Sure, sure.
Proper lighting adds lip color, lip fillers, removes cheek fat, makes brow ridges more prominent and turns a silver-blonde into a dirty blonde.
Proper lighting also lights up your face, when the actual light source is behind your head.
Proper lighting removes fog and glow from streetlights too.
Proper lighting maintains the exact same prebaked shadow maps in an open area of Starfield where NPCs are mulling about, where you need to be in the 4th dimension to explain how all those shadows line up to the light source. Path tracing isn't proper lighting. DLSS 5 on top of PS3 shadow maps is.
Proper lighting randomly adds special lights specifically to your appendages. Lights that don't exist in the actual game, because why the fuck not? Big black lady's arm is too dark to see in the shadow. Gotta light it up!
Proper lighting removes most, if not all, self shadowing, because people walk around with invisible ring lights suspended in front of them. It's the future after all.
Proper lighting gives
everyone dramatic edge lighting too, so that they can all float around the scene with halos around them, like Jesus, even if there is no light source to explain it.
And yes, proper lighting makes the same damn person in the same damn game using the same "lighting" technique look like different people depending on how close to the camera they are. Alex pointed this out too but who cares? She hotttt
And in the most special moments, when you least expect it, proper lighting could change your race too!
I was refraining from commenting on the technical competence of this "lighting system" because I hadn't taken a close enough look. But the more I look at, it's a goddamn joke. Here's what it actually does:
- Adds an intense SSAO like shadow around everything it identifies as an object in the frame. Doesn't matter where the light source is, how many lights exist in the scene or what the incident angle is, it will just add it anywhere it can get away with, so you can drool over all them new shadows. If the original game had it already, it darkens or blows it out further.
- Adds SSR wherever it identifies reflective surfaces
- Edge lights everything it considers a character model
- Makes them all look like they are front lit even if they are not
- Adds a bunch of bullshit to their face that it thinks makes them more pleasing to look at
- Dynamic tone mapping to blow out all subtle details, so you can be blown away, just like those TVs stacked up at Best Buy
Annnnd that's it. There is no actual path traced approximation, modeling of light sources, shadows or interplay. It's a wannabe system operating in 2D space on a single frame that has no clue how lights even work. The reason it's working at all is because the game engine behind it has done all the grunt work
before it has been summoned. It's trained on internet footage, a majority of which is authored with artificial lights and post processing, and making best guesses at an admittedly impressive speed. Just a bunch of made up bullshit to keep you drooling. If you actually wanted believable lighting, you need to path trace the game first, like RE: Requiem, so it can dress it up and take all the credit, cuz she so hottttt now. It's the horrible spouse who blames you for his/her negatives and takes credit for your positives.
I noticed how much Alex was pulling his punches during his segments. Pausing and hesitating. Like he didn't want to be too harsh and make his peers look like bumbling charlatans that got too carried away by the shiny new thing. Regardless of what drove them to walk back on their glazing, I respect them for taking it the chin and letting Alex subtly tell them they need their eyes and brains checked.
After examining all the footage, i can confidently say this is not the future of rendering. It isn't even the current of rendering. It's vaporware built on generative AI and the actual things it brings to the table (like SSR, SSAO, "dynamic mode") are the worst aspects of last gen rendering that we have been trying to escape for a decade.
If anyone with any actual technical credentials still marvels at this for being an
objective technical leap forward in lighting, check yourselves. It's a completely subjective
aesthetic leap at best that falls apart the moment anything moves. This is not even my specific line of work and it still doesn't pass my sniff test. It's not just shitting on art. Clearly a lot of you don't give a fuck about art, integrity or ethics, so there's no point wasting anymore of my time on that. It shits on physics, decades of computer science and common sense.
And for those who want to enjoy this "option", go right ahead. Doesn't change the fact that it is a dumb blonde of an option with the memory of a gold fish, can't read, write or speak any coherent language and changes faces depending on time of day.
Everything I've listed above as observations from footage is evidence based. But I can't even be bothered to make any more image comparisons. It's not worth my time. If you have actually watched all the footage, you will know exactly every instance I'm referring to. If you disagree, l urge you to go take another look and we can debate it.
To save me time in the future, I'm just going to quote this wall of text anytime anyone calls this abomination "lighting" or "technical leap". You have been warned. Lol
