ken_masters
Newcomer
"Yes, but how many polygons?" An artist blog entry with interesting numbers
- Thread starter Farid
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It's also dependant on the hw platform (indexing support, support for strips without degenerates, etc.) as well as the algorithms used to generate the data. It's disturbing how horrific the results of PS2 optimal stripper can be on say, PSP (in terms of resulting vertex counts).Laa-Yosh said:
Typically urban environments are by far the worst, and landscape/water/other procedurally generated crap is the best(can even approach ideal). Characters would fall somewhere in between.
It is the highest cited poly count, but it's certainly not what you see on screen and moreover, IMO it involves creative counting and not all developers might be using the same counting method as F5.
ken_masters
Newcomer
We might expect a good project for Wii from Factor 5 in terms of graphics.
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http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/customer_stories/default.aspx
A lot of information here from official sources regarding the rough polygon counts of characters. Devil May Cry 4, for example, is stated to have ~15,000 polygons per character. And for MGS4, "about 5,000 to 10,000 polygons".
A lot of information here from official sources regarding the rough polygon counts of characters. Devil May Cry 4, for example, is stated to have ~15,000 polygons per character. And for MGS4, "about 5,000 to 10,000 polygons".
I consider DMC4 to be the second best looking console game this gen after MGS4. And i must say i played most of them including Gears 2.
This game is so beautiful and pefectly smooth (especially on 360) it is unbelievable.
I't great to see actual numbers for the characters polys and other stuff. 10x for the link
Well, I popped in MGS4 recently again, and I am not very sure if it can hold up next to many games that are coming now.
I am even starting to question how good it looks unlike previously. The visual quality is inconsistent. Sometimes it looks godly awesome, and sometimes just good.
I cant see why it is considered to have the best characters ever in terms of visuals. In most cases it seems to be more a work of art direction (excluding the godly detailed model of Snake and Ocelot at the end of Act 5. These seem to be made out of better shaders and more polygons).
Technically perhaps I might put DMC4 above MGS4. Overall quality including art direction though perhaps I would prefer MGS4.
I am even starting to question how good it looks unlike previously. The visual quality is inconsistent. Sometimes it looks godly awesome, and sometimes just good.
I cant see why it is considered to have the best characters ever in terms of visuals. In most cases it seems to be more a work of art direction (excluding the godly detailed model of Snake and Ocelot at the end of Act 5. These seem to be made out of better shaders and more polygons).
Technically perhaps I might put DMC4 above MGS4. Overall quality including art direction though perhaps I would prefer MGS4.
MazingerDUDE
Regular
Just name one game that has better character quality than MGS4 :smile:
DMC4 is great too, but it uses different character models for the cut scenes just like in every other games, where MGS4 uses basically the same quality models in both cut scenes and the actual game itself.
MazingerDUDE
Regular
Well you got me
Uncharted truly has impressive character models.
http://www3.telus.net/public/dhwag/UCFACE2.jpg
I think in number of polys being used, it's unrivaled in console.
However, Uncharted uses prerendered movies for its cut scenes.
Can't really compare it to MGS4 where almost everything is in real time
Well I am referring solely to the character models regardless of how they have done the cut scenes. For example the images you posted are clearly from gameplay. Yet if the cursor wasnt visible nor Drake at the distance I would have thought they were from the cut scenes.
(Now about the cut scenes I think I remember that Naughty Dog said they rendered them in real time and recorded them as FMV's so that the game would load the data of the next area during their viewing.)
When I am trying to understand why the characters look so good in MGS4 (and they often do look splendid), I fail to attribute their quality to lighting, shaders, polygons, normal maps, or textures etc that are better than anything else available in the market. Yes they are good. But Its easier for me to attribute it to the best effective use of the limited resources available. It doesnt seem to me that they pushed the boundaries technically, but rather in their talent to produce high image quality from standard use of effects.
(Now about the cut scenes I think I remember that Naughty Dog said they rendered them in real time and recorded them as FMV's so that the game would load the data of the next area during their viewing.)
When I am trying to understand why the characters look so good in MGS4 (and they often do look splendid), I fail to attribute their quality to lighting, shaders, polygons, normal maps, or textures etc that are better than anything else available in the market. Yes they are good. But Its easier for me to attribute it to the best effective use of the limited resources available. It doesnt seem to me that they pushed the boundaries technically, but rather in their talent to produce high image quality from standard use of effects.
...or because the cutscenes in Drake would have been plagued with pop ups and tearings and stuttering if they were running realtime...
And, about the characters in MGS4 and why do they look so good ? I think it is because the exquisite motion captured animations and camera work that makes everything so cinematic. Let's not forget that they had a big budget and arguably the most talented director in the industry to direct the game/cutscenes (Hideo Kojima). The cinematic angles and proper use of film camera tehniques like shallow depth of field, dolly shots, shacky camera and other stuff, is what makes everything look so good, and usually screenshots don't show you all that, in motion is where MGS4 truly shines.
Having played Gears 2 which i think pushes to the max this generation of console's quality of textures with some very smart streaming tricks, i can say that in my opinion it's doubtfull we'll see another game to match MGS4's overall visuals and presentation as it's not about textures or polygons, it's about the artistic quality.
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http://www.siliconera.com/2008/11/10/naruto-ultimate-ninja-storm-is-all-about-the-polygons/
Im suprised character Naruto in Ultimate ninja storm boasts an impressive 17k poly, is that high for a cell shaded game?
Im suprised character Naruto in Ultimate ninja storm boasts an impressive 17k poly, is that high for a cell shaded game?
Cell shading makes it a lot harder to hide jagged edges as most of the shading (silhouettes) comes from the actual model instead of a normal map.
The quality of 3d-models has become more and more important for game visuals as technology has improved. Last gen the technology was always the limiting factor of the game appearance. In current games the amount of astist work needed to model, texture, skin and animate the detailed character models is often higher than the time needed to code the character animation and rendering system. The artists are becoming more and more a bottleneck in game graphics quality.
The MGS4 models are likely using some kind of parallax mapping technique to compensate for the relatively low polygon count. With any of the more realistic pixel shader based displacement mapping techniques (palallax occlusion mapping, relief mapping, etc) the polygon count becomes really meaningless, as any amount of extra detail can be added by painting them in the height and normal map. Most advanced pixel shader based displacement mapping techniques also write proper z-values according to the height map and texkill the pixels that do not cause a ray hit. With a technique like this the extra polygons are not even needed to improve the silhouette quality. Basically you could render all characters by using their simplified bounding boxes and using a pixel shader based displacement map. However this would only work for convex objects, as only one depth value is stored to the displacement map per pixel. In practice, using a low (1000) polygon character and displace map it would be the most cost efficient way to render characters with required image fidelity (and it LODs automatically with normap mipmap hardware). The more near the low polygon model surface is from the high poly model (and heightmap) the less samples need to be fetched in the displacement mapping shader. A low (1000) polygon character model with proper pixel based displacement mapping cannot be disquished from the high polygon model (even on close ups).
woundingchaney
Regular
Snake uses 10k polys. Various other builds use 5k. The poly count for characters is 5k-10k.
http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/customer_stories/metal_gear_4/default.aspx
Technically or even artistically there are various titles that I appreciate more so than those found in MGS4, this of course is directly based on character builds.
I'm sorry but most of your speculation is just wrong. For example, I've never heard of any game using parallax mapping on charaters.
Also, calling MGS4's character artwork the "best" is highly subjective. But before we get deeper into this, let me remind everyone that such discussions do not belong to B3D.
So let's just agree that Konami has good artists and leave it at that.
The most commonly used (texture coordinate shift) parallax mapping is almost free (only few extra pixel shader instructions if you have extra component in your texture format to store the height channel). We have used parallax mapping on our characters before and are using it on our new forthcoming game also. I am pretty sure dozens of other developers have used parallax mapping on their skinned characters as well. I don't see a reason why not, as commonly used tools like z-brush can be configured to output the height (displacement) channel in addition to the normal data, so it's not an art creation limitation either. Common normal mapping (without any parallax effect) is a technique of the past. For our last three games we have been using (texture coordinate shift) parallax mapping on all our surfaces, as it's basically free and looks better than normal mapping.
More complex mapping techniques such as multilayered relief mapping (http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/~oliveira/pubs_files/Policarpo_Oliveira_RTM_multilayer_I3D2006.pdf) are not yet used in any games I know of. However I am pretty sure techniques like this will be common in future games (next gen consoles), as storing complex surfaces like human body (wrinkles etc) in polygon format is a huge waste of memory and bandwidth. Image space techniques like this solve the LOD problem completely. Performance scales perfectly linearly according to rendered pixels (further away characters are almost free to render). Hardware mipmapping also solves the bandwidth and over sampling issues of the furher away geometry.
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