Ugly, performance targeted lighting

inlimbo

Newcomer
I don't know how else to describe this kind of lighting, because my technical knowledge is antiquated and limited, but I'm playing Rift Apart right now and it's exactly how I would describe the lighting. It's incredibly flat and one dimensional and clearly lit for performance first and no amount of ray traced reflections is gonna fix that. It's a flatness it shares with the likes of Infinite Warfare, Crysis 2, Horizon, Nioh and Doom Eternal. And that flatness and lack of variation in shadow casting is really starting to wear on me.

That there are games with far fewer technical bonafides offering richer lighting, Fallout 4 among them, really bugs me. I don't know. Does anyone see what I'm getting at even if you don't strictly agree? I'm pretty hungover right now so maybe I'll be able collect my thoughts better a little later.
 
I feel like these games share a particularly ugly use of distance fog, too, which accents what's so flat about their lighting. And I mean distance fog is great but this particular implementation...
 
I can’t understand how you view fallout 4 as having better lighting than R&C. It’s not close to something like Metro enhanced but I think it competes well with the field for rasterized lighting.
 
Because it looks better. Rift Apart's lighting is "better" technically in the sense that it's got more shadow casters and more active lights but it looks blander.
 
I wonder if this is also due to art direction?
That and maybe global illumination. GI is great for accuracy or realism, but without fudging some lights you have to dress a scene more carefully to have the lighting pop. Especially if you don't have dynamic time of day. Even if a scene looks flat mid day, it can end up looking great at dusk or dawn.
 
That and maybe global illumination. GI is great for accuracy or realism, but without fudging some lights you have to dress a scene more carefully to have the lighting pop. Especially if you don't have dynamic time of day. Even if a scene looks flat mid day, it can end up looking great at dusk or dawn.

DICE (or rather, the players) experienced this so well. Due to how natural everything is being light up, enemies became hard to see / discern. The solution was DICE adding a bunch of fake lights.
 
Lighting look flat to you is probably from their Probe GI solution, which definitely produces flat lighting, both in and out of shadow.
I am honestly not sure though why you think Fallout 4 is better. It does use a forced rim Highlight on characters, maybe that is why.
 
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DICE (or rather, the players) experienced this so well. Due to how natural everything is being light up, enemies became hard to see / discern. The solution was DICE adding a bunch of fake lights.
I observe it's harder to see enemies with increasing realism, both on lighting and detail side.
That's one reason i often miss the clear structures of low poly Quake 3, and even there i set texture res to zero so only light maps remain visible. Helps with MP, and looks even better to me.

Rim lighting is no solution to me. Very ugly. And fake lights moving with the character (new Horizon game for example, although a good one) also contradicts the goals of realism.
So to me, the preferred solution would be non realistic content. Define the world with low frequency geometry like Quake, add high frequency structure details for eye candy, but leave middle frequencies at zero.
And characters could wear colorful cloth, while rest of the world is more subtle.
Does not work for every kind of game ofc., but generally i'm bored from realism and actually want 'gamey' look. It's no shame to be a game : )
 
I can’t understand how you view fallout 4 as having better lighting than R&C. It’s not close to something like Metro enhanced but I think it competes well with the field for rasterized lighting.

I'm not qualified to comparing the lighting tech in R&C and Fallout 4, but Fallout 4's lighting is stellar and very dynamic.
 
It just looks bad visually. How this is less flat than R&C I don't understand.

The first gameplay hour of the game has the lighting and weather 100% scripted. When you play the game, when you're out exploring over the game's 25-hour day/night cycle, with the many different types of weather, then you can see how dynamic it is. Crawing through some ruins in the early morning, then daylight breaks and light floods floods through windows and holes in the wall of roof. So good. :yep2:
 
The first gameplay hour of the game has the lighting and weather 100% scripted. When you play the game, when you're out exploring over the game's 25-hour day/night cycle, with the many different types of weather, then you can see how dynamic it is. Crawing through some ruins in the early morning, then daylight breaks and light floods floods through windows and holes in the wall of roof. So good. :yep2:


It doesn't look better than the first hour. R&C GI can improve a lot this is one of things they can make huge progress with continuous LOD, better shadow technology and better CPU usage for futures title. Like the technical diretor told they only scratch the surface of what they can do.
 
Lighting look flat to you is probably from their Probe GI solution, which definitely produces flat lighting, both in and out of shadow.

Yeah its what i noticed aswell, probably wouldnt after having experienced CP. but its definitely a huge drawback for R&C.
 
How many hours have you played Fallout 4?

I did not play the game but from what I see on video and I did not see only this one I am not more impressed by it than most of last gen title from a technical point of view maybe you talk from an artistic point of view. Imo the best title for lighting is Metro Enchanced, The lego title, after probably CP2077 PC, probably some other titles using RTXGI, HFW does not look bad at least for GI, reflections and shadows arent impressive and Unreal Engine 5 demo is good with impressive GI and shadows but not a game for the moment.

EDIT: RDR2 ligthing is very good.

If we count demo, the best of the best is Marbles and not only the lighting but the geometry is impressive too. This is probably the best lighting currently and with an impressive level of geometry.

I know Quake 2 and Minecraft are impressive but the level of geometry is too low imo. I am not impressed visually.
 
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I don't know how else to describe this kind of lighting, because my technical knowledge is antiquated and limited, but I'm playing Rift Apart right now and it's exactly how I would describe the lighting. It's incredibly flat and one dimensional and clearly lit for performance first and no amount of ray traced reflections is gonna fix that. It's a flatness it shares with the likes of Infinite Warfare, Crysis 2, Horizon, Nioh and Doom Eternal. And that flatness and lack of variation in shadow casting is really starting to wear on me.

That there are games with far fewer technical bonafides offering richer lighting, Fallout 4 among them, really bugs me. I don't know. Does anyone see what I'm getting at even if you don't strictly agree? I'm pretty hungover right now so maybe I'll be able collect my thoughts better a little later.

Yep. There really isn't anything technically impressive about the graphics in this game. It uses the same GI light probes for global illumination, the fur rendering doesn't have ambient occlusion, and several assets with low poly count. Their RT reflections is using checkboard rendering on top of using very very low samples for the reflection. It makes all of the specular objects look granny as hell. I would have preferred for them to stick with SSR tbh. The low reflection samples are very jarring.

The game is extremely pretty artistically though. They've got a billion different shades of color in one frame which catches the eye very effectively.
 
EDIT: RDR2 ligthing is very good.

If we count demo, the best of the best is Marbles and not only the ligting but the geometry is impressive too. This is probably the best lighting currently and with an impressive level of geometry.

RDR2 lighting system is one of the best, if not the best, out there, even without raytracing (which is coming soon). Heck, GTA V lighting system is still impressive for an 8yr old game.
 
Yeah, RDR2's got some of the best lighting ever. Aesthetically and technically, but aesthetically especially.

When we're talking GI probes and Ratchet and Clank are we talking baked GI probes? Because as I understood it Rift Apart is still using baked indirect lighting for all its GI. And surely baked GI isn't the reason it looks flat, it's the particular kind of probes they're using, right?
 
I observe it's harder to see enemies with increasing realism, both on lighting and detail side.
That's one reason i often miss the clear structures of low poly Quake 3, and even there i set texture res to zero so only light maps remain visible. Helps with MP, and looks even better to me.

Rim lighting is no solution to me. Very ugly. And fake lights moving with the character (new Horizon game for example, although a good one) also contradicts the goals of realism.
So to me, the preferred solution would be non realistic content. Define the world with low frequency geometry like Quake, add high frequency structure details for eye candy, but leave middle frequencies at zero.
And characters could wear colorful cloth, while rest of the world is more subtle.
Does not work for every kind of game ofc., but generally i'm bored from realism and actually want 'gamey' look. It's no shame to be a game : )

That sounds like Halo. :p Not surprising as ease of seeing friends and enemies was a key design constraint.

Regards,
SB
 
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