Josh378 said:
Yosh, I mean a game like LAIR is said to have 100-170K of polygons per dragon(1st gen game)...
There's an order of magnitude of difference between a hundred thousand and a million.
and we seen the video of the many dragons on screen...
Dragons in the distance had LOD to reduce their poly count.
Killzone might be achieveable for next gen polygon-wise, just the effects is the main problem.....
It's not as simple as that.
The main elements in KZ's visuals are the following...
* Lots of geometry - most of this will be replaced with normal mapping in the game, like jeep tires, folds of clothing, weapon detail etc.
* Global illumination lighting - there are techniques like spherical harmonics to create similar results, but it won't look as good though
* Ambient occlusion - this technique creates the effect of bounced lighting blocked off by objects. Ie. the inner sides of the legs on characters get darker and darker as the other leg is moving closer, blocking out the light reflected from the sky and the ground. It requires massive raytracing, unavailable in realtime; although there's a lot of research to fake it - but still without convincing results.
* Complex shaders - there are tricky things in UE3 like a very nice skin shader, so we can expect similar, but lower quality implementations in every game.
* Volumetric smoke - probably based on voxels, I'm not that familiar with Lightwave's possibilities. Nevertheless, the smoke casts shadows on itself according to the lighting and it's continuous puffs instead of texture mapped particles. You can do a lot with the latter too (we're using that approach as well) but it just won't look good enough for the kind of thick smoke that's in the KZ video.
* High quality antialiasing - both on the geometry and the textures, to get a jaggie-free look. Consoles are still limited to 16-32 sample anisotropic filtering, 2x-4x geometry AA, and developers will have to learn a lot about shader antialiasing...
* Digital compositing - KZ has been rendered in many separate layers (background, ground, buidings, characters, smoe etc.) which were than put together in a sotware package that's similar to Photoshop, but with animation. Both the individual layers and the resulting composite are heavily modified by filters, color correction, transformations and so on, to enhance the imagery. Elements are finetuned to better fit together, and stuff like DOF, fake shadows and so on can be created as well. One can replicate these effects on both the GPUs and CPUs of the consoles, so we may expect games to take advantage of image processing as well.
Can't they create technique(s) to simmulate the effects in KZ...and come close enough to fool the casual eye? It would make perfect sense...
As you can see, it's about quite a lot more than simple 'effects', even if a good range of the techniques can be implemented in realtime. But even if all the elements could be mached almost perfectly by their realtime counterparts, you'd still lack the carefully planned direction, the finetuned animation and camera motion and timing in the trailer, which are just as important in its effect as the looks of it...
