How close are we to photorealism?

Mass Effect 2/3, Co D:BO, and Halo:Reach. All of those games have excellent graphics. You've got human characters that very much look like humans. Rather than focusing on how they look you spend more time on what they say and do, etc. I don't want to be taken as a curmudgeon saying that graphics never need to get better, there's no reason to not try and improve them, but they are to a point now where even for the pickiest sonofabitch graphics can get out of the way of the story. So at this point the only reason to still be in a graphical race is just a big prick waving contest between developers.

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

>implying that graphical race has ever been anything else

People aren't as awful as the internet makes them out to be.

There's always been a degree of prick waving but even the most engaging games back in the day were still you talking to people who looked like they were made out of legos. I don't miss that even a little bit.

edited 17th Jun '11 5:38:21 AM by Tyyrlym

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

^^^The characters in Mass Effect only look realistic if they're meant to portray people who've been attacked by a rogue laminator.

Simply put, we're close, but so, so very far away. We're still not at the point where people don't look like they have plastic skin.

Well, I'm sure people will say this of the games of this period in 20 years, too. No generation sees the need for more advanced graphics (and I'm no exception to that, either, I'd also rather have story and gameplay development), but later generations then can't live without that advancement.

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You completely missed the point. It's not that the characters are perfectly realistic. It's that they're realistic enough to not distract because they look like lego people.

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

Realistic graphics does not mean a realistic setting.

Photorealistic graphics can always only add more immersion. For instance, exploring a world in which you could see even the patterns on leaves, would be very immersive and suspend disbelief quite a lot.

What I do find it though, is a waste of time when it takes much more money and effort that should instead go to gameplay.

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If I had to guestimate, I'd say we are a generation away from photorealistic graphics being *possible*. However, actually making graphics that good will be rather expensive. I suspect that we are quite a ways from photorealism being practical, outside of the odd specialized high budget game. Which very likely means we'll have a swing back to stylized graphics ( subtle or not ), as people tire of cheap "photorealism".

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If you need the veins on a leaf to be detailed in order for you to suspend disbelief then your suspension of disbelief doesn't exist.

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

You're making things conveniently overly black and white/simple to make a humorous point. I hate it when people do that.

There are all sorts of shades of disbelief and suspension of.

Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]

Sucks to be you right now then.

Suspension of Disbelief is about being able to look at something that is not real but to put that aside for the moment and accept it as real. If you need something to look absolutely real before you can do that then you're not really suspending your disbelief. You need it to look real before you're accepting it as real.

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

You don't need it. NES games can suspend disbelief.

But it helps.

And did you just pull a "sucks to be you" right now? Seriously? Seriously?

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The thing is, having characters whose faces look like they've been buffered is horribly distracting and off-putting to me.

Not even live-action films look literally like reality, and they can certainly look stylized.

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Slooooooowly getting there. Games like Heavy Rain and LA Noire are really starting to get facial details and expressions right, but they're not perfect.

I'd say give it another decade, and we'll start seeing facial simulations effective enough to fool even some of the more astute facial experts.

We actually build much more comlicated and detaild models then get used in games now - they have to be downgraded.

And this ignores the fact that tehnology will solve this problem anyway.

"When you cut your finger, I do not bleed." Response of a man who lived on the outskirts of a concentration camp.

This video is 4 years old.

edited 17th Jun '11 1:52:20 PM by Boredman

cum

I've seen this get brought up a LOT lately, maybe its because of the recent Wii U announcement or something. Anyway, I think within one or two more console generations we'll get it. Its just that we've gone so far that it would be, imo, minor.

We're at the point where we can make a face, but we're not at the point where we can animate it correctly, is what I think. That video looked pretty accurate (it was really creepy though) but the way she moves is just so, so wrong. Like the features didn't work together to make it look photo-real.

After we get the way the face and body moves correctly is when we'll get as far as we can. I dunno, might just be me, but the Call of Duty men always looked clunky to me. =/

How close are we to photorealism? When a friend showed this to me the first time, I almost thought this video was real

We've been beaten over the head with it so much that I literally thought that the above video was not a far away step in terms of graphical competence in video game.

And it bugs me.

There is little wrong with the realism as an aesthetic but really it does nothing for me. I'm more immersed in the world of Okami than I am in Call Of Duty, the aesthetics and gameplay should always be the important thing and graphics will come up eventually. Realism as the graphical and aesthetically be all end all was always a bad idea becuase it means wasting more money and resources on making a game visually good and more or less likely means a good story or good gameplay will be left in the dust.

It's part of why I have a better time sticking to say a lot of Nintendo games or be more attracted to a lot of stylized games.

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close enough that, as far as games are concerned, even if someone DID create a game with graphics like that i wouldn't consider it a major selling point.

Andre Bazin once said that the greatest aspiration of an artist is to capture the real.

I say: Fuck that. There's gonna be dragons.

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I agree that imagination needs to come first and foremost, but if you could throw in true photorealism without sacricing the important parts, it could make even the greatest fantasies seem surreal.

The one case in which it wouldn't work is in games with the manga art style. It would look very creepy. They're better off sticking to CGI.

However, in games like Halo, Battlefield, and Mass Effect photorealism would be really cool.

edited 17th Jun '11 5:01:07 PM by TheProffesor

What I think we really lack are algorithms that allow us to do realism conveniently. We can clone a 2d sprite hundreds of times in hundreds of possible color variations or spread a texture all over a humongous object with some simple code but we don't have something like a 'light this box realistically' macro yet.

When our shortcuts catch up with our technology we'll be able to do photorealism as an afterthought if we want to after building our amazing world and scripting our amazing characters. Imagine that.

That would be awesome.

I'm more of a fan of surrealism as opposed to realism. Realism is making things seem like real life. Surrealism is about making a fantasy feel real. That's why I want photorealism. More like Photosurrealism.

Even the newest MK doesn't have such photorealistic graphics... we've gone backwards

edited 17th Jun '11 8:05:51 PM by ActuallyComma

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