Accurate Human Rendering in Game [2019]

What if... we're all CGI?

 

Death Stranding's lauch trailer was posted today and the faces are unreal.

 

Decima engine's character model has incredibly high amount of polygon density from what I can observe, you zoom in all the way and the silhouette is still buttery smooth unlike most other games of this sort or even linear games. Now on top of Kojipro's outstanding art direction, the extra use of polygons really helps to bring out more nuances of the facial structure, when animated and deformation. Also what sets this apart from HZD is the photorealism direction, the shaders and lighting adjustment make you feel more immersed and adds believability. This would look insane in HDR as the extrended contrast would show much more texture detail and more realistic highlights in the eyes, nose, lips and skins everywhere. Their SSS solution is already stunning and the hair solution is probably as good as this gen can offer.
Come next gen I believe the major leap in character realism is in gpu compute hair and cloth sim and much more helpers in the face rig for super realistic animation.

 

^^ the best place to look at are the top lobe of the ears, or the sillhouette of balds heads: most current gen games including Death Stranding still have visible polygon edges there, like the acharacter model above even.

 

Léa Seydoux in DS, quite convincing

 

I'm thoroughly convinced.

 

Bless us with a Photomode Kojima, the models deserve it!

 

that coat...

 

The faces in Death Stranding are top quality at the moment but they suffer from the "faces covered in vaseline" effect, or something like that. Hard to describe, really.

Too much subsurface scattering?

 

i'd say texture resolution is too low. PC version should solve the problem.

 

I think the texcture res is good enough as you can see from Deadman and Mads' faces. It's definitely more to do with SSS I would say, all their female character faces have "perfect" skins almost devoid of pores and bumps probably due to Kojima's personal fetish.

 

The subtile stubble on Mads is nice. Lea could probably do with some peach fuzz?

 

Mads closeup

 

Would be chill if next gen ingame model looks like DS cutscene model and cutscene model looks like this: