The move towards CGI. What consitutes 'the look' and how close are we getting?

Laa-Yosh said:
I'm told we can't use a lightmap based fake SSS ion Arnold and I'm not an expert so I believed the guy...
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You can't use it any longer. But I wasn't even talking about going that far with getting an SSS look. I was talking just a regular BRDF that "approximates" it somewhat.

Also, the point is not just about using "cheaper" rendering methods, the point is that as far as I can tell a path tracer will never be able to render a lowrez, normal mapped, realtime shaded game asset the way a GPU does. We just can't match the output no matter how low we set the dials.
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Hmm.. that's too vague Laa-Yosh.. give examples.. simplistic ones. Let's dig deeper. ;)
 
I think physically based shading along with a well implamented GI does well to get that CGI look. If you play The Order 1886 for example, the scene in the ball room, It's as if all the objects blend together more realistically and become part of the environment. Volumetric lighting also helps to give that CGI look too. When you can see the light polution of light bulbs and how the light fills the scene. This along with a good texture pipeline, detailed assets and geometry, animations that new gen console RAM has allowed, it has all made it possible to achieve a CGI look. That said, CGI is still rendering orders of magnitude more tris and has far more miniscule lighting intricacies. But the asthetic alone can be achieved with modern shaders and sufficient use of LOD's.

If we observe what has changed in real time graphics over the last year or two, the main thing would be PBR. That is what is doing the job pretty much. I wish I had an image of PBR turned on and off so you could see what I'm saying. But PBR isn't something that is scalable. It's a commitment the developer has to make early on in game development. Which is why cross gen games don't have it.
 
The Order 1886 it is crazy very few rendering problems. Borderline old offline rendering. Few problems the specular leaking are for example visible on some metallic thin material. The shadow problem are easy to spot on self shadowing but are present for every dynamic object. Very difficult to spot on the scenery. A little waxy look for skin in sunny condition and some uncanny problem for some of the facial expression and prominent for some character and not other but uncanny valley was a problem for offline rendering too...

http://c0de517e.blogspot.ca/2015/02/why-rendering-in-order-1886-rocks.html?m=1

From the comment of this blogpost


Speaking of artifacts if you look closely you can find a few, of course.
There is still some specular leak due to lack of occlusion of details of normalmaps, you can see some shadows "peter-panning" which is a tell-tale of the use of EVSM or similar and many other little things here and there.

That's why I wrote in the premise that when I say that there are no noticeable artifacts I mean during normal viewing, not pixel-peeking.

Another example might be the recent Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
I'd say aliasing isn't really noticeable during gameplay in that game (albeit certainly it doesn't have the same quality of The Order in that respect, both for lack of MSAA and for lack of aggressive blurring) which -really- surprised me.
But it's easy to see if one goes slowly and pays attention, that it does just some post-processing AA, it's just that art was made in a way such that it's never horribly distracting
 
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chris1515 said:
real-time rendering is ahead of FF The Spirit Within in shading but is behind with geometry (hair), IQ and motion blur, DOF.
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And yet, many people are totally fine with "good enough" hair, motion blur, dof, texture quality and nicely balanced world geometry. A lot of things can be faked, and still look really great. Order 1886 achieves CGI level of presentation by mixing awesome assets/effects with silky smooth presentation and almost completely spotless IQ.

I really don't think we need to have perfect hair/geometry/textures everywhere on the scene to achieve very convincing CGI look. Complete package and smooth presentation is what is needed [IMO] for that.
 
I'd bold out the "almost" part too. Hair in particular is full of artifacts despite the AA - you can get only so far with transparency mapped infinitely thin polygons... Same for some of the cloth BTW.
 
DieH@rd said:
And yet, many people are totally fine with "good enough" hair, motion blur, dof, texture quality and nicely balanced world geometry. A lot of things can be faked, and still look really great. Order 1886 achieves CGI level of presentation by mixing awesome assets/effects with silky smooth presentation and almost completely spotless IQ.

I really don't think we need to have perfect hair/geometry/textures everywhere on the scene to achieve very convincing CGI look. Complete package and smooth presentation is what is needed [IMO] for that.
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The IQ of the game is pretty good and it is not the problem and hair aren't bad because they are designed knowing geometry limitation but it could be better if models can have true hair with physic simulation.

edit: At least we don't need to have only bald people. After it is not a critic against game developer. They do what they can with current technology limitation, GPU are not performant with micropolygons.
 
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But even in movies, hair usually don't have high physics. They usually rather set in stone. Hairspray or something
 
^But in that particular movie hair was basically a character on its own. Kinda like in Tangled.

There's not an awful lot of hair action going on in more modestly budgeted CGI movies like all that game-related stuff out of Japan. (Resident Evil) Then there's the fmvs in older Square games like FFX: convincing looking hair without single strains, and very similar looking to what's in FFXV for that matter.

For me it's kind of a matter of of doing everything well enough. Doesn't have to be perfect at all. Just needs to mesh well with the rest of the presentation. I think restraint is another important factor. It's why the Order looks so great. There are no obvious low res textures clashing with the high res textures on the character models. The geometric complexity is very constant as well. There's also no in-your-face god rays or any other effects for the sake of effects in general.
 
Sigfried1977 said:
^But in that particular movie hair was basically a character on its own. Kinda like in Tangled.

There's not an awful lot of hair action going on in more modestly budgeted CGI movies like all that game-related stuff out of Japan. (Resident Evil) Then there's the fmvs in older Square games like FFX: convincing looking hair without single strains, and very similar looking to what's in FFXV for that matter.

For me it's kind of a matter of of doing everything well enough. Doesn't have to be perfect at all. Just needs to mesh well with the rest of the presentation. I think restraint is another important factor. It's why the Order looks so great. There are no obvious low res textures clashing with the high res textures on the character models. The geometric complexity is very constant as well. There's also no in-your-face god rays or any other effects for the sake of effects in general.
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I agree all is subtle. I have seen all the other big visual title of this gen, Infamous Second Son, Killzone Shadow Fall and Ryse(Xbox One) and it comes on top for the moment. I don't think last year demo UC4 or Quantum Break were better looking title, maybe after polish...

I was surprise when I begin to play the first chapter by the graphics. I am on my third run just taking screencaps and I didn't do this for Drive Club another great looking games. But as a perfectionist I hope one day we will see this level of hair complexity. For shading I will watch Beowulf and seeing how it compares because I know it it better than FF The Spirit Within.
 
Yeah, Epic's stuff is "CGI like" for sure. I wonder how many common movie buffs would be able to tell the difference if Pixar (or another top tier studio) created 2 minute short film, with 1 min done in real time and 1 min done with normal renderfarm solution. I mean like total blind test - as in test subjects would have to comment on "uneven quality" of the film.
 
ArcticCircle said:
Yeah, Epic's stuff is "CGI like" for sure. I wonder how many common movie buffs would be able to tell the difference if Pixar (or another top tier studio) created 2 minute short film, with 1 min done in real time and 1 min done with normal renderfarm solution. I mean like total blind test - as in test subjects would have to comment on "uneven quality" of the film.
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That would fool a lot of people, me included. With the right artists and the right hardware.
 
It looks wonderful, but IMHO it doesn't take too much effort to spot the telling signs - foliage still disappears after a distance, and trees get very scarce on the background mountains too. Also, shading and lighting still has a fidelity at least an order of magnitude better in offline rendering, but I admit it might be pretty hard to spot for the untrained eye.
 
jim argues that game does not need to look like a movie because it is not a movie, its a game. although it seems he missing about the "cinematic" look is more than just frames per secone :/
 
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