davis.anthony
Veteran
I've always loved the lighting in Teardown.
State of the Art Lighting Tech: 2021 edition.
- Thread starter Shifty Geezer
- Start date
The whole thing's voxels, so I assume voxelised lighting. Looks very Minecraft. Is that using the RTX hardware? Or otherwise? IIRC it has the same accumulated light lag I expect it's using similar techniques. I think all the realistic models at the moment are using the same general solution.
Jawed
Legend
RTRT is a hack and will be for a long long time, requiring temporal caching, denoising etc. to run well.
It can look really nice, e.g. all of the lighting in Metro Exodus:Enhanced Edition is ray traced:
You could say it looks "ordinary", but hey, that's realism for you.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Yeah, that was one of my reservations about it. The lighting is without a doubt better than in the launch version. It is technically more correct and more realistic. OTOH - it some ways it's artistically worse (one specific example is character's faces which lose the cinematic lighting and end up looking flatter and not quite as interesting) and so it's not a win across the board for me.
Hopefully, just growing pains for RT and that in the future they'll be able to manipulate it to provide some cinematic effects in addition to correct lighting. The movie industry spends hundreds of thousands of man hours attempting to limit and manipulate light on sets in order to achieve artistic and dramatic lighting because natural lighting just doesn't generally look that good when viewed in terms of a dramatic scene, especially if the scene is in darkness or set in a dimly lit area.
Hopefully it'll be easier for the games industry to do that. For example, by limiting specific RT lights to a limited distance from the camera and limiting it to a small spherical area (better yet a half or quarter spherical area) at that distance so that, for example, it only provides light and shadows to a character's face and nothing else in the world.
Regards,
SB
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I think that’s voxel GI. No rtx required. I’m not sure what else it could be, it’s a pure voxel engine as well IIRC. @Dictator did a segment on it and I think we are looking at a custom pure Voxel engine
That's the truth. I remember seeing a GT PS5 screenshot and thinking "that looks kinda rubbish." Found a photo of the race course and...um...real life looks kinda rubbish! I guess that's why movies employ artistic camera-folk and lighting peeps!
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I started paying attention to this a few years ago. Especially on an overcast day real life is decidedly flat and uninspired. RT doesn’t eliminate the need for art direction in games.
Regarding TearAway, it is doing software voxel path tracing. He has somewhat detailed explanations of his rendering methods online, if one cares to look for them. He initially attempted SS path tracing to see how far that could take him, and eventually moved on to voxels, and tear away seems to have come out organically out of gamefying the resulting test demos he created.
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I find it's the opposite. On an overcast day you have the soft shadowing that brings out the details. It's in bright light where the world starts to look like a high-def PS2 game with really strong shadows and bounce light washed out by the high contrast.
Yeah that's what I expect, there should be no problem making RT lighting emulate old light solutions when needed.
You could also just set a light to only affect certain objects.
Real life IS rubbish!
Metro Exodus looks 'ordinary' because apart from the very impressive RT, everything else looks very MEH. Textures MEH, character models MEH, hair and cloth MEH.
It's an older title =P but it still passes imo. There are moments of awe if you're looking for it, they weren't designing the game in particular to awe you with it's lighting engine.
I think as they move to RTGI as a norm, then they will be looking at creating awe-spiring moments with RTGI. At least, that's what I would be doing.
Agreed, but it's not that old, it's from 2019!
=P
It will soon be Feb 2022 =p nearly 3 years ago
The RTGI in the forest is really nice =P
I guess I just want to showcase how with RT lighting, a smaller studio can get away with some pretty crazy stuff, that typically I don't think in the past they would have the budget to be able to pull off.
This one probably abuses RT a bit more for the sake of it (light sources are extremely bright) , but a first party studio should be able to create some stunning games (in particular the ones that Sony specializes in) imo.
Yep, I've been wondering when we're going to start getting smaller indies, which usually come with simpler graphics, with crazy RT implementations.
agreed.
as we move closer and closer to RTRT, I believe encounter design will change dramatically. As typically you might be bound by baked lighting, forcing you to move to new locations to fight etc, having a harder time maximizing the same space for combat; my dream is that will change.
I wonder,
Does unity, unreal, etc nowadays allows easy to use RT in the level editor?
Unity has realtime lighting of a sort that can look good. RTRT is in Preview so not production ready and you take a gamble if you use it on it potentially not becoming production ready. Still, there's work there.
That said, it'll be closed box solutions. I really want nerdy indies writing their own engines pushing the boundaries of the RTRT hardware. I imagine larger devs will be somewhat cautious and not really discover the full potential.