Lord Error said:
Not sure about that particular picture, but plenty of shorter cutscenes in the game are rendered fully realtime, and when they are, they do look pretty much exactly like the video recorded ones, and the framerate doesn't suffer at all. I don't think this should be a point of contention. They can clearly render any of these cutscenes in real time, but they made a decision not to do so for those longer ones, to prevent any loading needed for them.
Again the things that you point are true to a degree, even though I could easily argue the hair and texture quality in general (and besides, there's a lot more multitexturing and much higher quality normal/parallax mapping going in UC2 than TS had), but I think they are heavily outweighed by the way the overall thing looks. The image quality of course TS has the big advantage, but if you watch both on a smaller TV it won't matter that much (most people remember TS from a 480i DVD after all) and then there's motion blur, but again UC2 in particular has pretty amazing implementation of this, much better done in full game actually than in that early beta that I was posting pictures from once.
To your first part. I agree the in game cutscenes look incredible... however the pre-rendered ones or w/e they are (drakes gun is never what you're really holding in those cutscenes, they are absolutely not the same), those particular scenes have better animations obviously, because they are scripted, the lighting to me seems a lot better, particularly the boat scene in the beginning, and overall there's a film like quality to the whole thing. It definitely adds some nice effects whether you admit it or not, that is a fact.
To the second part, I'm not arguing IQ, obviously movies get the advantage there. I'm talking polygon count, animations, textures. Like I said a few posts up, look at all the buttons on Buzz's suit, look at his arm joints, the complexity of his suit is ridiculous... then look at Ratchets armor, and the guy he's talking to. It looks good, but it's pretty flat, and not nearly as smooth. It's just not even close. It's very nice, it's improving, it's advancing, but it's not yet Toy Story level.
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Lord Error said:
I'm pretty sure that picture is from TS2 period, and that movie already looked much better.
Buzz's model was equally as complex in the first movie, same with Woody.
Complexity still there, detail, textures. Even the bed and the blanket.