Halo 3: Screenshot & Movies Thread [56k warning]

[Deepblue]

I think my favorite part about the HDR implementation is how it applies to explosions. After several plasma's go off in your face, you're blinded for about half a second.

 

[TrungGap]

Actually, what's amazing about Halo 3's lighting is that you don't notice it until you start playing other games like Call Of Duty 4. Especially on levels with both outside and inside. You'll notice how the light react nicely and naturally.

 

[RobertR1]

You'll notice how the light react nicely and naturally.

The Silent Cartographer level with all the sand floating around. The way the light rolls off that and blends into the rest of the enviornment is just awesome, to me.

 

[_phil_]

COD4 has HDR lighting too.

 

[aselto]

COD4 has HDR lighting too.

Yes, but what's great about Halo 3 lighting is not only dynamic colour space, but also how light reacts with various surfaces etc. Too bad the image quality is so bad in the game, otherwise it would be the best looking game on consoles IMO.

 

[ErnstH]

Just finished the campaign. I have to say, I really like the graphics, minus the aliasing/filtering issues. The scale of the levels and fights (lots of enemies!), solid framerate and diversity of places you visit stand out to me. The lighting is also beautiful.

At first, I was somewhat confused with the story (new to Halo), but it really is a great game.

 

[ErnstH]

Yes, but what's great about Halo 3 lighting is not only dynamic colour space, but also how light reacts with various surfaces etc. Too bad the image quality is so bad in the game, otherwise it would be the best looking game on consoles IMO.

Let's hope the next Xbox also features backwards compatibility so it can play Halo3 with obscene amounts of AA and AF making it look just like photomode.

 

[-tkf-]

Halo 3 gets a bad rap as a graphically underwhelming game. One which I think is quite undeserved. It has some very uneven spots to be sure, but when it hits its stride, boy does it shine.

I don´t doubt that the game "shines" and it looks better than some might want it to.

However, unless i am mistaking every screenshot you posted are not ingame or realtime shots, they are basicly "bullshots", i could post Photomode pictures from GT4 in comparison.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Bullshots won't effect colors, lighting, atmospherics, particle effects. They do sharpen the textures and remove all kinds of aliasing artifacts, but the general look is pretty much what you get in the game...

 

[RobertR1]

I don´t doubt that the game "shines" and it looks better than some might want it to.

However, unless i am mistaking every screenshot you posted are not ingame or realtime shots, they are basicly "bullshots", i could post Photomode pictures from GT4 in comparison.

We had enough posts about 'bullshots' in the other Halo3 threads. Dig one of them up. No need to shit in this one.

 

[-tkf-]

We had enough posts about 'bullshots' in the other Halo3 threads. Dig one of them up. No need to shit in this one.

The OP says that Halo 3 got a bad rap and then posts the exact same type of "screenshots" that got it it´s "bad rap".

Not that i am surprise by your tone since you have some history with the game

 

[aselto]

Bullshots won't effect colors, lighting, atmospherics, particle effects. They do sharpen the textures and remove all kinds of aliasing artifacts, but the general look is pretty much what you get in the game...

Well, this uberAA is makes what these screenshots look exceptional. Keep in mind that PGR4 Photo Mode doesn't even add better texture filtering, only exceptional AA and the difference of the view before and after taking a photo is huge! I wish we had AAx16 in games, this sharpness really makes a whole world of difference in my opinion.

I still dig Halo 3 graphics it looks exceptional at times and I always hold my breath when I launch 5th level. But the image quality (and bad human models) is what is holding the game back from impressing many people.

 

[Deepblue]

The human models (specifically the faces, since bodies are fine) are an interesting case, because about half of them are good, while the rest are pretty terrible. Luckily you don't spend that much time staring at them either way.

 

[kyleb]

Well, this uberAA is makes what these screenshots look exceptional. Keep in mind that PGR4 Photo Mode doesn't even add better texture filtering, only exceptional AA and the difference of the view before and after taking a photo is huge! I wish we had AAx16 in games, this sharpness really makes a whole world of difference in my opinion.

I believe the Halo 3 shots are actually 49xAA, as when you take the shot it shows it render as a 7x7 grid of tiles.

 

[AlNom]

There it is again.. the number 7. Oh Bungie... It's too bad they apply a ridiculous amount of image compression though.

 

[TurnDragoZeroV2G]

NOVEMBER 2007 thread resurrection warning!

Considered dropping this in the upscaling discussion, but thought it might be better to avoid that, and instead stick it where it's most relevant (albeit several months old) and will be seen if anybody searches for this particular subject...

Bungie's latest update has an explanation of exactly what the screenshot function does. Among them is a rendering resolution of 3840x2160 downsampled, 8-16xAF on some surfaces, and ditching the simpler approximation on their bloom filter, which they've shown in their presentations before (HDR Rendering the Bungie Way and Hao's Lighting and Materials talk).

Bungie Update 3-7-08

Bungie graphics engineer Chris Tchou talked me through some of that technique.

Halo 3 screenshots are just hi-resolution renderings, directly from the normal game engine.

The initially rendered resolution is 3840 x 2160, but as you’ll see, that’s not what you end up with.

The 360 doesn’t have the memory to render at this resolution (especially while the game is running), so we render the image in 16 tiles and then crop and stitch them together. The final image is converted to the standard PC color space (from our ‘special’ 360 color space), downsampled to 1920 x 1080 (with a simple box filter), compressed to a jpeg on your xbox, and transmitted to bungie.net. That downsampling is where much of the “anti-aliasing” comes from.

The only tricks that are played during the rendering are to do with that jumbo magnification. The bloom filtering switches to a smooth bspline instead of bilinear – this gets rid of a subtle blocky appearance of the bloom on super bright lights which becomes more apparent in a high resolution shot.

Some textures are bumped to use 8x or 16x anisotropic sampling – this makes some ground and wall textures more detailed at farther distances, though it also has the side-effect of making tiling patterns more obvious. All of the post-processing is simply designed to make the big uploaded images function, and not be janky messes of obvious tiling.

Almost all of our LOD (Level of Detail) is based on the size of the pixels in an object. So when you are rendering at higher resolution, everything renders with more pixels, and will therefore use a higher LOD.

 

[Rockster]

The final image is converted to the standard PC color space (from our ‘special’ 360 color space)...

I always wondered why the screenshot function seemed to lose so much of the dynamic range apparent in the rendered image. Thanks for the info.

 

[xatnys]

Ack. All of that effort to produce a high resolution, high quality image, and then they save it as a jpeg?

 

[AlNom]

A pretty low quality setting for jpg compression too... The block artifacting is horrendous. Of course, given the lol-number of screenshots being taken, it's easy to understand why they would do it. It's too bad they set a quota for the 30 most recent screenshots rather than a total storage quota ala the saved films.

I'd rather have access to the most recent x amount of megabytes of PNG screenshots that I can swap out easily rather than have lots of crappy quality images.