>>715410058
Agreed. If you asked a 3D artist in the 90s what the trick to good looking 3D was they'd say "2D." The trick was always in having a really good 2D artist that would paint gorgeous detail in the textures and the job of the vertex monkey was to not make it look like ass once it was morphing around in their animation system.
We then brought pixel shaders across from workstation CGI but without the graphics hardware to do it, so we went from stupendous hires texture work on hand crafted polygon models to smudgy lores textures with lumpy mashed potato normal maps and vaseline smeary specular highlights. And then before we had a chance to have a PS1->PS2 progression we invented machine generated PBR crap on top of direct exports from zbrush or worse, photogrammetry, and so now even with 24GB of VRAM the end result is still as shiny mashed potato as a PS3 game.
And all the decent 2D artists are off making anime waifus for gachas, vtubers or their hyper fixated patreons.
