Uncharted 4: A Thief's End [PS4]

[Laa-Yosh]

The entire face is still subtly stylized, just as Noel and Ellie were in the Last of Us. You can immediately tell they're not real people or scans of real people.

In the case of Drake it's mostly the angularity in his features and too perfect symmetry, which they are obviously using to keep consistency through the series. Scanning someone would never look like Drake.

The character is also believable and that's more important than being realistic, IMHO. Even Mickey Mouse can become 'alive' with the right animation and that's true for even such hyper-real styled humans like Drake. One of the reasons the Beyond and Heavy Rain characters never really clicked for me. It's also incredibly hard to get right, of course

 

[SlimJim]

I agree, Beyond looked 'too realistic', for it's facial animation that is: in screenshots it looked great, but during gameplay/cutscene (which are basically the same things in that game, lol), it looked really off. Also I hate Ellen Page.
With Ryse, I do think some characters looked more believable than the main character.

During the Uncharted 4 trailer, I expected Drake to move completely unrealistic in comparison to his appearance, but the animation was excellent so it created a believable picture.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Also I hate Ellen Page.

You monster!

 

[DieH@rd]

Sony cinema post E3 show, Druckman and Straley talked how Drake's U4 model have emulated muscles, bones and even blodfloow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bohAzgYkUTY&feature=youtu.be&t=33s


edit - entire trailer with tweaked "daylight" settings. Wow.
http://a.pomf.se/ulhgiw.webm

 

[betternatethanlever]

From a technical point of view, I've observed that all Naughty Dog games tend to have more detail on the character models rather than other things in the surrounding. Drake looks exceptional, but the rest of the environment does not. I've noticed some kind of specular aliasing, low-res normals for the cloth? Perhaps it's just the look of the cotton.

 

[TEEDA]

Wow, that water splashing on the rock behind Drake looks really good.
http://giant.gfycat.com/EveryDevotedGordonsetter.gif

Always loved to see particle effects and water in games. I loved how they rendered snow, water and sand in the series. Can't wait to see more of those in U4.

 

[SlimJim]

You monster!

I am the monster?? Watch "Hard Candy (2005)" :smile:

Ontopic: OMFG @ the 'daylight' trailer

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I respectfully disagree: with 3d scanned games like Ryse it often appears as if not all facial muscles are connected.

3D scanning is just another tool, so it still won't guarantee anything, the results depend on the skills of the artists using the tools.

However, scanning will give you a lot of the subtle aspects of human physiology like asymmetry or underlying bone and muscle structure or unique facial wrinkle patterns (also true for hands!) or with body scanning, vein layout or fat deposits. These require a really, really experienced and talented artist to get right but scans give you for "free".

The wrinkles were 3d scanned but don't actually move like wrinkles should.

Facial expressions are actually the most complex field of CGI in my opinion, and scanning makes it a bit harder for two reasons: you have actual reference that you should match, and because the face itself is so realistic, even the smallest issues tend to stand out much more. Games still have to rely on a lot of approximations and make trade offs for efficiency not just in rendering but also in production, so it's an uphill battle from the start.

Wrinkles are also an issue because even if they're actually displaced, the effect still tends to look like they're faded in - instead of the skin colliding and folding on itself.
TLOU was a clear case for this, and it's also there in this trailer; but it works better on these stylized faces, and UC4 also seems to use an even more detailed facial mesh, so the folds between the eyebrows have enough underlying geometry to support them as well.

The best approach today is to fit the direction of the polygon edges of the head model to the wrinkle patterns and have a polygon density of 1 to 3mm across the face itself. This requires around 25-40 thousand quad faces in our experience, and then you need to control all the facial deformations with blendshapes. This takes up far too much memory and processing power on the current consoles so it's not an option. Our facerig files in Maya are usually 300-500MB, and we don't usually get to really build a full library of corrective shapes that fix the look for messy combinations of the elemental expression shapes.

So expect games to stick with blended normal maps for now. At least they can also use the same tech to blend color maps as well, in order to simulate blood flow changes.

 

[wco81]

Ellen is cute but doesn't she play for the other team?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

You've got quite some self-confidence if that matters for you

 

[messyman]

I'm confused. Are you guys talking about Ellen Paige, the actor, or Ellie from TLOU?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Ellen Page has recently came out, so I guess it's about her

 

[wco81]

Isn't the TLOU character basically Ellen Page?

 

[Malo]

Isn't the TLOU character basically Ellen Page?

Isn't that Beyond Two Souls?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Beyond was brought into the discussion in that it has scanned characters and performance capture, and it has Ellen Page in the cast.

Yeah Ellie looks like Page but that wasn't the point here. I guess.

 

[HTupolev]

Isn't Ellen Page based on Jodie from The Last of Us?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Ellenception

 

[betternatethanlever]

Also note how the sand moves. I'm guessing it's not actual particle-based sand simulation, add in the wet property, it would have been nearly impossible. I'm sure it's just different geometry and they were just switching it.

I also think they were probably using normal map blending technique to fake wrinkles. That's how it's always been.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

I'm not aware of any games using displacements and displaced wrinkle maps; it might happen eventually but ISS and this trailer shows that developers can get very far with more detailed models and blended normal maps. I do know about one game that uses blendshapes and tessellation, though, but can't tell which one

The rest of the stuff in this trailer is probably realized with some very high quality effects work, the water splashes for example must be done with alpha mapped particles and some sort of proceduralism. Getting this stuff to look like the "real thing" (proper volumetrics and fluids) has to be pretty damn hard.

 

[Ike Turner]

Small heads-up regarding the "in-engine" debate: never trust what PR/marketing/etch says... as a matter of fact Rocksteady just confirmed live on Gamespot that the Batman Akham Knight trailer which says "PS4 footage" and had DS4 button prompts was actually PC footage..