UC4: Best looking gameplay? *SPOILS*

[Clukos]

Lighting seems to be the main difference and animation of course. Asset quality seems to be very similar other than extra SSS during cutscenes

 

[Clukos]

Few examples of ambient shadows/ao during gameplay

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7012/26462970553_8db3c2df15_o.png
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7690/27033839326_c3f98357df_o.png
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7528/27066842255_2d8032c39f_o.png
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7668/26461283574_2de034143a_o.png
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7678/26462898493_b45917e092_o.png
https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7678/26462893363_412136e00f_o.png

 

[Karamazov]

Characters benefit from extra cosmetics for cutscenes (and that's a good thing)

But there are instances where they can still look close during gameplay, when all the stars are aligned

http://i.imgur.com/XAGgN5c.jpg

 

[Clukos]

they can still look close during gameplay, when all the stars are aligned

Yes I posted this video couple of pages ago, this is during gameplay

 

[Clukos]

For comparisons sake, some screenshots i got from RotTR with nvidias own VXAO (the first game to use voxel based ambient occlusion on PC): https://developer.nvidia.com/vxao-voxel-ambient-occlusion

Only got screenshots from indirectly lit areas
http://abload.de/img/riseofthetombraider05mfumr.png
http://abload.de/img/riseofthetombraider0506u67.png
http://abload.de/img/riseofthetombraider05abur7.png
http://abload.de/img/riseofthetombraider0501ui6.png
http://abload.de/img/riseofthetombraider05lfudb.png

One thing that both games (or basically every game) have in common and is a problem visually is that in some cases small geometry doesn't cast shadows and it looks very odd (you can see the very same thing in Battlefront as well, and other games)

RotTR: http://abload.de/img/riseofthetombraider05gpujl.png
U4: http://abload.de/img/uncharted4_athiefsend56uxj.png

In such a case i highly prefer POM with self shadowing than actual geometry.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

U4's SSAO is one of the simplest and cheapest this gen...

One superb piece of shadowing I saw last night (up to Chapter 8) was soft shadowing when climbing a tower. It was very realistic with softness and darkness adjusting based on distance of different limbs to the surface. So as the knee got closer to the wall, the shadow under it got tighter and darker, but it wasn't just a uniform shadow change. Very good, and confusing as to why that shadow was so awesome! Is there a special Nate Climbing Shadow Solver?

Also on the subject of animation that everyone's raving about, it's still very computer gamey. Characters walking on the spot, sliding, glitchy transitions from one position to another aligned with the scenery features. It's improved on previous UC's from having more variety etc., but it still looks fundamentally the same at is core. Given the general enthusiasm for the animation I was expecting more. Heck, even the cutscene presentation is mediocre in results.

Details and vistas are definite pluses. I can agree with on those points.

 

[rabidrabbit]

Now I got to the Chapter 10:

Spoiler

Madagasgar

and really, the graphics truly pick up considerably there!
Chapters 8 and 9 were a bit boring graphically and left a bit muted impression, but now I'm starting to see what the hype is all about
The highlight in chapter 9 was

Spoiler

Nadine's hair, especially when a light shines behind her highlighting her hair.

 

[HTupolev]

anybody know what they were using for TLOU last gen?

Some kind of mellow screen-space AO, plus some objects (notably characters) have simplified capsule representations used for occlusion. For environmental lighting, a simple sort of cone trace is used to test the extent to which a incoming light is being occluded by nearby capsules.

One superb piece of shadowing I saw last night (up to Chapter 8) was soft shadowing when climbing a tower. It was very realistic with softness and darkness adjusting based on distance of different limbs to the surface. So as the knee got closer to the wall, the shadow under it got tighter and darker, but it wasn't just a uniform shadow change. Very good, and confusing as to why that shadow was so awesome! Is there a special Nate Climbing Shadow Solver?

Sounds like the capsule occlusion.

 

[London Geezer]

Some kind of mellow screen-space AO, plus some objects (notably characters) have simplified capsule representations used for occlusion. For environmental lighting, a simple sort of cone trace is used to test the extent to which a incoming light is being occluded by nearby capsules.


Sounds like the capsule occlusion.

Yep. First seen in The Order, out of the games I've played, I'm sure it was used elsewhere.

 

[milk]

One superb piece of shadowing I saw last night (up to Chapter 8) was soft shadowing when climbing a tower. It was very realistic with softness and darkness adjusting based on distance of different limbs to the surface. So as the knee got closer to the wall, the shadow under it got tighter and darker, but it wasn't just a uniform shadow change. Very good, and confusing as to why that shadow was so awesome! Is there a special Nate Climbing Shadow Solver?

Also on the subject of animation that everyone's raving about, it's still very computer gamey. Characters walking on the spot, sliding, glitchy transitions from one position to another aligned with the scenery features. It's improved on previous UC's from having more variety etc., but it still looks fundamentally the same at is core. Given the general enthusiasm for the animation I was expecting more. Heck, even the cutscene presentation is mediocre in results.

Details and vistas are definite pluses. I can agree with on those points.

That, as other's have said, is the result of the character's capsule proxies. It is not exclusive to nate climbing, nor to that tower. It is literaly everywhere in the game, you just had not noticed.
Basically, they do cone trace against those proxies in the direction of the dominant indirect light of the baked lightmap at every screen pixel (maybe at 1/2 res) and oclude that term based on it. That specific idea was first used in TLoU on ps3, and I don't know if anywhere else. Using capsules as proxies though is not a new idea, splinter cell conviction did it for regular AO, which TLoU and U4 also do, and so did the Order. This latter one also used the capsules to oclude specular reflections, which better grounded the characters and gave them shadowy reflections on highly specular surfaces. This latter use was also incorporated in U4, which digital foundry picked on, but did not now how to name becuase its not a feature you can toggle on-and-off in the graphics settings of some other pc game, so completely outside of the relm of things those guys can possibly understand about real time rendering...

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm pretty sure it isn't applied when running through corridors. I find the internal lighting a bit rough. There's no bounce-light from lit walls and the shadowing didn't stand out as fabulous as this climbing-shadow did. Maybe I missed it, but I have confidence in my perceptive powers.

 

[London Geezer]

I saw bounce lighting pretty much everywhere - in dark corridors and interiors at least.

 

[milk]

Every static surface has that effect. Its an intrinsic part of their lightmaps. Its just not as strong or pronounced in every area.

 

[Clukos]

From Yibing Jiangs artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/6kEmV

Here some closeup details of the fabrics on main characters. Using 4k high-res capture.

Using Disney Diffuse Model, added special cheap Sub-surface Scatter. We also added fabric micro details, small wrinkles and aging.
For Specular models, we are using kajiya-kay model for silk fabric, and modified the fabric model from Ready at Dawn for cotton, wool, ext...

Models of the characters showing in the post are done by our talent Character team.
Real-time rendered in game.

If you guys want to know more details, I will give a talk at Siggraph this year July 2016.

Cloth

About Hair: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/JOY4A

Here some closeup details of the hair on main characters. Using 4k high-res capture.

Here are some features we used to create the volumetric look of the hair, realtime in-game:
1. Using baked shadow map and wrap diffuse to fake the shadow. It helps us to get the feeling of depth and volume of the hair.
2. Scatter is really important for blonde hair to look right. It’s because the lights scatter between hair strands.
We can’t afford ray-tracing, of course, so we approached the similar result by wrapping the lights and offsetting the dot(N,V).
3. We used typical kayjiya-kay specular model for the specular of the hair. We also put hair id maps to masked out the offset value of the spec.

Models of the characters showing in the post are done by talent Character team.
Frank Tzeng worked on Drake, Sully and Nadine, Soa Lee worked on Elena, Colin Worked on Sam, Jaehoon worked on Rafe.

If you guys want to know more details, I will give a talk at Siggraph this year July 2016.

 

[Clukos]

And regarding self shadowing on foliage i've found it is pretty consistent, some examples all purely gameplay

Indirectly lit areas are looking fantastic in terms of shadows, wondering if we'll get something looking like that dynamically within the next generation of hardware, or current on PC (voxel gi/ao looking very promising but not quite there yet)

Looking at some areas that I've rushed through on my first play through and i'm very impressed by the level of consistency in that regard.

 

[Clukos]

I've noticed that one of the hardest areas to get to look right in games is anything that is directly lit, because not only do you need everything to have shadows in the scene, but self-shadowing as well, accompanied by convincing shading (light transport etc.). I think Uncharted 4 manages to do well in that regard and presents something that is at least decent even in the worst case scenario (brightly lit, huge environment). One example from an area where it basically covers everything in that regard:

Directly lit

Area opposite to this building completely under shadow

In between shots

And that is my last post about this subject, i don't think i know enough about it technically anyway, just some observations of what I thought as visually pleasing

 

[rockaman]

Yea the variation in lighting conditions that they are able to do effectively is incredible. Whatever their HDR solution is it is absolutely incredible. It looks photographic often.

It's one of the few, if maybe the only game I know of, that does low-lying sun lighting so nicely. Most games look extremely washed out with that kind of lighting, but Uncharted 4 manages it very exceptionally.

Also the game has tons of globally lit areas, the lighting is static though, but it is definitely using global illumination. Also the flashlight does GI as well much like TLOU does in a couple of scenes.

And yea this character model viewer is incredible.... I've spent entirely too much time zooming into every point of their models... even the undersides!

 

[HTupolev]

Also the game has tons of globally lit areas, the lighting is static though, but it is definitely using global illumination.

That kind of goes without saying when a game is using a baked lightmap, though. Even if you go back to the 90s; Quake 2 used a radiosity solver, for instance.

The interesting question is how it stores it and how it applies the data to lighting the scene. In a rudimentary implementation, the lightmap could store a single RGB triple that is simply multiplied by the diffuse texture of an environmental surface to produce the final pixel color. In a more sophisticated implementation, the lightmap could store a vector of RGB values interpreted as a spherical gaussian, and the game could calculate the diffuse and specular response to this spherical gaussian. (And then you have questions like how dynamic objects sample and use environment lighting, what about transparencies, etc.)

 

[rockaman]

It's definitely a cheap solution, but the consoles are just not ready for full-blown GI. Even next-generation maybe it won't be a perfect idea yet, since there will always be more possible detail to extract with baked lighting systems. It's an appropriate system for Uncharted 4 at least.

I think P.T. demo was the only one that really used real-time global illumination to its "fullest" maybe? I might be wrong though. I still have that installed on my PS4... haha.

And yea that is an interesting question, I do wonder how they baked the GI. As far as I could tell whatever lighting was going on applied to all the character components... but I can't be sure what they actually did

 

[HTupolev]

It's definitely a cheap solution

Not necessarily. Baked lightmaps can pose challenges with memory management, and incident lighting data being baked doesn't mean that what the game does with it is cheap. Running complex lighting data through fancy reflection functions can be very expensive.

there will always be more possible detail to extract with baked lighting systems.

There will always be more possible coherent samples to use in the result for a single scene state with baked lighting systems.

Adapting to scene changes is arguably a sort of extraction of detail in its own right.

And the ability of realtime systems to dynamically LOD means that in some cases and respects they can sometimes get away with doing things on finer scales, up close at least. If we're counting screen-space GI, this is already a thing that games are taking advantage of.