Accurate human rendering in game [2014-2016]

[Warchild]

I don't really want to comment on the stylization, performance, our characters vs. Activision's, etc. I've had enough of my comments end up as fodder for NeoGAF.

What I will say is that sometimes even small visual improvements are the results of tremendous amounts of time and effort. Sometimes it may sound like something should be as simple as me or another programmer opening up the shader code and hacking away until it looks better, but in reality almost everything to do with skin/faces/materials ends up being part of a rather complex authoring pipeline. Some things might require the rigging department to set up their rigs differently so that we can hook things up to joint animations. Some things might require iterating with our material artists for weeks to come up with a UI and workflow that allows them to quickly make the changes for all of our principle characters. Sometimes we're just so bogged down with actually making a game playable that we have to put off making quick shader fixes until a later point. No matter what, we have to be very careful about how we spend our time. We always need to make sure that we're putting our resources towards whatever should be the highest priority given our overall project goals and time/budgetary contraints. It's complicated and frustrating at times, but that's what engineering is all about.

I totally understand what you are saying. Sometimes i wonder why you guys are using 4xmsaa instead of the smaa t2x that infamous uses, which looks much better and saves some performance compared to msaa. I also shared that the character models look damn near perfect and that the only thing that i would say needed improving were the eyes imo. But i know it's more complicated than it looks. You guys are the masterminds

 

[Gitaroo]

thought last of us looks amazing for a PS3 game. Even U3, lots of scene were actually rendered in real time on PS3 like when Drake was lost in the desert.

 

[ArcticCircle]

I wonder if Agni's philosophy has surpassed Spirit's within. It certainly looks like it in terms of things on on on screen...

I think that question can't be answered. AA and lighting are obviously more complex in Spirits Within. Skin shaders or material shaders, certain textures and physics are much better in Agni's. I guess it depends what you personally feel that matter the most. I feel that modern games in general look much better then older CGI movies.

I think best example is Polar Express. Poster child of creepy uncanny valley and it sort of makes me feel like we're slowly moving upwards the valley with modern games.

We have certain Sony exclusive game has much nicer eyes, skin and moustache

 

[babcat]

thought last of us looks amazing for a PS3 game. Even U3, lots of scene were actually rendered in real time on PS3 like when Drake was lost in the desert.

Certain closeup shots in Last of Us and Two Souls looked amazing for the PS3. They make me hopeful that with the PS4 real time characters with the quality of the activision demo can be achieved. I am starting to think the biggest threat against realistic games is not the hardware but budgets and manpower. It may just be significantly easier and cheaper to keep your characters stylized.

 

[Warchild]

I forgot how impressive Echo looked.

 

[HTupolev]

I forgot how impressive Echo looked.

I wasn't all that impressed. KZSF skin shading has a weird gloss on the surface (which is betrayed by your rightmost image), and the facial animation wasn't all that great; they made moving parts of the face intricately visible, but they don't actually move very naturally, especially with each other as a whole.

Echo does look better than the others, and I suspect a big part of that is that they obscure the sides of the head with a hood, making it more difficult to see how unnaturally parts of the face are moving on the head as a whole.

 

[Karamazov]

regarding how old it is and on what hadware it's running, it's still looking good !


http://www.abload.de/img/0728ryr.gif

 

[Warchild]

I wasn't all that impressed. KZSF skin shading has a weird gloss on the surface (which is betrayed by your rightmost image), and the facial animation wasn't all that great; they made moving parts of the face intricately visible, but they don't actually move very naturally, especially with each other as a whole.

Echo does look better than the others, and I suspect a big part of that is that they obscure the sides of the head with a hood, making it more difficult to see how unnaturally parts of the face are moving on the head as a whole.

I forgot to mention that both outermost images were taken with the playstation screencapture function and uploaded to facebook(further compression and loss of color.) The middle one is a PNG image, that's why it looks better.

I agree that the facial animation was really bad. Imo facial animation makes up at least 50% of the characters believability.

Here is another good one

Edit: and another

 

[XpiderMX]

They announced it to be 1080p30 on PS4, which is strange for fightning game, but at least they are really pushing the visuals.

1080p on both, Xbox One and PS4.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/11/05/ea-sports-ufc-is-1080p-and-30fps-on-ps4-and-xbox-one

 

[XpiderMX]

The sorcerer and the woman from the order with scars on her neck look the best. However, none of them look as good as the woman in the activision demo. Is that shot of the woman from the order in game and real time?

IMO the sorcerer looks good in the pictures, but it looks a little bit weird in videos.

From the second pictures, I like more the woman from Ryse.

 

[dobwal]

Clu from T:L was pretty good.

 

[DieH@rd]

New UFC will have Bruce Lee

Now I wonder how good will they emulate his movement and facial quirks.

 

[ultragpu]

Wow very nice looking Lee model there, but for this particular instance I'll have to say 30fps doesn't do him justice at all if you know what I mean , the guy is probably more suited for a 120fps game.

 

[ultragpu]

I got a feeling Quantic Dream's new game would have the most realistic in game human model ever if what David Cage said is true. If Sorcerer's engine is the minimum of what we can expect, on top of a 1million poly budget for the main character, now just imagine what crazy thing an artist can do with that kind of poly budget and shading power ? It's gonna far exceed FF SW's model, maybe bar the hair.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I've never played a UFC game but I'm suddenly a lot more interested in this.

 

[Karamazov]

Those yellow shorts are a bit revealing.

 

[DieH@rd]

 

[Jedi2016]

New UFC will have Bruce Lee

Now I wonder how good will they emulate his movement and facial quirks.

Facial quirks will be easy. But I don't think computers are fast enough yet to emulate his movement.

 

[DieH@rd]

He will move faster than the 30fps rendering can showcase on screen.

 

[XpiderMX]

I got a feeling Quantic Dream's new game would have the most realistic in game human model ever if what David Cage said is true. If Sorcerer's engine is the minimum of what we can expect, on top of a 1million poly budget for the main character, now just imagine what crazy thing an artist can do with that kind of poly budget and shading power ? It's gonna far exceed FF SW's model, maybe bar the hair.

But Quantic Dream's games allow this grade of details because the nature of the gameplay.

I prefer not-realistic faces as in Quantum Break.