Vivid Colors

Comparing the first release of Gears Of War to the last one, reveals a striking difference.. The first one has bland dull colors , and a muddy appearance.. While the last one has vivid and lively colors ,the scenes contain a wide range of different colors and contrasts. from bright to dim and inbetween .

This wasn't exclusive for the last GOW however , more recent games managed to use the same rich color plateau , like Bioshock infinite , Mass Effect 3 .. even in Crysis 2 where DX11 had more colors than DX9.

Is this the product of HDR or tone mapping ? why wasn't it used in older games? why only now?
 
its just artistic choice,
How did you come to the conclusion that crysis 2 in dx11 has more colours in it tha when running in dx9 ?
my testing (not 100% identical scenes because the smoke is animated and there is a moving flock of birds in the scene) comes up with
dx11 = 251250 unique colours
dx9 = 252559 unique colours

mass effect vs mass effect 3 (screenshots both taking in the citadel because its a common location, cant get the same image naturally, but i tried to get the scenes as close as I could)
mass effect = 142604 unique colours
mass effect 3 = 137571 unique colours

bioshock vs bioshock infinite cannot be tested because the game isnt out yet but you would expect a game set in a sunny floating city to have more vivid colours than an undersea city

Is this the product of HDR or tone mapping ?
More likely the product of your imagination.

why wasn't it used in older games? why only now?
it was used in older games there are hundreds if not thousands of games with vivid colours.
The only increase we got to so called vividness (tech wise) was hdr that was first introduced with a patch to farcry back in 2004 thats 8 years ago
 
And no , I believe this wasn't possible before , not many games sport this bright vivd color plateau that we are seeing in recent games , bright colors of all sorts and ranges are together in single scenes , like they are touched by an HDR brush or something .
 
that brightening at the beginning of the trailer i dont see that in the actual game
and infranviews histrogram function shows no difference
 
With all those ENB tweaks getting really popular for PC around 2-4 years ago, maybe developers took note?
 
Plus weve just come out of the era of the dull brown shooter so theres probably some blacklash against that,
Also we went trough a phase where a lot of games seemed to be bathed in beige light "The Piss Filter" someone called it


Edit: Deadly Ninja gets the credit for the term "Piss Filter"

ps:
Comparing the first release of Gears Of War to the last one, reveals a striking difference.. The first one has bland dull colors , and a muddy appearance.. While the last one has vivid and lively colors ,the scenes contain a wide range of different colors and contrasts. from bright to dim and inbetween .
Both done on exactly the same hardware
 
There are a number of factors there.
The browns and grays really started in the ps2 gen. Right after coming out of the low color bit-depth of the previous gen, devs and artists were finally able to work with subtler hues rather than the cartoony over colorful look of ps1 games. Add that to the crippled texturing capabilities of the ps2 and it's lack of anti-aliasing, that system just begged devs to go for low contrast palletes, but really at that time (pre-HDR rendering) those grayish brownish or bluish palettes were the easiest way to accomplish a filmic look, and better overall mood. There was not much post processing, and lighting was rather simplistic at the time. The textures themselves frequently were colored specifically for the scene they would be used one. A night-time level? So your grass texture is gonna be blue.
At the start of this gen, devs were simply still used to that way of making things. You gotta realise that one of the biggest influences on the design of the very first gears was resident evil 4, a game that was actually a bit more colorful than most on gamecube, but still had that contained "filmic" style. As gears got more sequels (just to stick to that example) it manage to find its own style and personality, and it realized and accepted it was more on the actionny, corny fun side than on the dramatic, scarry, serious one. So hence bring in the colors, you are here to have fun! What's more, UE3 got lightmass between Gow2 and 3, and that completely changed the artist pipeline, and the final look of lighting. Artist didn't have to spend most of their time setting up fake pointlights everywhere to get the whole level well illuminated, true radiosity was calculated for them automatically (though not instantly). Faking out radiosity through artist chosen point-lights in a convincing is not easy, even more so if you are going crazy with colors all over the place. Sticking to a more kept lighting makes it much easier to get away with poor GI. This is true to gears, but also to many of the UE3 games, and other engines too. coming from ps2, few devs had very god GI (Max Payne was an example of a ps2 era game with EXELENT lighting, but a rare exception).
The other great technological evolution that happened during this gen was a great improvement of HDR rendering tech, tonemapping and such. There was really not many real time implementations of this in 2006, and very little know how yet. Devs were still struggling to get their gamma sorted out. Now most graphic programmers are well versed with this stuff, and multiple games have been released with exellent HDR and tonemapping to show that it can be done, how it can be done, and most importantly, that despite the hight costs it can pay off greatly. It was not impossible to make a game in early 2007 full of lively colors and lighting with the tech available at the time, but it was very hard to do it and have it look right. It often just looked weird and amateurish, almost n64ish. The lighting tech devs have now, allows them to have color and a filmic look at the same time, without too much tweaking of individual lights and textures.
Artists acquired know how of what works and what doesn't with today tech, all the deferred real time lights they can add, post processing, HDR and all. Similar learning curve is going to be noticeable during the next incoming console gen. I believe the first bunch of ps4 and Durango games, although impressive in many areas, are still gonna carry some of the ps360-development-best-practices influence on both their tech and art.
 
With all those ENB tweaks getting really popular for PC around 2-4 years ago, maybe developers took note?

while SA was at first mostly shiny cars, gta iv really looked pretty good. Really really better than the shitty turd that rockstar ejaculated with perforated shadows.

amazing how you could come to this:

gta4-enb-011qb2.jpg


from this:

GTAIV2010-11-0714-43-26-04.jpg



It's not even funny:


http://www.uproxx.com/gammasquad/20...to-v-trailer-using-gta-iv-and-it-isnt-pretty/
 
I personally felt that Gears after 1 was too vivid and shiny. It made the whole game look like shiny plastic toys. That can be endearing (the new SimCity's look is toyish but works even if the game is broken), but it just threw me as it ruined the darkness of the game. Gears2 wasn't nearly as engrossing for me.
 
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