Well, it does bring up an interesting question, in a way. If your artwork is sometimes too subtle, and people don't notice it, did you make the right choice? I think Reach is a great looking game, for sure. But looking at stills, you can pick out a ton of fine detail you would never see in a game with that pace. I think that's still ok, but should they have made things a little more flashy and noticeable? To me, they did a good job of balancing things out, but other people seem to prefer the high-contrast style of Killzone 2/3.
Range of graphics effects in console games *spawn
- Thread starter Cyan
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Well, it does bring up an interesting question, in a way. If your artwork is sometimes too subtle, and people don't notice it, did you make the right choice? I think Reach is a great looking game, for sure. But looking at stills, you can pick out a ton of fine detail you would never see in a game with that pace. I think that's still ok, but should they have made things a little more flashy and noticeable? To me, they did a good job of balancing things out, but other people seem to prefer the high-contrast style of Killzone 2/3.
Oh yeah, I wouldn't deny that the texturing in Reach is of the highest quality. Just saying, there is a question to be asked if all that detail is there and people aren't noticing. I guess the other question is how many people aren't noticing, and if it's an issue at all.
Honestly the game looks bland and in lack of details in a lot of levels. The textures while detailed, are slapped onto some low poly geometry most of the time. I'm just saying the work Bungie put in is not showing its best from other shortcomings.You found IQ poor?I thought Bungie made quite a job with that...sure its a touch sub HD but texture work,AF and even their AA seemed to work like a charm.I found it to look much cleaner than alot of 720p native games.Only thing i didn't like in Reach(and Halo 3) are interiors,lighting seemed "flat".
How can anyone say that this represents bad IQ or textures for console game?
Considering that theater is a feature of the game and utilized by fans, it's probably a huge consideration for them. It's also pretty clear the game will be sold based on other merits including gameplay. But whether or not I find the graphics impressive or other isn't what the thread is about.
edit: In the case of the hexagonal pattern, it's something that might be based on the camera distance, applied only to certain textures/objects when it's close enough. The pattern itself is highly repeatable so it shouldn't cost much in memory. Should be simple enough as a dynamically branched shader.
That's fine too, but like I said, it's a subjective issue that's beyond the scope of the technical discussion.
I went ahead and snapped a close-up shot of an Elite's armor in Halo: Reach. Detail textures galore.
So the armor parts are at a higher rez than the black parts. I also noticed the pattern crosses into the black area slightly...misalignment?
That pattern seems to be something completely separate from the texture. It follows the real and actual polygon surface, but doesnt seem to take into account any form of displacement map applied on the surface.
Displacement map? On Reach characters?? Definitely not.
FYI, I've re-read the KZ2 chapter in the D'Artiste book yesterday, here's what I've found.
- Helghast Sniper has a square UV layout, but it can't be decided if it's a 2K or 1K texture, there's no info and the images are too small (and they paint their textures at a higher res and scale them down for the game anyway).
Still, I might have been wrong with the 1K guess, maybe I'll look into it during the weekend (I know Fenix in Gears 2 is 2K for the body so it might be possible to compare). This image suggests 2K, but then I'd have to assume an even higher texture res for games like Reach and UC2 which are clearly more detailed.
- They did have the tech to use detail maps for the normal channel in place for KZ2 too; but they've only applied it to character faces in the actual game (repeating skin texture). They have used it however in engine rendered images and videos for promotional purposes. They've used vertex alpha to mask the detail map in KZ2, it's safe to assume that KZ3 is doing the same.
FYI, I've re-read the KZ2 chapter in the D'Artiste book yesterday, here's what I've found.
- Helghast Sniper has a square UV layout, but it can't be decided if it's a 2K or 1K texture, there's no info and the images are too small (and they paint their textures at a higher res and scale them down for the game anyway).
Still, I might have been wrong with the 1K guess, maybe I'll look into it during the weekend (I know Fenix in Gears 2 is 2K for the body so it might be possible to compare). This image suggests 2K, but then I'd have to assume an even higher texture res for games like Reach and UC2 which are clearly more detailed.
- They did have the tech to use detail maps for the normal channel in place for KZ2 too; but they've only applied it to character faces in the actual game (repeating skin texture). They have used it however in engine rendered images and videos for promotional purposes. They've used vertex alpha to mask the detail map in KZ2, it's safe to assume that KZ3 is doing the same.
Normal map?
The honeycomb pattern is not higher rez it's a (masked to appear in some place and not others) heavily tiled detail texture.64*64 or smaller should be enough to achieve the effect.
Yeah, the normal map doesn't seem to suffer much in compression artifacting in the upper left there, which would be typical around the curvy details. Contrast this to those three bumpy dots in the bottom of the screen or the "folds" in the black weave of the armour where you can sort of start to see compression/resolution issue. If there's anything really low res, it'd be the red "lights" on the right side, but this screen is zoomed in so much with the theater cam. Any issues with the specular would be hidden with all the metal scratches and hexagon detail maps.
I noticed something cool when playing Halo Reach. Reach is one of those very, very few console games where the closer you get to a texture the better it looks while in 95%+ of console games the closer you get to a texture the worse it looks, turning into a pixelated mess.
I don't know how they programmers "reach" that, but it's a nice graphics effect, that's for sure.
EDIT: Patsu, do you work as a sales man/woman for TV shop?
We all know patsu is one fine woman. If I were a woman I'd become a lesbian just for her.
@ Cyan, moved your reply to ultragpu to the Halo Reach thread to keep things on topic: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1526242&postcount=2762
Note how the bottom lowres cloth texture looks a lot more like the KZ3 screenshot than the top highres cloth texture.
I'm still looking for the pixelation. Can you help me by circling these areas? I don't mean circle the whole thing either.
4x better textures is still a pixelated mess, huh?
Note how the bottom lowres cloth texture looks a lot more like the KZ3 screenshot than the top highres cloth texture.
Thats not where I see the high offender
The high offenders don't need pointing out though, do they?
Is it just the resolution of some textures, but the number of textures as well? We just end up going back to the same argument that modeling and texturing a human face is more difficult than doing it for a helmet*.
Are we really saying that because Killzone 3 uses lower resolution textures for a coat pocket so they can use the resolution in the human face, that it's less impressive technically? In order to really make that call, wouldn't we have to count the number of polygons and surfaces, and the entirety of the texturing on the characters?
*Texturing Helmut is more difficult than texturing helmet.
Are we really saying that because Killzone 3 uses lower resolution textures for a coat pocket so they can use the resolution in the human face, that it's less impressive technically? In order to really make that call, wouldn't we have to count the number of polygons and surfaces, and the entirety of the texturing on the characters?
*Texturing Helmut is more difficult than texturing helmet.
I'm not aware of saying anything about what's impressive or what's not... Every game has access to roughly the same resources, if one balances the scales more in the favor of the character textures then something else usually has to suffer to compensate. There's a little room left to tweak things in how close you allow the camera to get to enemies, how open the spaces in levels are. And of course there's a larger difference thanks to the X360's unique memory layout and less reserved space for the OS.
A texture with 1K resolution is about 1MB when using 1:4 compression, a 2K map is 4MB. But I'm not completely familiar with how many maps can be packed together nowadays, so some actual developer could maybe throw in some info on that. Color is 24 bit RGB, normals should be 24 bit RGB, spec, spec power and glow should be another 24 bit RGB. But compressing normals can usually leave out one channel if the map is normalized... So once again, anyone familiar with how much space is usually used in practice?
Anyway, the only real chance to cut this gordian knot is to add virtual texturing - we'll see how id utilizes this advantage in practice, and also how Brink manages to stand out. Oh and I think the next Frostbite engine running Battlefield 3 is also going to have virtual textures, right?
Helmets are completely unrelated here.
A texture with 1K resolution is about 1MB when using 1:4 compression, a 2K map is 4MB. But I'm not completely familiar with how many maps can be packed together nowadays, so some actual developer could maybe throw in some info on that. Color is 24 bit RGB, normals should be 24 bit RGB, spec, spec power and glow should be another 24 bit RGB. But compressing normals can usually leave out one channel if the map is normalized... So once again, anyone familiar with how much space is usually used in practice?
Anyway, the only real chance to cut this gordian knot is to add virtual texturing - we'll see how id utilizes this advantage in practice, and also how Brink manages to stand out. Oh and I think the next Frostbite engine running Battlefield 3 is also going to have virtual textures, right?
Helmets are completely unrelated here.
