Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion Archive [2012]

Status
Not open for further replies.
I disagree with most of your conclusions :)

FYI Uncharted does not use performance capture, the faces are completely hand animated.

Beyond actually does not match LA Noire's quality. You guys need to take a closer look at lip deformations and facial wrinkles and eyelids. Beyond's actual facial animation is quite simple, but it has very few flaws and the timing and precision are perfect - that's what sells it.
LA Noire's problem is that the facial textures are very low res and the shader is awfully simple - it seems to only use a color and a normal map and simple diffuse shading. Streaming bandwidth, disk space (on the 360) and RAM constraints are the reason.

The beard is totally simple, a photo-texture with a single polygon layer floating above the skin about 1-2 mm out. Eyebrows are only present in the texture. This is very simple tech, but it's used very well, the quality and resolution of the textures is what makes it stand out - particularly when compared to Heavy Rain or the Kara demo.

The eyes are very simple too, it's mostly a nice HDR or fake HDR reflection map with properly tuned values. There's no real depth to the iris, no internal reflections or refractions.


All in all this is another proof that high quality art is the most important aspect. Sure, there's probably a lot of fine tech too, but I think the closest parallel is GT5 on the PS3 - finding the right settings for light intensities, reflections, making sure you don't get caught cutting corners, and polishing your artwork to a flawless level.
So I also think that it is a great achievement, but mostly because the team knows the system and its limits very well and they have amazing artists.
 
They certainly have mastered their texture capture method though. I'm guessing they're using a lightstage.

image_beyond_two_souls-19392-2522_0009.jpg


http://www.pauldebevec.com/
 
Virtua Fighter 5: Final Showdown Face-Off

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vf5-final-showdown-face-off

No surprises, here (in my opinion?).

However, the article says:
Perhaps as a result of moving to more powerful arcade hardware, Final Showdown ditches the 1024x720 framebuffer resolution used in previous versions of Virtua Fighter 5 in favour of a native 720p presentation on both formats

IIRC, I thought we all assumed here (I've seen that in a few (oooooold) posts) that VF5 resolution on PS3 was 1024x1024 (I don't remember if we discussed anything about its resolution on its later release on the XBox360).

Aaand, since there was an error with Eileen's video and I wasn't able to watch it, could anybody please confirm if they implemented character reflections for the water in Eileen's stage? I own VF5 for the PS3 and that has always pissed me off! :mad:
 
DF is not always right, irc both of the old VF5 on ps3 and 360 were 1024X1024 I think, but the 360 version has 4XMSAA. And I thought all the AM2 games on sega lindbergh (Geforce 6) were all fp16 rendering, that's why non of them have any MSAA all the ports to PS3 too. All their port to 360 were FP10 with 4 x msaa until this VF. For some bizarre reason VF5 FS looks a bit washed out compare to PS3 on my tv.
 
Yep. I can confirm that it looks washed out and muddy compared to the original too at least on the PS3.
The original looked brighter and the colors were better refined.
The lighting was definitely better in the original too.
Detail in some stages is destroyed due to some white crash which was not present in the original.
For some reason, I feel the first game looked better. Something is wrong with this port.
I ll download the demo for the 360 version to see how it looks there too.
 
isnt the original 1024X1024 actually higher res than 720p? Could give it some advantage from some vertical downsampling.
 
Thanks for your replies, to both of you!

In 1024x1024 only the vertical resolution is a higher resolution than in 720p; horizontal resolution is lower. Overall, 1024x1024 only pushes a 'few' more pixels, though.

I'm pretty satisfied with the looks of VF5 for PS3, but according to your comments and the screenshots I saw, I couldn't say the same about VF5FS... not by a wide margin, though.
 
From the article:
For example, light shafts in most games only appear when the sun is on-screen. Not so in Halo 4, where "god rays" are cast no matter where the principal light source may be and aren't just fake geometry as we saw in Halo 3.

So, what kind of magic could that be? I'm guessing it's not volumetric lighting?
 
http://images.eurogamer.net/2012/articles//a/1/4/9/2/6/8/1/e32012_halo4_campaign1.jpg.jpg

What is it that seperates them from the fake stuff in other games? Don't look different.

This is probably a better example: http://www.abload.de/img/h4t4x62.gif (The sun is off-screen). There's the other scene from the gameplay demo with the giant orb in the sky (next to the human ship), blocking the light behind it with the sun on the far right - though it is static for the scene, and the shaft does look kinda off for the geometry of the sphere... Can't really say too much unless they move the sphere. *shrug*

Anyways, as far as I could tell for UE3, you basically need the objects right in front of the light source - pretty limited scope. Could be wrong about the underlying tech, but it certainly looks different.

Laa-Yosh may have a better explanation, but who knows. The footage so far is pretty limited, and it's not like we're playing around to see how it works. :p
 
Similar to what Saint's Row 3 does?

izC6iIBWQTaWh.png


Seems like the whole sky is treated as a light.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Possibly... Is that a PC-only feature? Don't recall the console version.

edit: Google says that the "god-rays" are a PC enhancement. http://www.saintsrow.com/news/detail/article/251623/pc_exclusive_features_for_sr:tt

Lack of SSAO might be to preserve the sharp looks of the new art style..

I'm not sure I understand "sharpness" here. Reach's version of HBAO was pretty clean for most of the gameplay. The only artefact was when zooming in on a character far across a level, and it'd be surrounded in a dark shroud. If anything, the blurriness in Reach was from the temporal AA...
 
Anyways, as far as I could tell for UE3, you basically need the objects right in front of the light source - pretty limited scope. Could be wrong about the underlying tech, but it certainly looks different.

Laa-Yosh may have a better explanation, but who knows. The footage so far is pretty limited, and it's not like we're playing around to see how it works. :p
Traditional way to do the 'fake' volumetric scattering with shadows was described in GPU gems 3.
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch13.html
So it basically is a tweaked radial blur.

If one wants to do proper volumetric light you need to calculate scattering in participating medium and if there is shadow take that into account.

Traditionally this is done by ray marching the volume and sampling a shadow map for the shadows.
Found somewhat newish papers which takes this step further.
http://www.sfb716.uni-stuttgart.de/uploads/tx_vispublications/espmss10.pdf
http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~billeter/pub/volumetric/
http://www.cse.chalmers.se/~billeter/pub/scatter/index.html
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'm not sure I understand "sharpness" here. Reach's version of HBAO was pretty clean for most of the gameplay. The only artefact was when zooming in on a character far across a level, and it'd be surrounded in a dark shroud. If anything, the blurriness in Reach was from the temporal AA...

What I meant was that the designs have a lot of sharp light/shadow transitions, but a lot of that is only in the normal maps. SSAO would probably not be able to detect that, and blur the transitions here and there, so maybe that's why they've gotten rid of it.

Yeah, objects could still be casting contact shadows and the like, we'll see if that's happening... most of the multiplayer footage has too fast action for much of the detail to register at all ;)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top