on Endor and IMHO the image does not do him justice. If my memory serves me well (might not) the colour has a slight blue tinge to it but the character has a brown tinge. Am I the only person that thinks this does not look right. I have tried this on 2 sperate monitors on different machines and all look the same.
This is only my opinion but I think it does need to be looked at.