nFactor2 - an engine on X360

[Shifty Geezer]

I wouldn't draw too many far-reaching conclusions on the quality of the DOF in this tech-demo, as all the pics look like they use very heavy jpeg compression (lots of artefacting all over the place). Things almost always get screwy when people try to pick apart pictures downloaded off the web and analyze them down to the smallest details.

JPEG compression makes blocks appear. It can't take a blurred picture, remove the blurring and replace it with fuzzy lines AFAIK. And that's what I'm seeing if no-one else is!

 

[London Geezer]

I see the fuzziness too. It's like the DOF isn't using a blur filter. Very strange, i'm sure it's just a minor bug in the engine. I fail to see why they would show that cause it looks awful. Don't these people learn? FIX it before you show it!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I see the fuzziness too. It's like the DOF isn't using a blur filter.

It looks to me like to achieve the DOF they taken alternate vertical lines and displaced the rendering left or right. At a guess they've forgotten to do the blur process. This actually gives an insight into how DOF is calculated in real time. A varying blur filter is complex and expensive, but this looks like a trick that uses a uniform blur and offsets the graphics to stretch the radius of the blurred data.

Perhaps the blur is deliberately left out? Perhaps as a technical showcase, to show the ground work of the blur, they show this render state without the blurring? So devs can see it and think, 'hey that's a good amount of DOF range they're getting. If we apply our fast gaussian that'll look really good.'

Hmm, dunno. Maybe. I still can't see how DOF can discriminate between edges of near and far objects without some sort of multipass z filter check thing. Unless they just have a threshold value for range at which point the blur pass is a pplied. DOF I'm seeing in other games doesn't look like that though.

 

[_phil_]

i think it's capture problems.or weak hdr precision.

 

[Mordecaii]

Sorry, this is just my opinion but the hair on the character model looks absolutely terrible...

 

[ihamoitc2005]

Bad hair day

Sorry, this is just my opinion but the hair on the character model looks absolutely terrible...

I agree it looks very bad. Looks like they used traditional fin and shell model but with virtually no transparency so it looks like solid mass of ugliness. Advantage is close up camera view does not present appearance of floating dots like in Conker but their choice actually looks worse. Another possibility is they could not do transparency of all shells and fins for performance reasons.