What is most needed for graphical realism?

Actually I'd go with less animation! I'm fed up of computer games where when you stop the character walking, they fidget like 6 year olds! Computer game characters have the over-the-top motions of mime artists!

 

I agree about excessive movements, but the key word in my post was "subtle". I guess what I meant was the character obviously shouldn't be a statue, but that natural "micromovements" should be present, without actually performing any actions like willingly moving limbs, turning head around, etc..

 

I want better blending of many animations. If there is one thing that consistently bothers me in games it's that.

Games that show a that little extra effor in animation right stand out head and shoulders over the rest in my book. HL2, GoW, PoP to list a few.

Also I want to see more physics based procedural animations. Cloth, muscles, liquids, particles. Rigid body... boring! Let's see something actually cool and new. And I don't mean just add waving flags.

In many recent games, it seems animation technology hasn't really caught up with the overall graphical fidelity of the scene.

 

If I were to develop a hardware for gamming I would put 3d ultra realistic graphics in second place. Off course HDR, displacement maps, radiosity and so on add to realism. But I'd invest more on particles, non pre computed animations, extremely efficent anti aliasing, texture compression, physic simulations, fog banks, sandstorms simulations, ice rain simulations, car damage, ripping cloths simulation, burning cloths, weting cloths, wetting hair, realtime volumetric liquids, so on.

I've understood some of the discussions in this forums, there are bottlenecks in MSAA + HDR (GF7 series inability to turn on both at the same time), vertex input bottlenecks, shaders bottlenecks, there are lots of bottlenecks here and there.

 

They shouldn't start break dancing the moment you stop controlling them, but things like clenching your hands, tapping a foot and shifting your weight a little bit adds something to the character of the game.

 

yeah, i think you right. when movement is awkward it really does send off alarms.

 

____Some form of High-Dynamic Range lighting with full radiosity to accurately simulate how every light, both directly and indirectly, lights everything else. Also, to further fool our heads, they need motion-blur for all movement (scaling appropriately from slow to fast). Finally, depth of field, so that our eyes know what to focus on. These three attributes are very important for helping to convey that illusion of photo-realism. There's a lot more involved, but these are the most subtle, yet easily the most consequential, in making it happen.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLZkUTD-bvY

That is a relatively bad scene, but with the lighting it has it doesn't look too bad.

 

Lighting is extremely important to me when it comes to graphics and art. Just look at an artist's drawings or paintings that's really good with lights. Caravaggio is a good example of this. His paintings have thise special quality that just eke really good lighting. Painting in the dark manner and all that is some quality stuff.

I understand it is rather hard to do good lighting in a dynamic, moving environment in real time. Even still, steps can be taken to make things appear better and not all staticky in this environment.

I also second animation. It is entirely important to provide immersion into a game. The better graphics get the better animation needs to get. Subtle movements are really important and if it's some 3rd person perspective character I need to see some weight shifting, small movements of the hands, fingers twitching and maybe even the head moving ever so slowly. Who in their right mind really sits still? People move a lot even in their sleep! Just look at someone sleeping for 10 minutes. At first it might seem they are sleeping peacefully, and they probably are, but there will be small movements throughout their entire body. It's true.

And that's just for humans. Other things need to be greatly studied by artists in how they behave and move. Animals are sometimes really bad in games.

Enough ranting for now.