Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Most notable games already have a good mix of all of those features, hence the reason why they're notable.
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"Realistic" Current-Gen Console Graphics Have Finally Stopped Impressing Me
- Thread starter HotHamBoy
- Start date
dgrdsv
Member
This console gen is rather weak on graphics advancements considering that it's built on a low-end level PC APUs. This is partially why graphics doesn't impress as much in this gen as in previous ones. Most advancements are coming from areas which did improve in line with a usual console gen change - like the amount of RAM available which allowed most of devs to switch to a no loading / open world design style. It also means that the next gen should be more impressive simply because of a lower starting level of current gen - even if next gen will still opt for the same lower end APU platform.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Try plugging in last gen console and playing that for an hour and then play a next gen game. The gap between this gen and last is absolutely huge in terms of visuals thanks to most devs switching to a PBR workflow.
Maybe the wrong example to use (in my humble opinion). Uncharted always had a stylised look to it (same with TLOU). Mind you, not stylised as something like Wind Waker or Okami, but Uncharted always had a very punchy colorpalette (little realism there), cinematic lighting and most things adhere to an internal style guide. I think its partially do to the fact of using realistic references and try to blend those with the pre-production, more cartoony/fantasy based concept art. The more 'realistic' features we see in UC4/LL seem to stem more for improvements in rendering tech like PBR, compared to the older games, but they didn't change style much throughout the years, it just evolved. People saying that those enviroments or charactermodels attempt to 'mimic' reality, I dont believe them. But they are definitely inspired by them.
It's an interesting mix of elements which also makes Naughty Dog games instantly recognisable. Being able to manage that sounds like an 'art style' to me.
dgrdsv
Member
PBR workflow can be done on last gen h/w just as well as on current gen one.
People trying to act like ND's game are oh so much better than and nothing alike the other dirty, unclean AAA games. Or something? I really don't understand. There's some weirdness going on in this thread.
UnluckyKate
Member
Not comparing apples and oranges
but if you want super good looking female model and man characters
feathers
particules and lightining bolt
in a great looking and unique universe
try Horizon
yeah, it's far from FF. But it's checking these boxes
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
But it wasn't, there's an incredible small amount of games that did and on top of that they were absolutely hampered by the tech they had to use.
People are gonna be so shook when they see Joel's face at PSX and realize that he no longer has incredibly lively baby eyes anymore and much worse wrinkles:
And then they'll still be saying that ND isn't aiming for photorealism. :|
texhnolyze
Banned
Jack of all trades then? That's not what I (and probably OP) want.
Graphics can settle down a bit. Improve the story and gameplay to perfection.
The only aspect of the PS4 that was low end in 2013 was the Jaguar cores. It couldn't have had much better gpu or ram.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
But these are all happening at the same time. Reducing graphical fidelity isn't the key to better gameplay and gamers need to stop treating devs like it's that simple.
texhnolyze
Banned
But isn't it a fact that more polygons = more work to do = more staff needed = more funds required?
Dictator93
Member
Oh , OK! My mistake.
What makes you say that Crysis is further along the spectrum towards photorealism than Uncharted 4? Nearly* every single part of Uncharted 4's technical make up approaches ground truth in a closer fashion than the original Crysis. Material shading, skin shading, etc.
*
even after all these years, Crysis still does some things technically better than modern games. Hard to imagine, hah.
Spuck-uk
Banned
IMO Uncharted / Last of Us etc make a conscious decision to not to go too realistic. The uncanny valley effect is a real thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
Spuck-uk
Banned
No, there's not a direct relationship between # of polygons and dev effort required. This isn't the 90's/2000's, there's a lot more going on in how you construct game assets now.
All games need to be completed in X amount of man hours. When you are spending a ton of time to perfect one area of the game, it inevitably affects other parts.
TLoU for starters actually went for a photrealistic look, so using TLoU2's visuals as evidence that ND goes for photorealism in all its games is not a very good argument to make.But it wasn't, there's an incredible small amount of games that did and on top of that they were absolutely hampered by the tech they had to use.
People are gonna be so shook when they see Joel's face at PSX and realize that he no longer has incredibly lively baby eyes anymore and much worse wrinkles:
And then they'll still be saying that ND isn't aiming for photorealism. :|
Uncharted has always gone for a pseudo realistic look and that means having things look realistic but have a layer of stylised look on top of it. The key to recognise this lies in observing the colours and shapes of objects in environments and the symmetry in faces, it's never been photo realistic no matter how real the character models look to you...even with Uncharted 4. For example, the faces in Uncharted are extremely symmetrical and this is totally unrealistic no matter how real the skin shaders and eyes look. Games that aim for photo realisim will avoid having this sort of symmetry. Then there's the question of environments, which in particular have always been heavily stylised, even the way a simple tree looks is stylised rather than photo realistic (just take a look at a tree in say Madagascar, their shape and colour looks more like hand drawn than photo real). This is something that's been very clear and well agreed upon by the gaming community as well as actual professionals and artists that work in the industry itself.
It's the same way The Witcher 3 goes for a stylised look rather than photoreal eventhough the character models and faces look realistic.
The same way how Battlefront has photo realistic textures and faces but obviously has a stylised look.
Hope you understand what I and others mean when they say Uncharted doesn't go for a photo realistic look.
The thing is, eventhough Uncharted 4 is approaching grounds closer to photo realism that does not mean it's not stylised and aiming for photorealism.
It's like say Farcry 2 went for a super realistic look, and while Farcry 4 and Primal are miles better in terms of tech and are covering a lot more grounds in photo realism than Farcry 2, Farcry 4/Primal are still considerably more stylised in their approach than Farcry 2 ever was. Because Farcry 2 aimed for a photo realistic look with Farcry 4 and Primal didn't.
Dictator93
Member
Which parts of the modelling of human characters in UC4 strays from expectations of photorealism would you say?
My mind's eye is not seeing consistent features or morphology which deviate from the way I imagine a human face or anatomy would look given the poly-budget and materials in use.
Like this for example. I am not seeing any sort of deviations from how I imagine a human face should be proportioned or how skin or eyes should appear.
texhnolyze
Banned
I see. It's just logical assumption from me after seeing the similar pattern between the AAA games, they have like hundreds of people working on a single game. It's true that I know nothing about game development though.
Alright then.
i see this a lot, but i still have no idea what it means exactly
that to me looks like they're trying hard to model real vegetation
I mean, I feel like this is a weird distinction. Movies can be photorealistic (because they're literally real) but also vary in degrees of stylization. Making something stylized doesn't make it not photorealistic.
If your scene contains vivid lighting and clever framing, then a photorealistic view of that scene will be very stylized.
Every art asset generated, every light placed, every camera angle framed is an artistic decision. You can make those decisions cleverly to create a stylized look, or you can just be as bland as possible. You can use the exact same assets to create something that looks very flat or something that looks beautiful and stylized.
Check this article about framing in Grand Budapest Hotel: https://timeinpixels.com/2015/09/cinematography-in-grand-budapest-hotel/
I would die a happy man for a game to look as good as the Grand Budapest Hotel
Dictator93
Member
That is all rendering though? It is not like we are pathtracing or whatever.
I guess I just do not see the overarching perceptual or even point-out-able difference (as in how far the rendering purposefully diverges from photorealism) in comparison to say, Detroit:
There's a guy in Beyond3D called Laa-Yosh who talked about this a good few times in the "Accurate Human rendering" thread they have there. He works as a character artist/modeler at (I think Blur?), the guys who make some of the best CG trailers for games.Which parts of the modelling of human characters in UC4 strays from expectations of photorealism would you say?
My mind's eye is not seeing consistent features or morphology which deviate from the way I imagine a human face or anatomy would look given the poly-budget and materials in use.
Like this for example. I am not seeing any sort of deviations from how I imagine a human face should be proportioned or how skin or eyes should appear.
He said that while on a surface level a face may appear realistic when you look deep into it you start noticing things that aren't realistic and stylised. In case of Uncharted in particular (which he talked about in other threads as well), the faces are super symmetrical for the main characters. Then there are the eyes and the exaggerated expressions. These are all subtle details that all come into play at once when working together.
Edit:
This was his response when people were like "UC4 is so accurate and real"
https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1896149/
Laa-Yosh said:I'd rather not call it accurate, especially because ND doesn't seem to aim for it at all.
I still prefer the term 'hyper-real' for this style, where certain aspects of reality are more or less over exaggerated, while others are pushed back.
For example, asymmetry is almost completely lacking in the UC4 characters, whereas in real life every human face has a lot of it. In fact, when you mirror the face vertically, most people have a "fat" and a "slim" side.
What's even more curious is that in general, we tend to find people with really symmetrical faces to be more attractive. Yet, there are a lot of celebrities with quite obvious asymmetries - and yet they are considered to be extremely handsome. Like, Tom Cruise has teeth that is shifted to one side, but his smile is one of the best, responsible for some huge box office incomes. Or another example is Adam Driver, who's entire face is really mismatched and yet a lot of female viewers of TFA have found him to be extremely nice.
So, the human characters in UC4 are an interesting mix of real life features and idealized representations of humans.They have realistic skin textures, hair, body proportions and build; but the skin shaders are stylized, the faces are very symmetrical and also somewhat idealized; their clothing is very realistic, they have dirt and grime and wear and tear and sweat and blood, but everything is slightly over the top at the same time.
All of this is a result of very conscious art direction, of course.
It's a common thing nowadays to compare UC4 to Quantum Break - but let's not get into a flame war here- which is a bit strange to me, as Remedy is obviously aiming for a very different result. They're using a lot of scanning and other types of data acquisition to create their characters, and both the lighting and the post-processing are tuned to mimic the look of TV shows. Which makes a lot of sense, considering the tie-in series. So that title should be more appropriate for this thread, as they are aiming for accurate human rendering - whereas ND is going for their own look, building upon the traditions of the Uncharted series.
And I'll stress again, he is someone who's been doing this for a really long time and is one of the key character artist behind some of the best CG trailers in the industry.
Dictator93
Member
Mind digging up the post in that thread for me? It is massive (70 pages!).
I guess when I look at things, I just assume they purposefully make pretty people rather than ugly ones, which explains the symettry. Also, what exactly is exagerated about the eyes or expressions exactly? Watching footage of the game does not give me hints into that in a consistent way.
With UC3 and earlier I would definitely say "yeah", since we are tlaking about keyframed stuff. But here we are dealing with performance and motion capture for cutscenes. And why explain any sort of "unrealistic" movements or character details in terms of stylisation? Is it that consistent across characters in an enumerable fashion where oyu can start talking about stylisation? Why not "artist mistakes" , "limits of technology", or some other facet instead?
Do we afford this description to other games?
edit: reading the quote from Yaa.Losh does not really do that much for me honestly. Like, what about the skin shading is stylised exactly? Why do we chalk that up to a stylisation rather than the inability to technologically reproduce ground truth skin shading in real time on console?
Check my edit, I digged it up.
As for exaggeration, the thing is eventhough UC4 uses performance capture at the end of the day they still have to hand tune it. And this is where the "ND magic" happens. This is what makes their faces different eventhough they aren't the only ones doing advanced performance capture and they aren't the only ones with capable top quality artists working for them. So there's something that still sets them apart despite that, and "ND magic" is about as best of a word I can use to describe this stylisation.
Dictator93
Member
But this is the truth of all performance capture, presuming you have the time and budget as a studio to edit it all. THere are always situations where the capture is not 100% or where a hand needs to be moved, or you need to combine separate animations that are not from the same capture event or moment.
That is the point where I have trouble going further with the argument that it is stylisation.The ability to point out the the thing, in its consistency (like in Gears of War for example regarding the size of hands and shoulders), is a good way to point out stylisation. I mean, they have outsourced asset making, asset guideliness, physically based parameters like lots of other large AAA studios. Why are they as a studio in UC4 afforded the description of magic or stylisation for this when other studios are just said to make unrealistic characters?
Well there's stylisation in how things move and stylisation in how things look. Admittedly in case of the former, it is more difficult to differentiate between stylised movement and non stylised movement as it's something quite subtle and the boundaries start to blur at some point. Like would you say the way actors move and speak in movies is stylised or would you say it's realistic? Because eventhough real people quite obviously don't move and talk like the way actors do in a movie....it does look quite natural and realistic in the movie.
But when it comes to the latter i.e. stylisation in "how things look", it's relatively easy to spot. For instance, a game that uses fully scanned faces of actual actors would be a clear cut example of a character model that's not stylised. This distinction between scanned faces and made up faces is further talked upon by Laa-Yosh in that thread just a few post below the one I linked to. But here's a link to that 2nd post https://forum.beyond3d.com/posts/1896253/
Dictator93
Member
And thus problematic to use as a point of argument without consistent, point-out-able evidence, I would say. Especially since it is a point where we cannot all intuitively agree upon it being a thing.
I still think that argument is not good. Yes, scanning in a face is an example of photogrametry. But those faces that are scanned in lack hair and are 100% raw images. You still have to apply make up (yep, this is a real thing), eyes and iris, tongue teeth, develop the shaders for all the materials, hair placards , baked in AO, stubble, scars or other characterisations that games have. You are "arting" and iterrating a lot off of a scan.
I would say their character art has great best-practice and skilled oversight and direction regarding how to make them realistic characters with the technology they have, but I am not convinced that it is along the lines of stylisation guide where they are conciously pulling features or changing the material model to evoke something other than photorealistic humans. I would just say ND makes great looking humans that approach reality, where as other studios do not (time, budget, skill whatever).
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Yes, but the only times we see this happen to the detriment of a game is in rare cases like The Order 1886. A lot of other games are much better at allocating resources to each team.
I know. I'm saying that TLOU looks more stylized than UC4 due to the character models and lighting in the latter being much more realistic despite the former's attempts. So much so that when people see some of TLOU characters rendered with ND's new workflow, they'll be shook at the difference.
dgrdsv
Member
RAM maybe (and I've said that RAM is the only aspect of this gen consoles which is somewhat on par with what you'd expect from a new gen of console h/w), GPU on the other hand - not even close. PS4's GPU is essentially a downclocked mid-range Pitcairn GPU which was launched in spring of 2012, 1,5 years prior to PS4 launch. By the time PS4 was launching, it was in the low-end category, selling for about $150 for a whole videocard.
This is a stark contrast to prior console gens where their GPUs were generally on par or even faster during launch frame than what PC had in the high end. This is also partially why PC used to struggle with running ports of console games during launch periods which is basically a non-existing issue these days, even during PS4/Pro/XBO and soon XBX launches.
I mean, I feel like this is a weird distinction. Movies can be photorealistic (because they're literally real) but also vary in degrees of stylization. Making something stylized doesn't make it not photorealistic.
If your scene contains vivid lighting and clever framing, then a photorealistic view of that scene will be very stylized.
Every art asset generated, every light placed, every camera angle framed is an artistic decision. You can make those decisions cleverly to create a stylized look, or you can just be as bland as possible. You can use the exact same assets to create something that looks very flat or something that looks beautiful and stylized.
Check this article about framing in Grand Budapest Hotel: https://timeinpixels.com/2015/09/cinematography-in-grand-budapest-hotel/
I was mostly talking about the characters, not the scenes or colors.
This is pretty much what I was talking about. The characters in UC4 and Lost Legacy do more realistic things than in the PS3 games, but there is still definitely a point where Naughty Dog exaggerated some aspects or did some deliberate things to the way the characters look in order to avoid the uncanny valley. There is more realism in these PS4 games, but developers are intentionally not going for 100% realism because they know they can't achieve it yet.
Current games don't even try to look realistic. Instead of that, they try to be cinematic, CGI. If you want realistic look, you can achieve it with outdated techs like arma engine
Great example of a simulator that actually does try to go for "real life" lighting. By some standards it looks dull, but those games aren't trying to look cinematic or eye-catching in the conventional way.
Personally I think even older simulators like say, Gran Turismo 2, have lighting that looks more natural than today's cinematic games.