I noticed something today

[Acanthus]

After watching the KoRn video for "Everything ive known" and i looked at the geometry detail of the monsters, and the complexity of the scene, its really amazing how close we are getting to hollywood style CG effects.

We are even getting remarkably close to pixar level details in games Toy Story and Monsters INC arent looking all that impressive when compared to the high complexity and lighting models in the newest games and demos.

From what it looks like Unreal Engine 3 may even SURPASS these things in detail and lighting effects.

Just some food for thought, id love to see if theres any geometry numbers out there for scenes in things like toy story so we could do a direct comparison.

Edit: cliffnotes for the incredibly lazy, it looks the 2nd gen DX9 cards may be the real dawn of cinematic gaming, something MANY MANY of us have been waiting for.

 

[Viper GTS]

I very seriously doubt that, considering the resolution that feature films are rendered at the detail levels would have to be FAR higher to still look good.

Viper GTS

 

[FeathersMcGraw]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
We are even getting remarkably close to pixar level details in games Toy Story and Monsters INC arent looking all that impressive when compared to the high complexity and lighting models in the newest games and demos.

Toy Story, maybe (it deals with comparatively simple geometry and materials). Monsters, Inc.? You're nuts. You don't render fur with a lighting model alone.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Viper GTS
I very seriously doubt that, considering the resolution that feature films are rendered at the detail levels would have to be FAR higher to still look good.

Viper GTS

do you know what the resolution is? i know its progressive scan but i have no idea of the resolution.

Theres always AA to hide that

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: FeathersMcGraw

Originally posted by: Acanthus
We are even getting remarkably close to pixar level details in games Toy Story and Monsters INC arent looking all that impressive when compared to the high complexity and lighting models in the newest games and demos.

Toy Story, maybe (it deals with comparatively simple geometry and materials). Monsters, Inc.? You're nuts. You don't render fur with a lighting model alone.

ATi has a realtime demo with fur.

 

[theNEOone]

music video != hollywood. cg effects in movies run into the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. a music video cost peanuts in comparison. the crap they put in music videos don't even compare to hollywood cg.

video games aren't that close, in fact i'm really not very impressed. i forgot who it was, but i think it was carmack that said that it would take about 10 years for video games to render in real-time what hollywood is putting out in movies today. it's just a matter of computing power, game rendering will always (read again, ALWAYS) be alot slower than what's put out in movies. "rapidly approaching" suggests that games will some day catch up, which will never happen. well, unless the entire landscape of computing changes drastically (not in terms of power and performance, but in terms of a paradigm shift in the way developers design products.)


=|

 

[FeathersMcGraw]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

ATi has a realtime demo with fur.

Which might as well be a complex texture. Compare that to James P. Sullivan snoring and disturbing the hairs on his arms, or travelling through a snowstorm.

Just because it can be done doesn't mean it's done better. And clearly, it's not yet.

 

[Acanthus]

while i agree to some extent, you can only get so photorealistic until you cant tell anymore

eventually its going to get to a point where its as detailed as we can possibly notice, itll look real. At that point, realtime and rendered images would look the same.

Im talking from a pure geometry detail, lighting effects, shadowing, modeling, textures. Its getting pretty damn close.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: FeathersMcGraw

Originally posted by: Acanthus

ATi has a realtime demo with fur.

Which might as well be a complex texture. Compare that to James P. Sullivan snoring and disturbing the hairs on his arms, or travelling through a snowstorm.

Just because it can be done doesn't mean it's done better. And clearly, it's not yet.

The fur is not a texture, its definately a shader of some kind as it blows in the wind and moves realistically.

 

[FeathersMcGraw]

Originally posted by: Acanthus
while i agree to some extent, you can only get so photorealistic until you cant tell anymore

eventually its going to get to a point where its as detailed as we can possibly notice, itll look real. At that point, realtime and rendered images would look the same.

You seem to think that image quality is the only factor which determines the realism of a moving image. It's not. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a perfect example of a movie which approximates photorealism in image quality, yet the action sequences looked clumsy because there wasn't a sufficient amount of physical weight or tension in the characters (I also found this to be true of even recent movies like Shrek 2).

Technology makes a lot of things possible, but Hollywood movies are superior visually because there are artists behind them compensating for the failure of the modelling systems. Further, the goals of the two media are different; the real-time and interactive nature of gaming imposes constraints on the graphic system that Hollywood does not have, and essentially limits the actual amount of detail the system can harness without requiring cutting-edge box specs.

Do games look great now? Hell, yes. Do they look like movies? Hell, no. Will they in the future? Maybe, except high-definition technologies are starting to enter the film arena. The game state of the art is always moving towards the film one, but the state of the art in film is not a static target.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: FeathersMcGraw

Originally posted by: Acanthus
while i agree to some extent, you can only get so photorealistic until you cant tell anymore

eventually its going to get to a point where its as detailed as we can possibly notice, itll look real. At that point, realtime and rendered images would look the same.

You seem to think that image quality is the only factor which determines the realism of a moving image. It's not. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a perfect example of a movie which approximates photorealism in image quality, yet the action sequences looked clumsy because there wasn't a sufficient amount of physical weight or tension in the characters (I also found this to be true of even recent movies like Shrek 2).

Technology makes a lot of things possible, but Hollywood movies are superior visually because there are artists behind them compensating for the failure of the modelling systems. Further, the goals of the two media are different; the real-time and interactive nature of gaming imposes constraints on the graphic system that Hollywood does not have, and essentially limits the actual amount of detail the system can harness without requiring cutting-edge box specs.

Do games look great now? Hell, yes. Do they look like movies? Hell, no. Will they in the future? Maybe, except high-definition technologies are starting to enter the film arena. The game state of the art is always moving towards the film one, but the state of the art in film is not a static target.

I definately agree on your last point, while we may see toy story or monsters inc level of detail soon in the gaming area, we arent going to see Terminator 3 level effects for quite a while. Physics and realism are often far behind that of cinematics. Thats more of a business model problem than an actual hardware problem though. Larger gaming budgets would definately alleviate these problems.

Just to clarify, im talking about 2nd gen or "real" DX9 games that are on the way this year. Half life 2 for example can look a LOT like toy story.

 

[Acanthus]

bump

 

[jjones]

I don't think game graphics are even remotely close to approaching what hollywood puts out. No offense to gamer designers; they are limited by the medium used to play the games - namely the standard PC and graphics cards - and this means heavily reduced polygon count to compensate for lack of computing power.

Edit: Take a look at any hands and feet modeling in your average computer game and tell me that's the same as what you see in movie CG. That's just one simple example that you can easily check out.

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: FeathersMcGraw

Originally posted by: Acanthus
while i agree to some extent, you can only get so photorealistic until you cant tell anymore

eventually its going to get to a point where its as detailed as we can possibly notice, itll look real. At that point, realtime and rendered images would look the same.

You seem to think that image quality is the only factor which determines the realism of a moving image. It's not. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within is a perfect example of a movie which approximates photorealism in image quality, yet the action sequences looked clumsy because there wasn't a sufficient amount of physical weight or tension in the characters (I also found this to be true of even recent movies like Shrek 2).

Technology makes a lot of things possible, but Hollywood movies are superior visually because there are artists behind them compensating for the failure of the modelling systems. Further, the goals of the two media are different; the real-time and interactive nature of gaming imposes constraints on the graphic system that Hollywood does not have, and essentially limits the actual amount of detail the system can harness without requiring cutting-edge box specs.

Do games look great now? Hell, yes. Do they look like movies? Hell, no. Will they in the future? Maybe, except high-definition technologies are starting to enter the film arena. The game state of the art is always moving towards the film one, but the state of the art in film is not a static target.

Final Fantasy -TSW, has ALREADY been rendered in REAL-TIME with a current nVidia 5950u and the 9800xt . . .

. . . admittedly, it's a little slow ~1.5FPS, but will no doubt improve with faster procs and GPUs.

Gaming photorealism is only about FIVE years off - not 10 (that Carmack quote was a few years ago).

There there is always the physics and AI to work on. :roll:

 

[Goosemaster]

It is all about time.

You CAN now render CG equal to movie CG on a PC. Most consumer vid cards have the necessary Hardware to do it, and I think it has been like that for a while. That was still a very cool breakthrough though.....16bit to 32bit...pixel shares.....AA...etc. Remember, up tpo a certain point, many rendering features werne't even available at home.

Of course, it takes time.

Basically, all that seperates CG and consumer renderings is how much time it takes.


The question is, are you rendering a scene with a 3.2Ghz p4 workstation, a linux beowulf cluster of 4 dual 2ghz opteron servers, or with SGI 4000-blade server farmS.


I love BS. It makes the world go round.

 

[Acanthus]

I honestly think the Unreal Engine 3 demo looks above and beyond what we see in hollywood today as far as geometry and modeling detail goes.

In a related matter, whats would you like to see developed next for games as far as graphics features?

Id like to see no LOD clip planes in games, so the detail levels dont change with distance at all, AF hides this, but id like to see it built right into the engine natively.

 

[DerMonkeyhauser]

The fur on Sully in Monsters, Inc was created using the RiCurves primitive in Renderman, which draws a "ribbon" (a flat curve whose normal always points towards the camera), emulating a cylinder but with far less rendering time involved. My FireGL T2 bogs down drawing fur feedback in Maya (64x64 grid of curves on each of 13 surfaces); good luck rendering the whole coat of hair in anything approaching real time, especially when you get into shadowing and shading it, and running the dynamics simulations to make it move.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: DerMonkeyhauser
The fur on Sully in Monsters, Inc was created using the RiCurves primitive in Renderman, which draws a "ribbon" (a flat curve whose normal always points towards the camera), emulating a cylinder but with far less rendering time involved. My FireGL T2 bogs down drawing fur feedback in Maya (64x64 grid of curves on each of 13 surfaces); good luck rendering the whole coat of hair in anything approaching real time, especially when you get into shadowing and shading it, and running the dynamics simulations to make it move.

So because maya is inefficient, and you were also using a slower rendering card (NVIDIA dominates the professional 3d rendering market with quadros), means it simply cant be done?

 

[BatmanNate]

This debate is just too geeky for even me.

/duck out

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: BatmanNate
This debate is just too geeky for even me.

/duck out

Thx for the productive input :brokenheart: