Now as the current gen consoles are seeing their twilight days I think it would be interesting to discuss and speculate with educated guesses on what the nextgen can offer us in terms of INGAME character models.
This generation of making ingame character models with its vast utilization of Normalmaps extracted from high res source models, have been both efficient and effective judging by the result. But there are still tons of improvements to be made and technical hurdles to overcome. If you look at the hero model from Epic's Samaritan realtime demo, then compare to something like Nathan Drake or Battlefield soldier model, you can clearly see a big difference in quality.
So assuming a nextgen consoles is as powerful as or close to a 580 sli setup, do you think we can standardize tessellation with displacement maps on most of the nexgen in game characters? Do you think Samaritan quality is representative of what would be shown on nextgen consoles? Or do you think most would simply keep the old Normalmap route but only increase the polycount as they find power would be better used elsewhere? I wonder how close we can get to the zbrush source model with nextgen.
This generation of making ingame character models with its vast utilization of Normalmaps extracted from high res source models, have been both efficient and effective judging by the result. But there are still tons of improvements to be made and technical hurdles to overcome. If you look at the hero model from Epic's Samaritan realtime demo, then compare to something like Nathan Drake or Battlefield soldier model, you can clearly see a big difference in quality.
So assuming a nextgen consoles is as powerful as or close to a 580 sli setup, do you think we can standardize tessellation with displacement maps on most of the nexgen in game characters? Do you think Samaritan quality is representative of what would be shown on nextgen consoles? Or do you think most would simply keep the old Normalmap route but only increase the polycount as they find power would be better used elsewhere? I wonder how close we can get to the zbrush source model with nextgen.