The Order: 1886

VFX_Veteran said:
That image shows me a specular response from the bricks that is not physically plausible. Why would bricks be so shiny when they are dry? Furthermore, it appears the window seals have the same specular response when they are clearly supposed to be made of a different material.

Here is an image of a real world location:

Jacksonville+Latest+067.JPG


There is no such specular response on bricks (unless they are coated with something or wet). Which is my point.. you can't really tell that building is using PBR at all. I would think an Oren Nayar BRDF would be used on the bricks with very very low fresnel so that you don't get hardly any specular or the roughness would be so high that you'd not really see a massive amount of energy at the ideal reflection vector.
Click to expand...
There are different weather settings in Infamous and this is the one where the rain just stopped and you can see wet puddles on the street, hence the specular sheen on the bricks. And of course not all of them are shiny like this one, some are more dried up such as this.
e59QyqO.jpg
 
MJP said:
I think that they actually did use the SH data for specular in the shipping game. Their course notes from SIGGRAPH certainly go into detail on how to do it (they refer to it as "area specular"). They basically pre-computed Cook-Torrance specular projected onto SH for a set of viewing angles with the camera located on the XZ plane, and stored the resulting coefficients in lookup textures. The pre-computation also depends on fresnel intensity and roughness which gives you 3 dimensions for your parameterization, but they factor out the fresnel in such a way that you can reduce it to 2D. They also drop the SH coefficients that depend on Y, since they assume the specular reflection to be symmetrical with regards to the Y-axis. Then in the shader they just had to come up with a local coordinate frame where the camera is lined up with the XZ plane, and then use that to rotate the SH coefficients that they pull from the lookup textures. It's pretty cool stuff considering how long ago it came out.
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Interesting. I'd only ever seen the slides, so I wasn't quite sure what all they were using for what and how the model was actually "assembled." Found the course notes, it's fascinating.

...I think I might have been looking at the wrong spots to demonstrate the model's strengths. I just messed around a bit on Sierra 117, and I'm very willing to believe that they're doing area specular with the SH map. That ad-hoc "split things up by 'frequency' and combine them like-so" approach seems to have some quirky cases, but I saw stuff like the Chief getting lit up with a colorful specular response in the immediate locality of vivid sunlit static objects, on a scale that the cubemap regions couldn't possibly explain (the cubemaps are assigned to pretty big areas).
 
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DieH@rd said:
Entire world of Infamous Second Son has art style direction that makes is totally fine that some materials look different from our real world.

During gameplay, game looks incredibly awesome.
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"Awesome" is irrelevant to the discussion. The question is whether I:SS uses PBR materials (and implements them well) as the game was raised as an example of why what The Order is doing isn't all that technically impressive according to some. Looking at your screenshots, the dry materials are entirely lacking. Ergo, The Order is pulling off better rendering tech than I:SS, goes the argument, and RAD and their game are achieving something a little special in getting all the tech executed well and blended together.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
"Awesome" is irrelevant to the discussion. The question is whether I:SS uses PBR materials (and implements them well) as the game was raised as an example of why what The Order is doing isn't all that technically impressive according to some. Looking at your screenshots, the dry materials are entirely lacking. Ergo, The Order is pulling off better rendering tech than I:SS, goes the argument, and RAD and their game are achieving something a little special in getting all the tech executed well and blended together.
Click to expand...

The Order is clearly the best looking PS4 games. Only tops by the Uncharted 4 demo in facial animation of Nathan Drake and brother face...

It is very funny because Uncharted and The Order are on the opposited side of the rendering. Uncharted not realistic art design and the realistic material of the Order 1886.

Uncharted 4 is only a demo and one year from release and miss some polish but it is already one of the best looking PS4 title.
 
Infamous is a good looking game but Assassin's Creed Unity PBS is better...

Next Sucker Punch title will probably improve PBS and I hope keep the same level of performance and native resolution...
 
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chris1515 said:
The Order is clearly the best looking PS4 games.
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Did you mean "the best looking game" or "among the best looking games"? The former is impossible to call because art styles are so very different and subjective. L. Scofield's ideas of 'good looking' seem pretty different to mine, for example. But I agree that a selection of best looking games would include The Order along with DriveClub and others.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Did you mean "the best looking game" or "among the best looking games"? The former is impossible to call because art styles are so very different and subjective. L. Scofield's ideas of 'good looking' seem pretty different to mine, for example. But I agree that a selection of best looking games would include The Order along with DriveClub and others.
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It is the most cgish PS4 game is a better word. Among the best with Drive Club, the demo of Uncharted 4, The Tomorrow Children...
 
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I think Reflection Occlusion used in The Order is what separates itself from others in terms of adding realism, I don't think I've seen any other games attempted this technique or is there? Also the 3d scanned materials could be another major contributor for the look.
 
Only as a comparison of tech used in games. It's not a damning indictment of I:SS or Sucker Punch, just a recognition that a game coming > a year later with different context is using some better implementation of rendering tech to look prettier.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
"Awesome" is irrelevant to the discussion. The question is whether I:SS uses PBR materials (and implements them well) as the game was raised as an example of why what The Order is doing isn't all that technically impressive according to some. Looking at your screenshots, the dry materials are entirely lacking. Ergo, The Order is pulling off better rendering tech than I:SS, goes the argument, and RAD and their game are achieving something a little special in getting all the tech executed well and blended together.
Click to expand...
Just because I:SS has some limitations doesn't mean that The Order's tech is better. I:SS doesn't have the luxury of blurring and dirtying the screen to hide flaws in their model. Also, since The Order is an extremely linear corridor shooter it means RAD can make sure that all the surfaces visible to the player look decent. Open-level games such as I:SS are at a disadvantage here and not due to tech issues.

Regarding your "best looking game" ranking, depending on the criteria, The Order might even be disqualified from the get go due to all the blurriness and graininess. IQ purists must certainly hate it (I'm looking at you Globalisateur).
 
VFX_Veteran said:
Please forgive the OT post but:

This image reminds me of a debate I had between whether I:SS was using actual SSR of static/dynamic objects in the world or just the light source only. I looked all through the game trying to find SSR and could only find it with light sources while the rest of the reflections were cubemap lookups. Can someone verify this is the case?
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ISS uses a whole bunch of methods to try and produce its "look." It handles light sources directly, it uses cubemaps, it uses SSR, and there's even a bit of planar reflections (noticeable, for instance, when looking out across the water).

The game uses SSR to inform the reflection result, but generally attempts to avoid having it be the sole contributor. It's got a pretty gentle fade-in around the region where the screen boundary causes viewport-related misses, which is why some people think that Delsin doesn't have a reflection (he actually does, you just need to give him a generous chunk of reflection real-estate, since most of the time his reflection would be on the bottom of the screen where the game is being most conservative).

The result isn't as immediately striking as some SSR implementations, but I think it might be the only game with a more or less free camera where I was okay with SSR being used, as the artifacting isn't as obvious.

To some extent, the prominence of SSR might depend on the time-of-day (and thus the material settings). It's quite apparent in "blustery", for instance.

Here's a screenshot I took a while ago after glitching into a building (this one was taken with the time-of-day at "night") where the game was actually reflecting a hall-of-mirrors effect, hehehe:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BpBdH1QIAAAJFxr.jpg:orig
Here's a screenshot showing the very obvious reflections on "blustery", note how the railing reflection disappears in a region around Delsin where the game can't correctly reflect it:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B6HkGsWIAAAbGQ8.jpg:orig
 
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VFX_Veteran said:
Please forgive the OT post but:

This image reminds me of a debate I had between whether I:SS was using actual SSR of static/dynamic objects in the world or just the light source only. I looked all through the game trying to find SSR and could only find it with light sources while the rest of the reflections were cubemap lookups. Can someone verify this is the case?
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The game uses SSR for non light sources and mixes them with static cubemaps, just look at any of the street lamps, you'll see it reflects the poles as well. Cause only using SSR in a game like Infamous would look hilariously bad cause there are lots of tall buildings and signs at quite a height which. It's just like Watch Dogs that mixes cubemaps and SSR, in fact every game that uses SSR mixes them up with cubemaps achieve reflections.



L. Scofield said:
Just because I:SS has some limitations doesn't mean that The Order's tech is better. I:SS doesn't have the luxury of blurring and dirtying the screen to hide flaws in their model. Also, since The Order is an extremely linear corridor shooter it means RAD can make sure that all the surfaces visible to the player look decent. Open-level games such as I:SS are at a disadvantage here and not due to tech issues.

Regarding your "best looking game" ranking, depending on the criteria, The Order might even be disqualified from the get go due to all the blurriness and graininess. IQ purists must certainly hate it (I'm looking at you Globalisateur).
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Wait what blur?
Honestly I dislike it when people say this for pretty much any situation where the game is pushing a lot of effects on screen. Some people say Driveclub "hides" its flaws with all the blurry weather and rain, some people say I:SS hides its flaws with the neon lights, wet look and "blurry" DoF. Some say Killzone hides its flaws with its blurry Motion blur. Some say BF4 hides its flaw with all the bloom and lens flare. I think it's a ridiculous way to over simplify things especially relating to technology.
 
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nightshade said:
Wait what blur?
Honestly I dislike it when people say this for pretty much any situation where the game is pushing a lot of effects on screen. Some people say Driveclub "hides" its flaws with all the blurry weather and rain, some people say I:SS hides its flaws with the neon lights, wet look and "blurry" DoF. Some say Killzone hides its flaws with its blurry Motion blur. Some say BF4 hides its flaw with all the bloom and lens flare. I think it's a ridiculous way to over simplify things especially relating to technology.
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Chromatic aberration + DOF +motion blur + grain. It's like looking at a magazine scan.
 
HTupolev said:
The game uses SSR to inform the reflection result, but generally attempts to avoid having it be the sole contributor.
Click to expand...

Are you saying it reflects the silhouette of the object but not it's color?


Here's a screenshot showing the very obvious reflections on "blustery", note how the railing reflection disappears in a region around Delsin where the game can't correctly reflect it:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B6HkGsWIAAAbGQ8.jpg:orig
Click to expand...

Case in point..
 
nightshade said:
Wait what blur?
Honestly I dislike it when people say this for pretty much any situation where the game is pushing a lot of effects on screen. Some people say Driveclub "hides" its flaws with all the blurry weather and rain, some people say I:SS hides its flaws with the neon lights, wet look and "blurry" DoF. Some say Killzone hides its flaws with its blurry Motion blur. Some say BF4 hides its flaw with all the bloom and lens flare. I think it's a ridiculous way to over simplify things especially relating to technology.
Click to expand...

We'll have to agree here. The Order certainly doesn't appear to be hiding flaws (I, personally, don't see any blurry stuff going on).
 
nightshade said:
The game uses SSR for non light sources and mixes them with static cubemaps, just look at any of the street lamps, you'll see it reflects the poles as well. Cause only using SSR in a game like Infamous would look hilariously bad cause there are lots of tall buildings and signs at quite a height which. It's just like Watch Dogs that mixes cubemaps and SSR, in fact every game that uses SSR mixes them up with cubemaps achieve reflections.
Click to expand...

Hmm.. I guess I'm wanting more realistic reflections. The racing games so far that I've seen use them properly. Blurring the reflections is hiding performance problems. Ryse does it terribly. Which is surprising since the game is arguably one of the best graphical games of our time. Watch Dogs blurs it out too aggressively. Also, using a shadow projection as a reflection without adding color is also hiding performance issues. In general, having cube map reflections but not reflecting a dynamic object (in it's entirety) is pretty bad IMO. I think most games are struggling with reflections right now (except the driving games).
 
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