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Aesthetically speaking, what year in CG films are games comparable to?
- Thread starter sn00zer
- Start date
Exactly. And that's mostly because, there's no point. Like, photorealistic CGI films are a complete paradox because why go through the trouble of attempting and usually failing to beat the uncanny valley when you can just film it in live action?
I mean if we're talking tech demos than this is an entirely different conversation. Like, UE4 has been used for Star Wars films
lol.
Offline vs real time though.
Tech demos are still real time.
Yeah looks clearly worse than TLOU2There will always be peaks and lows. You can't pinpoint where we're at that way.
Anyway, here's Sid.
True but, what can be done with a modern game engine in realtime is still astounding and impressive AF and absolutely comparable to CGI with very few if any of the caveats of realtime rendering.
One of the few shots of actual dino CGI:
The day scenes don't hold up, but every single CGI used during the night (rain) scene and similar .... are still fantastic
No movie is individually placing all its hair though. They set a few key strands, and let computers fill in the rest. Same as games really.
It's amazing to me how far CG movies have come in the last few years. Animators are finally really learning how to make it work.
Games have such a disparity between still shots and motion and FMV and gameplay that I have trouble comparing the two much. I see lots that look fucking fantastic at e3 and then when you finally get to play and realize just how small the sandbox is, or how dumb the physics model is, they really start to look like shit.
At least Sid would have done what was needed to save humanity unlike somebody!
We have yet to reach 'The Spirits Within' polycount levels, even for main characters:
Final Fantasy: The Technology Within
Final Fantasy: The Technology Within
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KH3 matches toy story and frozen and tangled perfectly IMO. Sure the reflections of the films on the floor arent there but it is good enough. It overexceeded all expectations on scope and scenes for me and exploration.
Jurassic Park 1 film for me remains the best use of robotics still. IMO.
All this being said, for me the standard was always FF Spirits Within and FF Advent Children complete on blu ray.
I made a point to look out for when FF games would look as good or better with cgi cutscenes, and FFXV and FFVIIR did it the best from what ive seen in trailers and played.
Also, I need A Bugs Life 2 to be a real movie by Pixar :P
Jurassic Park 1 film for me remains the best use of robotics still. IMO.
All this being said, for me the standard was always FF Spirits Within and FF Advent Children complete on blu ray.
I made a point to look out for when FF games would look as good or better with cgi cutscenes, and FFXV and FFVIIR did it the best from what ive seen in trailers and played.
Also, I need A Bugs Life 2 to be a real movie by Pixar :P
Never said they are. Just giving the example that they can to get across the point that CG is a controlled environment with no/very few variables.
I think KH3 does Tangled pretty well all things considered, but nothing in it comes close to the animation of the actual film.
Well, UE4 got one update from next gen hair though. Sure it's not like offline, but its better than what we have now.
Nah. BUT, we have achieved better looking materials. Specifically skin.
Hair and cloth are still well behind early CG. But then things like skin are way ahead of something like Spirits Within. Ray tracing should help a lot, but I'm not sure when you'll ever see them getting hair right, at least long, straight hair like in those Tangled shots. A lot of games will keep doing short hair and lots of braids on women to have styles they can make look good.
I think games striving for realism are around Beowolf.
Though to be fair I have only seen screenshots of it so it might be a different comparison with both in motion.
Though to be fair I have only seen screenshots of it so it might be a different comparison with both in motion.
Do NOT post the dog please.There will always be peaks and lows. You can't pinpoint where we're at that way.
Anyway, here's Sid.
This isn't really something you can quantify since the technologies that power games and CG film all have their own unique requirements, and the time it takes for technology to jump from offline rendering to real time varies, if it even makes the jump. And I wouldn't be surprised if some technology gone in the opposite direction and jumping from games to CG (virtual production seams like it might be a recent candidate).
Take for instance PBR rendering - non of the films you've cited use it. In fact, games were fairly early adopters of the technology - I'm not sure the specific film that first used it in production but I know Gravity is a fairly early example of a film that used it, which came out in 2013, the same year the current gen consoles came out alongside games that made heavy use of the technology.
You would also be very surprised know that many films from that era cited didn't use ray tracing either - Pixar only really started using it on Cars and that was just for reflections, Monsters University was the first film by them that was fully path traced, using their new RIS engine within Renderman. So the fact that games are beginning to use ray tracing and path tracing for rendering elements of the scene means they're already a step above what those films achieved.
On the other hand, NURBS and Subdivision Surfaces never made the jump to video games, so games still suffer from visible polygonal faceting, no matter how good the rendering engines have gotten at rendering those polygons. Compare this to even the first Toy Story where we see perfectly round edges. NURBS is out of the question now since they're a pain to model with and were quickly abandoned by the film industry after the late-90's, but I'm still holding out hope that we'll see Subdivision Surfaces appear next console generation using an adaptive model similar to tesselation.
Take for instance PBR rendering - non of the films you've cited use it. In fact, games were fairly early adopters of the technology - I'm not sure the specific film that first used it in production but I know Gravity is a fairly early example of a film that used it, which came out in 2013, the same year the current gen consoles came out alongside games that made heavy use of the technology.
You would also be very surprised know that many films from that era cited didn't use ray tracing either - Pixar only really started using it on Cars and that was just for reflections, Monsters University was the first film by them that was fully path traced, using their new RIS engine within Renderman. So the fact that games are beginning to use ray tracing and path tracing for rendering elements of the scene means they're already a step above what those films achieved.
On the other hand, NURBS and Subdivision Surfaces never made the jump to video games, so games still suffer from visible polygonal faceting, no matter how good the rendering engines have gotten at rendering those polygons. Compare this to even the first Toy Story where we see perfectly round edges. NURBS is out of the question now since they're a pain to model with and were quickly abandoned by the film industry after the late-90's, but I'm still holding out hope that we'll see Subdivision Surfaces appear next console generation using an adaptive model similar to tesselation.
I know the HD versions "beautified" things a bit, but man the hair in FFX was really good for it's time.
I think real time faces are comparable to CGI from not too long ago, but look at the environments, clothes, and hair, and the illusion is lost.
People insisting that Toy Story hasn't been surpassed are all insane. That movie is ugly as fuck and its technical and aesthetic deficiencies are on full display in every frame.
Anyway, Spirits Within vs Uncharted 4
A long way for CG to reach Uncharted 4.
An inherent flaw in the gaming community being introduced to the concept of raytracing is the idea and/or implication that the only thing holding games back from matching offline CGI is raytracing.
Considering the state of Spiderman CGI no it really doesn't.Spider-Man visuals and models are so slean and crisp it totally looks like a CGI movie at times:
God of War also looks also amazing in-game/ during gameplay.
It very obviously looks like a game when compared to the real deal. Again, a lot of CGI is straight up invisible.
There will always be peaks and lows. You can't pinpoint where we're at that way.
Anyway, here's Sid.
There will still be *that* poster that says this looks better than Uncharted 4 or TLOU2.
The original Toy Story was so new that there are clearly things that took priority as they were quite literally winging it.
it doesn't really have anything to do with the technology, though. it's just bad art direction
At the point we are now is somewhere around the 2004 opening cinematic for World of Warcraft, but with lower poly-count, without all the fur, more rudimentary lighting, but with better faces.
Photo-realistic faces are now better than they were in the 2000s CGI, especially with performance capture. You can also see a world-wide face improvement in both CGI and real time after scanning became widespread in the 2010s.
Where games have been able to utilize new technologies that did not exist at the time, they have matched or surpassed old CG, but only those areas.
Things in games that are still done in the same old fashion they were done 20 years ago in CGI look worse since CGI left them behind. Games have to catch up to all the things CG does with simulations, like fluids, light, and clothes.
Photo-realistic faces are now better than they were in the 2000s CGI, especially with performance capture. You can also see a world-wide face improvement in both CGI and real time after scanning became widespread in the 2010s.
Where games have been able to utilize new technologies that did not exist at the time, they have matched or surpassed old CG, but only those areas.
Things in games that are still done in the same old fashion they were done 20 years ago in CGI look worse since CGI left them behind. Games have to catch up to all the things CG does with simulations, like fluids, light, and clothes.
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See as more efficient methods come up, raw polycount becomes a useless barometric. We have character models approaching 200-300K this gen, and next gen it'll probably be in 400-500K range or higher. But at the same time you don't actually need to have that much polycount if you aren't going to use it or have methods like tessellation used commonly. CG models have lots of polycount for their clothing which moves a lot in comparison to game models, same for hair which in games are alpha blended or a mixture instead of raw polygons. And hair is one thing that's likely never going to be fully poly based and other techniques will come up to replace what we have to make something more realistic than what we have.We have yet to reach 'The Spirits Within' polycount levels, even for main characters:
Final Fantasy: The Technology Within
For some reason tessellation this gen seemed to have been limited to environments and on top of that as an afterthought. Very rarely you get cases with fully tessellation character models or environment built for tessellation like Metro Exodus. But these models don't really need that much polycount
Compared side by side Spirits within character model most definitely looks worse than something like Connor from Detroit or Die Harman from Death Stranding. It's because Spirits Within lags so far behind in shaders, totally lacks SSS, and older CG generally moved like crap because it was still very much a new thing that artists were getting used to back then. These days you can probably have an artist hand animate a model better than a mocapped model from those days.
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Shadows in Toy Story 1 are not ray traced. It uses shadow maps. Material models are also not physically based. Most effects possible with ray tracing were avoided or minimized because of performance.
Thanks for a legit answer instead of talking at me like some rude people.
It's a really outstanding achievement in game animation. That scene has to be the high bar so far.Death Stranding completely blew my mind regarding this. Even though it's real time vs pre-rendered, I think it looks better than Beowulf in motion.
OP
OP
Again, this isnt a "whose pushing the most polygons" its a question of aestheticsWe have yet to reach 'The Spirits Within' polycount levels, even for main characters:
Final Fantasy: The Technology Within