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Why we can't have nice round shape graphics in videogames?
- Thread starter Ostinatto
- Start date
Pimpbaa
Slop Inspector
Sure, but GPUs are built for accelerating polygonal based graphics. Although I'm sure you could use compute shaders or software rendering on the CPU to do something different like voxels or something else. But the end result would be like going generations back in regards to graphic fidelity.
It is a meele gif, but you can see better that it is polygonal when he eats Mr Game & Watch and the shading is not perfectly round
OverHeat
« generous god »
We still see the poly on her ass...nice try
I believe you can do 3D modelling with splines, but it's pretty experimental if I remember correctly. It'd give perfect curves, however.
Dawg you can count the triangles on that butt.
Axonometri
Member
Polygons are made of splines
Not fake ones
Pimpbaa
Slop Inspector
The tessellation performance in both the ps4 and 720 GPUs should be good enough to keep most round objects rounded.
KojiKnight
Member
Cause 8 gigs of Vram has a lot to do with how many polygons are on screen, am I right!?
(yes I realize the sarcasm both from and to this post)
Axonometri
Member
Yes!
Computationally very very demanding especially dynamic with radiostic properties
What is a decent shadow? Like real world shadows? Then take a look at ray tracing. Otherwise, yes, shadows are taxing on the hardware.
JordanN
Banned
High resolution shadow maps use up alot of RAM.
Shadows made through shadow volume use up alot of CPU/GPU power (they're creating geometry twice).
OverHeat
« generous god »
Not with tesselation on
or just make sure polygons are smaller than pixels.
Nurbs are cumbersome to work with, and the surface would still have to be broken down to polygons at render-time(if I'm not mistaken). Nurbs are generally used when precision is important since a nurbs surface is a mathematical equation instead of connected pre-defined points the resolution is infinite.
When you design a machine using cad software you would use something like nurbs, can't have stuff like that in an inaccurate format as polygons.
3d-modelling with splines has been around for ages. I remember 10 years ago or so when subd-modelling wasn't very popular, lot's of people used splines to define patch surfaces, it was a total headache compared to the tools we have today.
Also, I'm not 100% sure about this but since a spline still is only a parametrized equation at some point the computer still has to translate it into polygons to actually render it. There is no magic way of getting free perfect curves. But like I said above, if you have the computing power to spare, just make sure each polygon in a curve is smaller than a pixel on screen and the curve will always appear perfect assuming the pixels aren't big enough to see individually.
I'd say something like open subdiv likely could find it's way into videogamin in the next 5-10 years. Its basically the tech used in cg-animation today. You start out with a lowpoly(for a high-end model that would be maybe 30 k polies for a face, but could be as low as a few thousands and still give good results) and then subdivide it with a smoothing algorithm, finally you apply a displacement map to get extra high frequency detail if you want that look. This will definitively happen when gpus are strong enough to not care about polycounts anymore.(we are approaching that point, shaders, lighting, effects and textures are far more expensive than drawing triangles). It's similar to tessellation but while tessellation just adds extra points without affecting the shape of the object subdiv changes the shape to have a curved surface.
Bronetta
Ask me about the moon landing or the temperature at which jet fuel burns. You may be surprised at what you learn.
I'm talking about NURBS. The name had escaped me before.
KojiKnight
Member
Incredibly. First off, you'd have to have realistic real time lighting, which we can usually only get from only a very select few sources at any one time. Next you'd have to be able to indirectly bounce that real time lighting off of objects and onto other objects realistically (a BIG hurdle that graphics technologies have only been really tackling the last few years).
So after you get the hard stuff down, then it'd be relatively "simple" just to apply those real time rendered light particles at the dozens of objects on the screen all at real time and thus your perfect shadow!
Axonometri
Member
Nurbs never caught on in game dev or effects because of the processes that became popular in advancing real time poly editing and sculpting.
JordanN
Banned
you scan still see the lines in the shape. That isn't a curve, it's lines connected.
Ayane (blossom outfit) from Ninja Gaiden 3 is apparently 122,883 polygons.
Dem cracks!
Axonometri
Member
A spline is part of a polygon. Splines are the lines connecting the vertex. Or points. You subdivide a polygon by adding a spline between splines creating new vertices.
gingerbeardman
Member
This.
What were those round shapes in Q3 made of, btw? Polygons (lots of them)? Nurbs?
JordanN
Banned
Yeah, I just got the terminology mixed up. Was thinking of nurbs.
Axonometri
Member
Voxels look 1989
Axonometri
Member
Time to go get my nurbs, I mean kids!
Eh? I would imagine just drawing the curves outright would've produced a better result.
You get tons of problems with cracks in the geometry using curves as rendering primitives. Tessellation is a solution to the roundness problem that plays to the strength of the hardware we use today with virtually identical results.
Not in final work, but they're a very useful tool for modeling. Assuming you meant NURBS, of curse.
And I remember someone showed a while back a video of pixol-like something in games? I have no idea how they animate that, but I remember seeing something like that.
JordanN
Banned
I tried using nurbs before and didn't like it.
I'm learning sub-d and the results are way more impressive mostly because it works on everything.
Create a low poly mesh, subdivide it, done.
I don't usually like it either, but they can really speed things up. I have this huge project now and I found them to be super useful. Especially for complicated designs.
megarockexe
Member
What I don't get is how flat textures can't be round. I've seen a lot of it on Wii which has really lowered my expectations of acceptable graphics. I can't remember an example, but hard-edged, polygonal round effects were surprisingly common.
Not fake ones
What do you mean?
Woah this has been bothering for a while, thank you. Now I can atleast somehow understand why the Shadows in certain games look that chunky and mosaic-ish..
Man this topic reminds me of one I found on the Nintendo.com forums way back in the day, and the title was "why can't polygons be round?" I have to admit I lol'd.
Anyway, it's been thoroughly explained in this topic at this point, but games are getting better at round things.
Although the non-round balloons in Bioshock Infinite sort of annoyed me
Anyway, it's been thoroughly explained in this topic at this point, but games are getting better at round things.
Although the non-round balloons in Bioshock Infinite sort of annoyed me
JordanN
Banned
Edit: Textures can be round. They need to mapped to round polygons like a circle, sphere or cylinder.
I remember Carmack talking about how rendering curved surfaces in Quake 3 produced visible cracks in the geometry. They solved it by inserting patches of triangles to cover up the cracks. I can't tell you exactly why cracks occurred in the first place, but my guess is floating point imprecision. For Doom 3 they threw out all of the curved surface rendering to spare themselves of some headache.
Texture resolution, I think. To have a perfectly round flat-texture you can either put it on a square polygon with alpha - But then you need the texture resolution to be pretty good or the edges will be blurry and won't look good, or you can put it on a "round" (or as round as you can) flat Polygon.
SneakyStephan
Banned
I just wanted to see quake 3 mentioned and it's been taken care of already 
OP I think project cars has some really high poly wheels compared to gran turismo.
OP I think project cars has some really high poly wheels compared to gran turismo.