Unreal high res shots! (56k --> NO!)

[GwymWeepa]

I think with the UE3 we'll get very close to that famous milestone, the T-Rex in Jurassic Park. That was early 90's CGI and still hasn't been surpassed in today's realtime... And people expect Final Fantasy level FMV from real-time graphics.... Meh...

Actually, the GGI in JP1&2 looks totally real and FFTSW looks totally fake. JP1&2 is what's called photorealism. If it looks fake it's because you've never seen a friggin live dinosaur ever and cannot fathom what one would look like in reality. The lab scenes with the Raptors where they hunt down the people are VERY real. As a matter of fact they were so photoreal you could mistaken them for animatronics.

If they used the CGI technology in JP1&2 to render a normal sized alligator and composited it into the movie, it would look totally real. The animation, however, is a different matter.

Those characers are certainly very impressive (even if the art is terrible).

Umm...can you elaborate on why the art is terrible?

Some of the CG looked very real, and some didn't, JP1 and 2 had quite a few shots that looked horrid...oddly JP1 had fewer scenes because I feel they tried to do less, while 2 had CG dinos up the ying yang.

 

[PC-Engine]

Some of the CG looked very real, and some didn't, JP1 and 2 had quite a few shots that looked horrid...oddly JP1 had fewer scenes because I feel they tried to do less, while 2 had CG dinos up the ying yang.

True there are some scenes that are more real than others, but the point I was making is the fact the technology has been available for decades. CGI today being not real has little to do with technology holding artists back as JP has demonstrated otherwise a long time ago.

 

[GwymWeepa]

Some of the CG looked very real, and some didn't, JP1 and 2 had quite a few shots that looked horrid...oddly JP1 had fewer scenes because I feel they tried to do less, while 2 had CG dinos up the ying yang.

True there are some scenes that are more real than others, but the point I was making is the fact the technology has been available for decades. CGI today being not real has little to do with technology holding artists back as JP has demonstrated otherwise a long time ago.

I think it does. Its alright to have a few elements making little screen time absolutely real, its a whole other with movies nowadays having hundreds and hundreds of special effects scenes, and at times having full CG main characters that make major screen time (Jar Jar, Gollum). The first JP has some of the special effect ever, few movies have exceeded it IMO, but I think its mostly because they knew what their limits were and used CG where it made most sense, and in shots that made them look best (having fewer scenes be CG means you can put much more time and effort on them), and where to use animatronics and other techniques. Movies nowadays want to do as much as possible in CG, and the quality suffers. If we had technology which was uber-powerful, then resources wouldn't be stretched so thin and you could make every little thing super-realistic.

 

[PC-Engine]

And you've just proven my point. It's not technology. It's money and manpower. Movies that use CGI look different because of money and manpower not limitations of technology.

 

[GwymWeepa]

And you've just proven my point. It's not technology. It's money and manpower. Movies that use CGI look different because of money and manpower not limitations of technology.

Oh well in that sense, yes, I suppose you can make a totally realistic CG movie with a single opteron, but that takes time, and time is money. Now, with advances in technology you can make better and better use of time and cash, we're nearing photo-realism in grand epics, LOTR had quite a bit of near photo-realistic scenes on a scale way beyond JP.

 

[jvd]

And you've just proven my point. It's not technology. It's money and manpower. Movies that use CGI look different because of money and manpower not limitations of technology.

Oh well in that sense, yes, I suppose you can make a totally realistic CG movie with a single opteron, but that takes time, and time is money. Now, with advances in technology you can make better and better use of time and cash, we're nearing photo-realism in grand epics, LOTR had quite a bit of near photo-realistic scenes on a scale way beyond JP.

Thats another good point. I only remember on scene where there were a ton of dinos on the screen at once and then it didn't look good. Most of the time they had 1 or 2 on the screen at once. Nothing like the scenes in lord of the rings

Just like i said i'd rather have bigger / better worlds than better graphics.

 

[PC-Engine]

And you've just proven my point. It's not technology. It's money and manpower. Movies that use CGI look different because of money and manpower not limitations of technology.

Oh well in that sense, yes, I suppose you can make a totally realistic CG movie with a single opteron, but that takes time, and time is money. Now, with advances in technology you can make better and better use of time and cash, we're nearing photo-realism in grand epics, LOTR had quite a bit of near photo-realistic scenes on a scale way beyond JP.

What you're trying to argue is the advancement in desktop PCs which is irrelevent. JP uses dedicated render farms from SGI. They don't use desktop PCs. Computing power was never an issue. CGI is still art limited not technololgy limited.

Anyway, LOTR used extensive CG because Tolkien's world doesn't exist in real life so almost everything had to be created from scratch. In JP, the settings were real present day areas so you didn't have to create cities or jungles using CGI. LOTR had good CGI but it's hardly more advanced than JP. It just had different requirements.

Thats another good point. I only remember on scene where there were a ton of dinos on the screen at once and then it didn't look good.

Some scenes in LOTR don't look photoreal either. As a matter of fact Gollum doesn't even look photoreal.

When you can't tell whether it's CGI or animatronics, is when it's photoreal.

 

[jvd]

Some scenes in LOTR don't look photoreal either. As a matter of fact Gollum doesn't even look photoreal.

When you can't tell whether it's CGI or animatronics, is when it's photoreal.

have u watch jp 1 lately , you can tell they look fake too

 

[rabidrabbit]

There's the difference that JP is part live action, part CG, whereas FFSW is all CG, thus it has to look more cartoony due to the limitations of current CGI.

Actually there's no limitation with regards to photorealism. We're talking about prerendered CGI not realtime. FFTSW looks the way it does because of art direction not CGI technology.

IMO it is still CGI technology limited, otherwise ther would be a computer generated human character, that was completetly undistinguishable from real human actor. But as it is, there is not even a short animated demonstration of an animated (especially facial) human character that looks real.
One can assume that if there were a hyphotetical super computer with unlimited power, it would be able to do a completely real human character, thus the current CGI is technology limited.

In FFTSW, as it was not possible to make a photorealistic human character, they made the art direction consistent by making everything look cartoonish.
In JP's they made mainly just the dinos, which were easier to gel with the real world backgrounds and human actors.

Edit: By CGI technology, I don't mean just hardware, but also the software tools and rendering techniques (radiosity etc.....)

 

[GwymWeepa]

"What you're trying to argue is the advancement in desktop PCs which is irrelevent. JP uses dedicated render farms from SGI. They don't use desktop PCs. Computing power was never an issue. CGI is still art limited not technololgy limited.

Anyway, LOTR used extensive CG because Tolkien's world doesn't exist in real life so almost everything had to be created from scratch. In JP, the settings were real present day areas so you didn't have to create cities or jungles using CGI. LOTR had good CGI but it's hardly more advanced than JP. It just had different requirements"

My point was, though the final product isn't limited by technology, since you can get better and better effects as long as you put the time into it (even if you used just 1 opteron), as technology progresses it is easier and easier to make more and more scenes realistic looking. Also, in general LOTR had much nicer looking CG effects than JP, though there are spots of photo-realism, many real shots were indeed animatronics, and whenever a dino was shown in bright light, like during the T-rex hunt of those bi-pedal dinos in broad daylight, it looked pretty fake (the T-rex looked best, the other dinos looked out of place). Right now, if you gave a real good studio a trillion dollars and 50 years to make a movie with current technology, sure they could give you a perfectly photo-realistic movie, and I wouldn't doubt the same would be true if using technology from JP's time, but movie makers don't have that sort of time or money. Movie special effects as a whole have improved with time because technology has improved, giving better results quicker and more cheaply. Who knows, maybe one day in the future a totally CG movie could be made in a matter of weeks that was totally photo-realistic, but we're not there today with technology, unless given a stupendous budget and an incredibly long schedule to make a movie.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

What you're trying to argue is the advancement in desktop PCs which is irrelevent. JP uses dedicated render farms from SGI. They don't use desktop PCs. Computing power was never an issue.

The hell it wasn't. Your home PC is a dozen times faster than an SGI machine they've had back then.

LOTR had good CGI but it's hardly more advanced than JP.

That's a joke, right? You cannot be serious... or are you having problems wiht your sight?

 

[PC-Engine]

Well my point is that photorealism and technology are not mutually inclusive. Photorealism is based entirely on lighting. For example you can take a VERY simple 3D model and put it in a simple environment and have it look photoreal. Here's are some examples:

Now that to me looks real. It looks like a real object that I can pick up.

Same here.

That looks like a real room.

Now the reason why FFTSW looks fake is because the artists do not know how to create a photoreal human being. This is exactly the same reason why you have never seen a 2D artist create images of a human being looking identical to a real photograph. It's not technology as 2D doesn't require supercomputers.

FFTSW doesn't use any global ilumination so no matter how advanced the models are, it will not look photoreal. It's not limited by technology as GI/RT has been around for a long time. It doesn't require supercomputers either.

 

[V3]

This is exactly the same reason why you have never seen a 2D artist create images of a human being looking identical to a real photograph.

Except, there are talented 2D artists, doing just that.

 

[Rodéric]

That looks like a real room.

Not at all, it's far too perfect to be real.
It lacks atmospheric and ground dust to be photorealistic.

Noone have seen "DragonHeart" ?
This movie is a few years old (1996), but the Dragon is amazingly well made, it's hard to know if/when it's CGI vs animatronics.
I strongly recommend watching it.

 

[PC-Engine]

This is exactly the same reason why you have never seen a 2D artist create images of a human being looking identical to a real photograph.

Except, there are talented 2D artists, doing just that.

For example?

Noone have seen "DragonHeart" ?
This movie is a few years old (1996), but the Dragon is amazingly well made, it's hard to know if/when it's CGI vs animatronics.
I strongly recommend watching it.

I haven't seen the whole movie just snippets. I will put it on my DVD wishlist.

Anyway let's move over to realtime apps for a minute therefore I'll loosen the definition of photoreal. Why isn't there any photoreal racing games for Xbox when PS2 has GT3? It must be Xbox's more powerful hardware that's holding back photorealism right?

 

[rabidrabbit]

GT3 is not photorealistic by any measure!
Even though it does look more real than any xbox racer, be it due to hardware better suited, or more skilled artists, or combination of both.

 

[V3]

For example?

You've never seen any ? The first time I've seen this was ages ago, most were of wedding photos, transfer into large canvas.

Lately I've seen someone did rendering some Japanese pop artists. Perhaps you can google around to look for some of this.

These kind of artists have awsome rendering skill.

Though today, artistic creativity takes over these kind of skills.

 

[cthellis42]

Now the reason why FFTSW looks fake is because the artists do not know how to create a photoreal human being.

"Do not know how?" That's not what they were aiming for! Certainly they wanted things to be "more realistic," but it was still an entire futuristic world of their creation. Was there the remotest chance that the people models could hit a photorealistic level? Why, then, would they spend extra time (read "money," which they were already burning at an alarming rate) and extreme pain to strive for "photoreality" to create something that would look like a cheesy blue-screening job if they succeeded anyway?

You think Pixar artists "don't know how to create" photorealistic environments either? I mean they must not--just look at how cartoony their films look!

"Photorealism" is not an easily reachable state yet for feature-length animation, nor in most cases would it make a difference. They strive for as good an overall effect as they can create--within their budget--in the artistic direction they decide to pursue from the beginning.

 

[PC-Engine]

GT3 is not photorealistic by any measure!
Even though it does look more real than any xbox racer, be it due to hardware better suited, or more skilled artists, or combination of both.

Umm..and that's why I said "Anyway let's move over to realtime apps for a minute therefore I'll loosen the definition of photoreal."

Now the reason why FFTSW looks fake is because the artists do not know how to create a photoreal human being.

"Do not know how?" That's not what they were aiming for! Certainly they wanted things to be "more realistic," but it was still an entire futuristic world of their creation. Was there the remotest chance that the people models could hit a photorealistic level? Why, then, would they spend extra time (read "money," which they were already burning at an alarming rate) and extreme pain to strive for "photoreality" to create something that would look like a cheesy blue-screening job if they succeeded anyway?

You think Pixar artists "don't know how to create" photorealistic environments either? I mean they must not--just look at how cartoony their films look!

"Photorealism" is not an easily reachable state yet for feature-length animation, nor in most cases would it make a difference. They strive for as good an overall effect as they can create--within their budget--in the artistic direction they decide to pursue from the beginning.

Thanks for taking one sentence out of context to build your whole pathetic attempt at an argument.

Maybe you should go back and read every one of my posts in this thread. Selective quoting seems to be your specialty. It's pretty obvious you have no clue whatsoever as evidenced by you arguing what I've already stated in the previous threads...

There's nothing more annoying than someone who reads only the last few posts then jumps on the chance to argue a point that's already been addressed without reading the previous posts because they perceive what seems to be a flaw in a post. I just hope these people aren't lawyers.

 

[rabidrabbit]

GT3 is not photorealistic by any measure!
Even though it does look more real than any xbox racer, be it due to hardware better suited, or more skilled artists, or combination of both.

Umm..and that's why I said "Anyway let's move over to realtime apps for a minute therefore I'll loosen the definition of photoreal."

And that's why I said "GT3 is not photorealistic by any measure, as there is no such thing as "loose photorealism". It either is photorealistic or not.
How far can you "loosen the definition of photorealism" for it to still remain photorealistic