Tom Clancy's The Division [PS4, XO]

[DieH@rd]

BF3 benefited much from being pushed to the limit on the PC, same thing happened also with two another games - Metro 2033 and Witcher 2. All created during time when relatively cheap PCs could easily outperform old consoles. Now, the whole rest of the industry is creating the game that are outpacing those visuals.

It will be very interesting to see how will Witcher 3 manage to compare with other multiplatform and 1st party games around its launch.

 

[DavidGraham]

To be honest, BF3 was the first to get it right, but the artistic aspects weren't pushed to the limit. Technically, all these games are just catching up to them several years later.

BF3 has physically based shading?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

As far as I know it does. Even COD Black Ops had it, but I think their HDR implementation wasn't as good. PBS is actually quite recent tech, ILM was among its first users on Iron Man, but it has found its way into realtime engines pretty quickly.

 

[DavidGraham]

As far as I know it does. Even COD Black Ops had it

I tried to verify that but I couldn't. Neither BF3 nor BF4 actually use physically based rendering. As far as I know the only games with this tech are Ryse, KZ4, Infamous SS and MGS5. And all of them are console games.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Oh, it's just you and your monomania about bullet points and feature lists, I remember now...

 

[DavidGraham]

Oh, it's just you and your monomania about bullet points and feature lists, I remember now...

None of the games mentioned look like PBR, nor that gets mentioned anywhere in their promotional/technical materials.

 

[HTupolev]

None of the games mentioned look like PBR

Being able to tell at a glance whether a graphical system was designed through a paradigmatically physically-based approach is pretty impressive.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

And he completely missed my entire point anyway, getting hang up on bullet point features again instead. I leave for a week and return for this??

The point is that adapting these new technologies will almost certainly bring significant visual advances, because so much of the real world imagery depends on the underlying numbers - proper reflections and contrast and such just can't be done without floating point values and gamma correct linear calculations and energy conversation instead of trying to cheat everything.

AC4 is, at least to me, a very good example of not getting stuff right because of engine limitations. The skin shading is terrible, and a lot of the lighting and other shaders look wrong too, the whole picture is very far away from the wonderful concept paintings and not pleasing to look at - but this is, once again, mostly an issue with the legacy systems that the team had to work with. The ACU teaser is a very good demonstration of how a physically based system can overcome these limitations.

What you basically get is very high quality "free" realism, as long as your artists get how the new approach works and learn to create proper texture maps. The next step is to look at how real world movies are made - how the lighting is manipulated with bounce cards and rim lights and such, or how the various photography related parameters like exposure or color grading build on top of real-life visuals. Then there are the assets, the costume design, the "make-up",

In other words, proper art direction still matters just as much as it did in the age of less photorealistic games. PBS is in some ways a limitation, but the boundaries are much wider and there's a lot left to explore in future games.

And of course PBS still isn't mandatory and non-photorealistic rendering is still a valid option.

 

[DavidGraham]

Being able to tell at a glance whether a graphical system was designed through a paradigmatically physically-based approach is pretty impressive.

Same as being able to tell they actually ARE using PBR. without even the developers admitting to that!

I understand that reverting to personal attacks and smug one liners is a lot easier than providing actual technical info, guess I am not used to the "informative" mood of the console's forums!

 

[Laa-Yosh]

No, the problem is that you get excited about bullet points without doing your reading to understand what they actually mean and how they work. B3D was about the idea that posts were contributions instead of noise.

Consider the current discussion. What's more important - feature lists of individual engines/games, or what the overall concept of a certain technology is and how it affects a game's visuals?

You tend to get stuck with the first, whereas a lot of us are more interested about the second - and get annoyed when the discussion we'd consider to be more interesting is lost in the noise.

And it isn't really personal either, there are quite a few other posters like you. But I've already put them on ignore though so I don't tend to get stuck on their comments.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Oh and for the actual technical info, there are some very nice presentations on the internet, there's a thread collecting links to those presentations, and there are still some users here who tend to post such info - at least when the conversations aren't hijacked...

 

[HTupolev]

without even the developers admitting to that!

Hard to say how thorough the implementation was as of BF3 or BF4's release, but a quick google search reveals that DICE has indeed been trying to migrate in the direction of physically-based models.

Perhaps more importantly, the issue of whether a game "uses physically based rendering" is hardly a binary one. For instance, Bungie's discussions of Destiny's shading have described an overall physically-based approach, but they've noted that they handled hair by basically just throwing what looked good at it (actually, hair seems to be a common recipient of that treatment in games with physically-based models).

PBR is a very broad paradigmatic thing, and in its purpose it's perhaps as much about setting up a sensible toolchain for artists to build assets that respond predictably to various environments, as it is about the rendering details (though obviously they go hand-in-hand).

And it isn't really personal either, there are quite a few other posters like you. But I've already put them on ignore though so I don't tend to get stuck on their comments.

Actually he's right, my comment was pretty rude and loaded with extraordinary levels of condescension.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Hair is actually a more problematic thing to do "right" as it would involve rendering hundreds of thousands of tiny sub-pixel sized cylinders, with subsurface scattering, global illumination, anisotropic reflections and so on.
As far as I know even a lot of offline CG work has to cheat it - we're certainly rendering it as a separate layer and do a lot of 2D work in comp to get the right look. I think Blur has a pipeline that allows them to render it in the same single pass but they're using different software (we're Maya and Arnold, they're 3dsmax and VRay).

And yeah, PBS is mostly about the general rule that the amount of light reflected from a surface should never be more than the amount of light hitting the surface; and that specular and diffuse reflectivity should be properly balanced. So the artists have to pay a lot more attention to the specular attributes of a surface and paint proper maps for gloss/roughness maps and colored specular maps.

Some very informative pictures can be googled by searching for cross polarizer filters. Or by putting on Polaroid sunglasses and looking at stuff like your own hands. These filters can basically remove the specular reflection and you can look at how much difference it makes compared to the purely diffuse reflectivity.

 

[DavidGraham]

Hard to say how thorough the implementation was as of BF3 or BF4's release, but a quick google search reveals that DICE has indeed been trying to migrate in the direction of physically-based models.

I understand many developers are now in the phase of full transition to PBR, I was just asking because PBR was really touted only at the start of this console cycle, I never heard of it outside of the few launch games that came with it. Most games will use it now. It still doesn't mean old games did use them. Johan just mentions they are in the phase of transition, but that was well after BF4.

In fact having played both BF3 and BF4, I managed to spot several scenes that don't look naturally or physically correct at all, many dark areas had objects with too much specular shading and unrealistic shine to them despite unfavorable lighting conditions.

Perhaps more importantly, the issue of whether a game "uses physically based rendering" is hardly a binary one.

Of course, and I fully understand that. At any rate developers 't tend not to downplay such a big change in their tool chains and the way artists handle assets. They talk about it and the media takes notice.

 

[DavidGraham]

B3D was about the idea that posts were contributions instead of noise.

:

Oh, it's just you and your monomania about bullet points and feature lists, I remember now...

And he completely missed my entire point anyway, getting hang up on bullet point features again instead. I leave for a week and return for this??

And it isn't really personal either, there are quite a few other posters like you. But I've already put them on ignore though so I don't tend to get stuck on their comments.

And it isn't really personal either, there are quite a few other posters like you. But I've already put them on ignore though so I don't tend to get stuck on their comments.

!!!!

Case Closed.

 

[DieH@rd]

So.... The Division. It looks cool.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Aaaaand there goes another ignore.

 

[helvetica bold]

After playing Infamous SS I really think the division will look pretty darn good on the PS4. Who know there might not be that much of a difference than the PC version. The E3 build was running on a PS4, right?

 

[Ike Turner]

After playing Infamous SS I really think the division will look pretty darn good on the PS4. Who know there might not be that much of a difference than the PC version. The E3 build was running on a PS4, right?

No, on a PC.

 

[djskribbles]

Wasn't it a PS4 devkit?