Thoughts about REYES approach, PlayStation 3 and Visualizer

[London Geezer]

Please dont limit ourselves to 640x480
Current texture quality are way off from photorealism

YES CHAP. one thing at a time....... u just grasped the first sentence of 3 posts ago....

no, really... read my posts again, i thought i was being clear enough, i even said The Hulk doesnt look real and i even explained why. cant we discuss the real problems here, the ones i raised, instead of turning this into a PS2 TEXTURZZ SUXXORZ kind of thread. thank you

anyway, do u REALLY think that the 99% of costumers will care about resolutions above 640x480? because only a tiny percentage can see HDTV resolutions. that is, if next generation does not include VGA output, in which case pretty much everyone will be able to play games at high resolution. which isnt a bad thing....

otherwise, we will have to limit ourselves to 640x480 sadly.

 

[maskrider]

Please dont limit ourselves to 640x480
Current texture quality are way off from photorealism

Is 640x480 the real limiting factor here ?

Why do the real flowers, dogs, boys and girls looks so photo-realistic in our crappy TV ?

The reason is because they are from real things/people.

Why do Pixars movies look so much better than my crappy PC/Console games on a my crappy TV ?

Is the display resolution the problem to begin with ?

Think about it.

 

[London Geezer]

Please dont limit ourselves to 640x480
Current texture quality are way off from photorealism

Is 640x480 the real limiting factor here ?

Why do the real flowers, dogs, boys and girls looks so photo-realistic in our crappy TV ?

The reason is because they are from real things/people.

Why do Pixars movies look so much better than my crappy PC/Console games on a my crappy TV ?

Is the display resolution the problem to begin with ?

Think about it.

THANK YOU for helping in my Chap-make-understanding session... he didnt get it 8 posts ago, let's see if he can get it now... maybe your simpler and shorter sentences will do the trick.. JUST KIDDING

 

[chaphack]

Please dont limit ourselves to 640x480
Current texture quality are way off from photorealism

Is 640x480 the real limiting factor here ?

Why do the real flowers, dogs, boys and girls looks so photo-realistic in our crappy TV ?

The reason is because they are from real things/people.

Why do Pixars movies look so much better than my crappy PC/Console games on a my crappy TV ?

Is the display resolution the problem to begin with ?

Think about it.

For your sake, please re-read page 2 again...

 

[London Geezer]

For your sake, please re-read page 2 again...

chap, please stop making yourself look like a fool..... u're the one who should REALLY read page 2...........

 

[chaphack]

What fool? With regards to mask post, since when did i say higher resolution alone makes a game more photorealistic..

I could add more replies if only the forums arent soo slow now....

 

[London Geezer]

oh just forget it man......

 

[Squeak]

Please dont limit ourselves to 640x480
Current texture quality are way off from photorealism

Is 640x480 the real limiting factor here ?

Why do the real flowers, dogs, boys and girls looks so photo-realistic in our crappy TV ?

The reason is because they are from real things/people.

Why do Pixars movies look so much better than my crappy PC/Console games on a my crappy TV ?

Is the display resolution the problem to begin with ?

Think about it.

The first PIXAR short: the Adventures of André and Wally B.
was rendered at a resolution of "only" 512x480, with ½ an hour of rendering time per frame on a CCI 6/32 (all I’ve been able to come up with, is that it was one of the first computers to use a MIPS CPU, anyone know more?). It can be viewed here.
I for one, would be very content with realtime graphics of this quality and with only half an hour of rendering time per frame in 1984, we must be nearly at the point at which this is possible (maybe we are even past it, but are just not good enough at utilizing our available hardware?).

 

[zurich]

Its mostly the perfect AA/mipmap/texture filtering, and ray trace lighting that makes that look so good.

A neat example of this are the FMVs in KOTOR - they use all ingame assets (models, textures, scenes, etc), but are rendered with production quality AA/AF/lighting/etc, and look very very good compared to the RT stuff.

 

[marconelly!]

The 'PC' look has more to do with the way PC games are played on and not how PC games are made.

That's true to a degree, but PC games have traditionally been heavy on textures and weak with polyconts and effects. Compare human faces in most PC games with console games of the same time (say Max Payne with MGS2) In Max payne, face is pretty much a texture slapped over low detailed polygon head. In MGS2 they modelled every little detail on the face, animated their eyes, hair, etc... I think it's that attention to detail and production quality that separates top tier console games from PC games (at least it used to be that way, some of the recently announced PC games have improved a lot in that regard)

 

[Panajev2001a]

Its mostly the perfect AA/mipmap/texture filtering, and ray trace lighting that makes that look so good

Till not long ago PRman did not do ray-tracing ( REYES creators didn't believe that ray-tracing was aboslutely needed and much could be done without it ), but I think that yes now they package a ray-tracer with it ( they have a back-door in the REYES algorithm to plug in helper renderers )... sorry for nitpicking

 

[marconelly!]

Ray tracing is sort of a bastard child nowadays... I don't know what to think about it, as it almost always looks terribly artificial compared to methods like radiosity or photon mapping. I never liked those ray traced hard edged shadows

 

[archie4oz]

Till not long ago PRman did not do ray-tracing ( REYES creators didn't believe that ray-tracing was aboslutely needed and much could be done without it ), but I think that yes now they package a ray-tracer with it ( they have a back-door in the REYES algorithm to plug in helper renderers )... sorry for nitpicking

I don't believe it's a "back-door" so much as changing the hider per object. Also keep in mind that also recently there have been other Renderman compliant renderers used in production enviroments (the now defunct Entropy in conjunction with BMRT), AIR, RenderDotC, and even more recently 3Delight.

Ray tracing is sort of a bastard child nowadays... I don't know what to think about it, as it almost always looks terribly artificial compared to methods like radiosity or photon mapping. I never liked those ray traced hard edged shadows

No it isn't. It rarely get's used heavily in production films these days because it's too time intensive, but ray-tracers have come a long way. Also I don't know about "hard-shadows", since you can get soft shadows from a ray-tracer. I prefer ray-traced shadows to (keeping in mind the rendertime) shadow-maps in most scan-line renderers in terms of quality. Also photon-mapping and radiosity can be pretty crappy on their own too. That's why many of the current commercial renderers incorporate all of the above; either as passes, per-primitive hiders, or server modules.

 

[Panajev2001a]

Sorry archie, but that is how it is referred in the original papers... as a "back door"... of course they do mention that is something that has to do with the hider as the "additional helper renderer" works in the "Visibility" stage...

From the REYES paper by Cook-Carpenter-Catmull:

7. Back door. There should be a back door in the architec-
ture so that other programs can be used to render some of
the objects. This give us a very general way to incorporate
any new technique (though not necessarily efficiently).

 

[Nexiss]

Ray tracing is sort of a bastard child nowadays... I don't know what to think about it, as it almost always looks terribly artificial compared to methods like radiosity or photon mapping. I never liked those ray traced hard edged shadows

To clarify, raytracing is typically a rendering technique, while radiosity and photon mapping are not (they are lighting methods). You can just as easily add in photon mapping or radiosity to a raytracer as you could with a more 'traditional' renderer.
Anyway, I would personally love to try my hands at a raytracer on the PS3.

 

[chaphack]

oh just forget it man......

why? fraid i own you so?

Marc, that i agree with ya

Of which is what i said before too. Once technology is there, the flaws will not be so apparantly, CGish is CGish. Add that with more efforts, you get pretty much cool looking games. Now we have to remember different teams have different goals in their games. The artwork will be one of the main differential factor.

 

[Fafalada]

Sorry but are you discounting the importance of good textures? With 10980X polygons, 982X particles and MGS2 like textures, games still wont look photorealistic....

100k polys per frame (average PS2 game) -> 10980x =~ 1bilion per frame.
Or about 3000polys per pixel in 640x480.
You actually expect anyone to use textures with subpixel precision that high? 8)

 

[maskrider]

Please dont limit ourselves to 640x480
Current texture quality are way off from photorealism

Is 640x480 the real limiting factor here ?

Why do the real flowers, dogs, boys and girls looks so photo-realistic in our crappy TV ?

The reason is because they are from real things/people.

Why do Pixars movies look so much better than my crappy PC/Console games on a my crappy TV ?

Is the display resolution the problem to begin with ?

Think about it.

The first PIXAR short: the Adventures of André and Wally B.
was rendered at a resolution of "only" 512x480, with ½ an hour of rendering time per frame on a CCI 6/32 (all I?ve been able to come up with, is that it was one of the first computers to use a MIPS CPU, anyone know more?). It can be viewed here.
I for one, would be very content with realtime graphics of this quality and with only half an hour of rendering time per frame in 1984, we must be nearly at the point at which this is possible (maybe we are even past it, but are just not good enough at utilizing our available hardware?).

To render it real time at 60fps, it needs a computer with 30*60*60 (108000) times the MIPS computer that rendered it.

Using Moore's law, processing power doubles every 18 months, we have around 13 * 18 months since 1984 ((2003-1984)*12).

2 to the power of 13 equates to 8192 which is a far cry from 108000.

And further more, the environment is rather static (the leaves and grass don't move) and the 2 characters are rather simple even compare to today's console games.

I will not settle for this quality nowadays for sure.

 

[Vince]

You actually expect anyone to use textures with subpixel precision that high? 8)

Ha! Faf, you're going to confuse him even more. I don't think he's comprehended this whole ideology and you're going to throw him into fits when he realises his simple "textures are teh low-rez" insult no longer applies to what he's saying.

 

[notAFanB]

It is becuase they are played at high resolution high refresh ratesmonitors over blurry limited res conventional 50/60hz TVs, do the flaws become more evident.

no it's really because CG rendering postfilter techniques aren't wide spread (DOF, soft shadows high geomoetry etc...).

Please dont limit ourselves to 640x480
Current texture quality are way off from photorealism

as maskrider says not the limiting factor as we scale up computing power. displacement mapping is reather interesting in this regard and even BM is preferred if you are going to simulate surfaces.

this si possibly where you and I differ as I don't believe Geometry levels are going to be left 'that' far behind.