photo-realistic rendering and our opinions

<shrugs> Well, it's just that your complaints are about AI. Ragdoll physics are just ragdoll physics, and in and of itself has gotten pretty solid. But as with anything, one trait does not exist in a vacuum. Just as high-polygon, high-detail models will still look fake if clothes/hair/etc are static and not affected by movement or the environment, so too will ragdoll physics come off wrong if not accompanied by smarter treatment of every situation. That's just common sense, and yes--we have a long way to go yet. Your complaint, though, seemed to be levelled against ragdoll physics, and not against the "incompleteness" of the overall treatment games get from all their elements as of yet.

 

If we can't get simple default anti-aliasing in the next-gen consoles, i don't think we're going to be seeing photorealistic graphics anytime soon. Algorithms to accurately simulate light and shadow in CG rendering are far more complex than that.

640x480 gaming with no AA really and truly sucks.

 

I am just pointing out, that there are needs for beliveable behaviors for everything, for every situation in the virtual world, that mirror our reality. Ragdoll was just example that I used, since it is the current trend use in creating behavior for characters.

 

I think we need to go back at the fact that reality is in fact quite simple...
Human movement is the tricky bit, but when it comes to physics, there is very little affecting movements of things apart from gravity and wind, collisions and deformations (that i can think of at the moment)...

 

Its not complex, Field of Physics has already revealed the parameters needed and their relationship, its all a matter of computation resources.

 

Actually i think it's not so much about computational resources, as it is about the effort put into an animation by the people working on the project. If the animator does not completely grasp what goes on in the human body when moving, and animates a character the way a real person does, he can have the most powerful computer on earth, we will still have a FFTSW kind of movie, beautiful to look at but obviously "behind" wrt animation...

 

True! Even MGS2 has better animation.

 

Now that's an exaggeration, but let's just say that in FFTSW it was more apparent for the simple fact that the characters looked esponentially better than the average game. In a game, people do not expect characters to move perfectly because they don't even look perfect. In FFTSW the characters approached photorealism (when still) therefore when seeing them move, it's easier for our brains to see that "there's something wrong"... If you know what i mean... It's more apparent.

 

In your last post, that I replied before, I thought you were talking about objects, not characters.

If you were talking about characters, than what are you on about ?

In real world not everyone can act or dance. What I am saying is this, in virtual world characters need to behave accordingly, say a virtual character is a dancer, therefore he/she would need look graceful when dancing as opposed to virtual characters who are learning to dance.

This goes for objects as well, For example in virtual world when throwing a basket ball and a ping pong at mirror, one expects to produce certain result (which may or may not hold in real world), but as long is within expactation, illusion of reality is not destroyed.

Photoreal CG is good for screenshot, but when things start moving, you'll need behavior as well to keep that photoreal illusion.

 

That's what i'm saying V3. In fact i wasn't disagreeing with you in your post up there, apart from the "computational power" thing...

 

The thing is you talk about physics, than goes on to animation. Physics is one of the thing you can use to drive animation. If you don't want to waste computational resources, you can just hand animate everything, without any kind of physics simulations, realtime or not.

 

Huh? You serious? Maybe you need to work with Maya for more than 5 minutes to see that the more the animation is procedurally generated according to faitful physics rules, the better it is for all, animators, end-users...
Of course, human animation needs to be scripted to a certain extent, but the more scripting you have the less potentially realistic it all becomes.
That's all in my opinion of course.

 

That was the point I am pointing out for you, in regard to what you said, in your previous reply.

Contradicting yourself aren't you ?

 

OHH i see what u meant now then!
Sorry this is a whole big misunderstanding...
Right, i get it.
Basically we're saying the same thing, i just wasn't really clear in my first reply (which is quite old, probably made while trying to sort out our profit margins here in the office, which isn't exactly the funnest thing around)