Games that look like CGI

[Prophecy2k]

I think The Order: 1886 is really impressive, and TTC. Ryse maybe when it first launched, but mainly in in-game cinematics. Some of the environments can look a bit dodgy in that game.

The marvel Lego game on PS4 looks stunning though. Like almost indistinguishable from CGI in everything except for IQ.

I wish we had more current gen cell-shaded games. Looking at stuff like Naruto: UNS on the PS3, I wonder how close to a 2D cartoon they could go with current-gen HW and modern cell-shading tech.

 

[iroboto]

Nah, it looks like same assets, just that art was better suited for their outdoor lighting conditions. And camera angles are fixed in the custscene sequences thus we don't notice that meshes are not that highpoly.

I'm not sure about that. It's a noticeable drop to me from the cutscene to sitting on the bed. It's just to me night and day. If you pick out the boys shorts for instance, or the girls sleeves, it's apparent I think.

The other screen shots here:http://www.trueachievements.com/n19294/silence-the-whispered-world-2-details.htm

Seem to be more in line with what you wrote however. I'll see how this turns out. Nice that it's a point and click adventure game, I just spent too many hours playing DAI, it would be refreshing to have something more... puzzle based.

 

[Karamazov]

last gen, some of RE5 cutscenes, heavy use of filters did the job

This gen, for now, the order, quantum break, the dark sorcerer demo, the last scene of CoD AW.

 

[orangpelupa]

Eternal Sonata looks like CG when i played that on my 19" 900p monitor. But when i played it on TV it looks crap with so many aliasing.
zoom this out until the aliasing is gone: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_IGvF0Ul6...iKFEPc/s1600/eternal_sonata_polka_forest.jpeg

the latest Naruto game also like CG that sometime mixed inside Anime.

Skyward Sword when played on PC looks like "moving painting" CG.

 

[deckard]

The Order 1886 is really doing things that I never thought we would see till the end of the gen, IT looks like CGI pretty much all the time.

 

[iroboto]

I'm going to cross post this from another thread I started. It's not a game, but uses UE4

This is a very impressive real time tech demo
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/ue4-tech-demo-virtual-paris-tour.56457/#post-1821295

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Shifty, that video you've posted doesn't look "CGI" to me at all. Almost everything is hand painted - maybe it's projected back onto 3D geometry, maybe it's just cleverly arranged 2D cards, but I'm quite sure there's no actual lighting and shading going on most of the time. Which is why the characters stand out so much from the backgrounds, as they're dynamically lit and shaded.
So in my mind it's actually more similar to traditional 2D animation, with 3D characters without cel shading. It does look nice though, but I see no reasonable comparisons here.

Toy Story is an interesting basis though. Thanks to Renderman, there are some elements of it which are still beyond the capabilities of realtime renderers IMHO - the image quality and the geometry complexity. No contemporary video game is even near the 'poly counts' although since almost everything back then was NURBS rendered as micropolygons, it's very hard to compare. And of course AA and texture filtering were already very good, whereas games are still using all kinds of trickery.
Another aspect could be the lighting - back then any type of global illumination solution was way too expensive, so Pixar's lighters used a LOT of point and spot lights and basically "painted" the scene to look convincing. Not even deferred renderers are really able to do that. On the other hand the various baked and approximated GI solutions today might look comparably nice to the audience.


But then again, what is "CGI" anyway? Even without looking at the more stylized approaches, there's a very wide range of possible looks and visual elements to chose from. I mean look at almost anything new from ILM and the new animated Asterix movie, they couldn't be more apart and yet they're both built with Maya and rendered with Arnold...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But then again, what is "CGI" anyway? Even without looking at the more stylized approaches, there's a very wide range of possible looks and visual elements to chose from...

That's really the point. My criteria would be if it's not obvious whether the output is from a realtime render or an offline render. In days of yore, there was an obvious discrepancy between realtime graphics and CGI. Polygons were lacking, aliasing was rife, shading was simple, art was also very limited due to limited RAM. You couldn't take a game engine and produce a sequence that'd look at home on a cinema screen.

That's no longer true. Although realtime graphics have their limits, such as obvious starched fabrics in the OP video, the overall look is clean and detailed and artistic, and an animated short in the same engine shown at Cannes would look perfectly at home among offline renders. Some of the Source Filmmaker stuff looks very good too, and the engine is certainly capable of producing an animated TV series that wouldn't look like a computer game.

Obviously games aren't up to the top-draw CGI productions who are pushing the envelope, but the realtime engines are now able to produce at a quality suitable for the smaller studios.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Here's another one:

It doesn't look real, but it looks perfectly serviceable most of the time for a film rather than a game. Of course, it's all static and may not work so well in motion yet. But I can imagine a French animation with 2D cartoon characters with exaggerated features wandering around that virtual house and saying very little, and it'd look like a 'real movie' and not a computer game.

 

[DieH@rd]

^ I think this would look real with great VR setup.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

That's really the point. My criteria would be if it's not obvious whether the output is from a realtime render or an offline render.

But there is no actual rendering going on, your criteria is cheated out
Of course cheating is an integral part of CGI, we use matte paintings wherever we can - and not just on environments, we paint characters as well wherever it's possible.

Still, what you're saying here is basically that because you can't immediately tell the difference between a 2D cartoon and a 3D rendered non-photoreal looking CGI environment, it means that the 3D approach is not superior. Yet the 2D approach doesn't allow for dynamic lighting, complex camera movement, dynamic sets and so on, so in truth it is far inferior.

Or for a different comparison, you say here that a 2D CGI background in a Resident Evil game is as good as a 3D rendered environment. Hopefully you can see my point now.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

If the intention is to create a film, not a game, then yes, a 2D backdrop is every bit as good as a GCI render. I'm thinking of this from the view of a filmmaker wanting to make a story. Options include 2D hand drawn, 2D animation software, 3D CGI renders, and now realtime 3D engines (loaded up with time consuming artwork). What's new now is that 3D computer work is an option. 2D realtime computer work has been used for quite a while now, but 3D didn't cut it. In the opening scene in the OP trailer, we see a typical 2D parallax view of painted cels giving depth, but it transitions seamlessly into the 3D world that looks just as good. And the final scene in the bunker is rich with detail. This could be a still from a feature length production :



You don't look at that and think "computer game"! And then this image, it could be a couple of characters composited onto a beautifully painted matte...

...yet the camera pulls out and that 2D matte is actually a full 3D scene, viewable from any angle (maybe limited angles based on texture projection).



The Ubi-art games also do an amazing job of creating non-computerific visuals. I think there's a distinction between the engine and just the art too. Ni No Kuni looked great with its artwork, but it still looked like a computer game due to shortcomings, and the cutscenes were clearly real animations rather than in-game.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Again - you're comparing apples to oranges. What's considered to be CGI - at least for me - goes beyond the visuals of this video. But then we'd have to define "CGI" for a more meaningful discussion...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

My definition is "suitable for producing an animated short and getting shown at Cannes without anyone snubbing it" followed with "shown to artistic and computer people who are then surprised to hear it's actually a computer game and who thought it must have been rendered over a period of a few weeks on a render farm."

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Shifty, don't get me mad

You're perfectly capable of making the distinction between sleight of hand and actually rendering things the proper way. That video is not a case of the right stuff. Close as it may be to your heart, you should know better than to cite it as an example of "movie stuff"

 

[Shifty Geezer]

? Okay, try it this way. If I have a storyboard and some concept art, and I go to an animation company asking for it to be made. I say I want it to look like this



...but I also want full 3D camera control. What options are there for that animation company? They can draw everything in 2D by hand, which won't get the 3D and will be prohibitively time consuming. So not an option. So they'd suggest either stop-frame with hand-painted miniatures, or computer graphics, right?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

..

Sorry but I don't have time for this argument, and it's silly anyway. The video you've posted is not CGI, doesn't look like CGI, anything else is really just a waste of time.

 

[milk]

I get the argument that this could pass for production qualitty feature animation, and that it does not look overly gamey (though I find character's materials and texture resolution to have a noticeble enough gamey look to them, but not something the avarege public would pick on) but the fact that it takes so many shortcuts (limited camera, dynamic lighting, heavy use of hand painted assets) makes the whole discussion kind of pointless.
I think its cool to look back and evaluate which games got closer to "hidding" the obvious graphical limits of the machine they run on, but if extreme limitations on interactivity are acceptable, then I'd throw in Donkey Kong Country for the SNES in there. Exept for the resolution, that game had CGI like (comparable to Toy Story) graphics. Even despite the limitations fo SNES's palleted graphics.
The whole "looks like CGI" thing is indeed a very abstract idea, and not at all a precise definition, but we all can sort of grasp what it means. But I think it only gets interesting if we consider games with actual dynamic environments and lighting (at least to some extent) and free roam cameras. Otherwise... Myst.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

...but the fact that it takes so many shortcuts (limited camera, dynamic lighting, heavy use of hand painted assets) makes the whole discussion kind of pointless.

All graphics are shortcuts, save maybe full on ray-tracing. The question is how much is shortcuts imposed by the engine or technique. Projected textures aren't an intrinsic limitation of the engine - you could achieve the same thing in total 3D just with more work to paint from different angles or individually paint and shade every object. You also don't need complete dynamic lighting when you know the scene you want to produce. In fact, it's a waste of time to model and texture assets (whether real world or virtual) if you're never going to see them. Many a set of a room consists of only half a room, dressed to work from given camera angles. Texturing the models from one or two directions is a good cheat to get the hand-painted look with proper depth and camera freedom! What works well here is that the engine can add shadows and they are correct because they're projected onto geometry. More effort can ramp up the lighting model and combine that with albedo paintings. The point isn't that realtime rendering can do everything CGI can do, and I never said it could or did. The title is, "Games that look like CGI."

I find Laa-Yosh's response perplexing. CGI is simply the creation of images using computer. It covers everything from life-like raytraced scenes as he speciliases in to cheap adverts for animated bottles and talking toothpaste. Its first use was spot effects in traditionally animated movies like Basil the Great Mouse Detective. Sometimes it's obviously CG, like in that example. Other times, like the jungle scenes from Tarzan using a proprietary shader tech to simulate a hand-painted scene, it blends seamlessly and the only way you really know its CG is when the camera follows impossible paths! What's different between now and yesteryear is game engines couldn't produce anything that'd look good on TV, whereas now they can, notably because the IQ can be maintained to eliminate jaggies and texture quality so good art looks like good art. What this means for creators is another option in meeting deadlines, using different techniques on computer to get the desired results. For my hypothetical question that Laa-Yosh ignored, if the animators went with using computer instead of stop-frame, they could either model and paint and shade everything so it looked perfect from every direction, and render it a frame at a time on a farm, or they could take some 2D paintings and project them and composite with 3D characters producing things like correct shadowing without having to paint individual frames of shadow animation and produce the result in real-time. Both are CGI.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

If you widen the term "CGI" that far then even something drawn in MS Paint can be considered to be CGI.