Uncharted 4: A Thief's End [PS4]

[London Geezer]

Effect of 20 yrs of drugs on Moss

DYING!

 

[L. Scofield]

It'll be the same hardware
Also, it doesn't make materials look like their real-world counterparts. Uncharted isn't going for photorealism.
http://images.gamersyde.com/image_uncharted_4_a_thief_s_end-27127-2995_0011.jpg

Looks like painted artwork, not real rock and moss/algae/lichen. Which is as it should be!

Well, one the main draws of PBR is to standarize materials so you don't have to tweak them every time lighting conditions change. Photorealism is optional.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

 

[L. Scofield]

Report yourself and ask for a mod to delete your post. That's what I've done to get rid of duplicated posts of mine.

 

[VFX_Veteran]

Well, one the main draws of PBR is to standarize materials so you don't have to tweak them every time lighting conditions change. Photorealism is optional.

Yeap. but not only that.. the PBR isn't necessarily physically accurate either. Taking the BRDFs and implementing them is one thing.. but then creating energy conservation for all the BRDFs to play nicely is another.

 

[AlNom]

DYING!

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well, one the main draws of PBR is to standarize materials so you don't have to tweak them every time lighting conditions change. Photorealism is optional.

Yep. And if the description of their 2 year PBR shader was saying as much and not 'look like real', I'd not have said anything.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Yep. And if the description of their 2 year PBR shader was saying as much and not 'look like real', I'd not have said anything.

The GAF 'quote' isn't exact. That section of the interview in EDGE actually reads:

Up close, a system that was co-developed by Naughty Dog and Sony's Advanced Technology Group [the ICE Team] delivers a more efficient way of making highly detailed surfaces without using performance-hungry adaptive tessellation; farther away the studio is relying far more on background LOD algorithms than it has ever before.

A new physically based shader more than two years in the making helps materials to look lifelike using their real-world properties.

A subtle but significant difference. And talking of 'subtle', good job on the deleted post there, moderator! I'm guessing, AlNets

 

[L. Scofield]

Yep. And if the description of their 2 year PBR shader was saying as much and not 'look like real', I'd not have said anything.

Well the shader might be able to create realistic results but the artists brake it by using hand painted textures

 

[AlNom]

And talking of 'subtle', good job on the deleted post there, moderator! I'm guessing, AlNets

YOU CAN'T PROVE ANYTHING!

 

[Deleted member 11852]

YOU CAN'T PROVE ANYTHING!

I KNEW IT!

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Physics? Is physics under graphics now? They showed inverse kinematics during the presentation and I don't think we should count that as graphics per se.

IK is actually more about animation, driving the skeletons using some complex math and probably blending with the existing anim clips.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

My understanding of the presentation on Drake was that the shaders also handle a lot of the additional detail work like the stitches on his clothing, and the results are calculated on the fly. That's probably some very complex code and it also has to perform pretty well so it could explain the long development time.

 

[psorcerer]

Take the same game aimed for console @ 30 fps and you can crank it up to 60 for PC where power's not a barrier.

Not obvious. Enough async compute and it will never happen.

 

[psorcerer]

One of my big problems with almost all sandbox games is that they rarely incentivise, much less force you into situations where you have to be creative.

I think Dragon Dogma did it right. Most of its mechanics are very useful. But it kind of strengthens your point: there are not a lot of mechanics in DD.

 

[VFX_Veteran]

My understanding of the presentation on Drake was that the shaders also handle a lot of the additional detail work like the stitches on his clothing, and the results are calculated on the fly. That's probably some very complex code and it also has to perform pretty well so it could explain the long development time.

That's just procedural. I'm not convinced that code is very complex. Stiching actually has a pattern. Now what I can picture is what a lot of studios do is make a uber-shader. That is , they put everything into the shader that the artist would need instead of allowing a shader tree which gets evaluated. Lumping all possibilities in the shader (i.e. procedurals, texture maps, layering, brdfs, post-processing, etc.. ) would take a long time to develop.

 

[(((interference)))]

Moss definitely

Effect of 20yrs of drugs on Moss

Yikes, women really age soo badly...

...

I agree with Shifty, no way does that rockface look realistic. I think the game must look a lot more realistic in dark/night scenes than in daytime (as with a lot of games) as the reveal trailer on the beach looks quite realistic (definitely compared to the vibrancy of the gameplay video), but then again, at nighttime your ability to deviate from a naturalistic look is necessarily reduced compared to scenes when you have full lighting.

"Farther away the studio is relying far more on background LOD algorithms than it has ever before."

With this quote, by background LOD algorithms do you think they're talking about LOD systems like Bungie's 'imposter tech' where 3D models are converted on the fly to very crude 3D models with drastically simpler shading & texturing or 2D billboards?

 

[psorcerer]

by background LOD algorithms

They probably mean that hardware tessellation is not used. And "artistic tessellation" at the "build time" is used instead. Which is a much better approach.

 

[London Geezer]

With this quote, by background LOD algorithms do you think they're talking about LOD systems like Bungie's 'imposter tech' where 3D models are converted on the fly to very crude 3D models with drastically simpler shading & texturing or 2D billboards?

Well that's what LOD is. The problem is making it look good and seamless, though I'd draw the line and 2D billboards

 

[HTupolev]

With this quote, by background LOD algorithms do you think they're talking about LOD systems like Bungie's 'imposter tech' where 3D models are converted on the fly to very crude 3D models with drastically simpler shading & texturing or 2D billboards?

I'd have to look back at the presentation, but I don't think the LOD models used by the imposter system are generated at runtime. What made them special compared to Bungie's previous method is that they're automatically generated (offline) using a system which attempts to correctly capture the low-frequency aesthetic of the objects (both geometrically and in terms of material properties) so that they can be rendered as an ultra-cheap vertex-shaded object while still looking half decent.

They managed to strike an efficient balance of visual consistency and rendering cost, but also importantly, it reduced the amount of work an artist had to do to produce a model by automating the LOD generation.