Speculation on the polycount or quality of nextgen character models.

[Acert93]

I mean this really is pretty damn close to as good as it can get with realtime hardware:

That looks great! What is that from?

But sadly this is the lower bar of "good" this gen:

And then we had major first parties do scary stuff like this:

I guess devs have been getting better this gen at faces. I quite liked the BF3 models on the 360 and could imaging with better shadowing and detail I wouldn't really care much for more improvements.

 

[Sigfried1977]

I'm still not buying that the Ellen Paige mugshot was generated in real time by a PS3 hardware. It's most likely about as real time as the Uncharted 3 videos, which do look similarly phenomenal.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

That head wasn't bad technically. I also don't like you ignoring that it was replaced in the final version of Reach by a completely different head model

Getting better involves hiring good artists. I really don't know any easier ways to put this - several long standing studios suffer from the issue where an art director or head of art or such person has been at the company since the '90s and the skillsets and talent that was good enough for that age is no longer sufficient. But hiring a better artist for a lower position is not an easy thing to manage.


Also, the girl's face is obviously not realtime - too good image quality, AA and such. But the asset itself is the same and the system can handle it perfectly well.

 

[DieH@rd]

I'm still not buying that the Ellen Paige mugshot was generated in real time by a PS3 hardware. It's most likely about as real time as the Uncharted 3 videos, which do look similarly phenomenal.

Where is your god now?
/in Riddick's voice

 

[ultragpu]

Tesselation isn't a good idea for character faces - you could make use of more polygons for more detailed deformations instead. What you create with tessellation can't be controlled, it's basically wasted vertices for animation.
Naughty Dog already has a head mesh that's very, very dense but I'm sure they could use even more polygons there to get even better control. Also, moving to blendshapes instead of bones would be a good idea to spend extra memory. A smoother nose or eyelid is only visible in closeups but better control over deformations is more visible.

Yeah, then again, KZ3 characters weren't as detailed as the ones in Uncharted or Last of us. Also, the LDR color depth is very very evident and disturbing. They should fix those things first.

I mean this really is pretty damn close to as good as it can get with realtime hardware:


The next big step in quality could come from implementing raytracing for the lighting and shadows and not from more polygons or textures... and of course from better hair (even if this is one of the best examples of realtime hair I've seen)

I agree mostly. But in regard to tessellation maybe it's not as useful when applied onto a realistic humanoid wearing simple clothes, but a game like Gears of war would definitely see massive improvements from it. The source zbrush models simply look so much better when put next to an ingame model. Now I believe tessellation and displacementmaps can replicate that to a certain degree maybe 90% roughly? I bet if we all see a nextgen Brumak using them techniques running around in a demo build then the impact should be much greater to us.
But then again, it would be awesome if we can see comparisons between tessellation vs uber lighting on character models in order to determine which one benefit the result the best. Hell if the hardware is competent enough we can use both.

 

[AlNom]

From what I understood of passing comments on creating the high poly models for gears, they already do use displacement maps, so perhaps we will see that hardware permitting (or perhaps to a lesser amplification).

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I might write up a little more tonight, but in short you guys have the wrong ideas about all this stuff

 

[AlNom]

There was at least the wretch model being demoed with displacement maps somewhere. I can't remember where it was though. And I think it was also described for one of the human characters. Probably from one of the CG Society articles. Though that's probably not usable on the low poly model anyway since that wasn't the target for the DMs.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

You probably misunderstood something about the content creation workflow. I recall a presentation that explained how they upgraded some creatures from Gears 1 for the sequel...

 

[AlNom]

Probably, it was awhile ago.

 

[Turok]

Where is your god now?
/in Riddick's voice

http://i.minus.com/ibjF3Uf47TWVFX.jpg

Even if it was running in real time, I can't see the game having that kind of fidelity in-game, especially when a dead NPC's shirt is as polygonally complex as that.

 

[ultragpu]

Joel also has the same polygonal creases on his sleeves, in fact I made a similar remark on the sheer amount of polygons that went into the characters when it was first announced. For a moment there I thought the model was tessellated.
http://i39.tinypic.com/1pt451.jpg
But yeah, I expect the majority of NPCs don't sport that kind of details but only the main characters and the cut scenes of course.