IGN: Nathan Drake will use identical model in cutscene and gameplay.

Your post forgets or ignores several things.

We have no reason to believe aside from AA that the final game won't look identical to the E3 trailer.

You might be right.

1. ND themselves clarified themselves that the E3 trailer was 60 FPS running on a single PS4.

Naughty Dog said the prerendered Last Of Us reveal trailer was running from a Playstation 3 here.

2. ND also said they are no longer doing the 7 PS3/4 rendering. All cutscenes in UC4 will be rendered in realtime, allowing for seamless cutscene>gameplay>cutscene transitions.

Like the prerendered Last Of Us reveal trailer, the scene might not appear in the game.

3. ND also have said the e3 trailer/scene is from level in the game, not just made for E3.

It might be like the Last Of Us reveal trailer.

4. The shadow pic you showed was from the 60fps option. Setting it to 30fps increased shadow fidelity. (Would be interested in seeing this option in UC4)

I am pretty sure that it was locked at 30fps, but it might have been 60. If not, the shadow map resolution for self-shadowing is pretty low even for 30 fps. It is much higher in the cut scenes. In realtime, the shadow map only is displayed on the model when you get really close to it. It is difficult to get the shadow maps to display on the Last Of Us Remastered models since you have to be very close to the model for it to be rendered. Some people might confuse ambient occlusion for shadow maps. Shadow-maps are used for self-shadowing.

Here is an image I captured of Ellie with the framerate locked at 30fps. Ambient occlusion is occurring on Ellie's chin, the shadow map is used for displaying the self-shadowing on Ellie's neck.

RYoYvnL.png



We have no reason to believe aside from AA that the final game won't look identical to the E3 trailer.

If the trailer was already running in realtime at 60fps with near perfect AA, why would we expect something different.

Like the pre-rendered Last Of Us reveal trailer Naughty Dog is using the ambiguous "capture" language and never officially saying "realtime". Here is what Digital Foundry says:
Part of the problem here is the ambiguous wording used by Naughty Dog for its E3 reveal. The blog text says "in-engine" - which skirts around the fact that the engine may be used to generate offline renders, in which case we can't help but feel that the teaser's wording is suggesting that the footage is something that it isn't. As far as we know, Naughty Dog never used the magic phrase "real-time" on the record
 
It's funny you bring up Last of Us because many people claimed the Last Of Us announcement trailer was running in real time. We now know it was a prerendered render using the engine. The scene never appeared in the game. Naughty Dog used the same language in the Uncharted 3 e3 teaser as the Last Of Us reveal trailer. Why would it suddenly mean something different?

The models in realtime and the cinematics in Last Of Us Remastered were exactly the same, the lighting was not. The cinemas had to be rendered to a file and played back because the lighting was too complex to compute in realtime even for the Ps4.

The realtime models in Last Of Us Remastered are amazing (especially when viewed at distance), but sport lower quality shadow maps and lower quality shaders than the cinemas. For instance, look at the low-res step shadow on Ellie's neck.

Here is Ellie in real time on the Ps4 and a "capture" directly from a Ps3. The shaders and lighting is so much higher quality on the PS3 capture. Just look at the way the light envelops the model on the right.

This is very apparent while looking at the hair and the way that light enters through the skin illuminating it. Light doesn't appear to be going through the hair on the the realtime pic. In the cinema, look at the way that light enters through the ears, revealing the fleshy part of the ear.

The 60 fps E3 Uncharted teaser never dropped a frame while supporting superior lighting, unbelievable anti-aliasing, ridiculously high resolution shadow maps, and image quality. The gameplay footage dropped to 29 fps during a realtime cutscene.

That said, none of this maters. The game is going to look great. Perhaps Naughty Dog has a way of scaling the lighting depending on the scene.

Damn fine post here, and nice catch with the language used in the trailers.

2. ND also said they are no longer doing the 7 PS3/4 rendering. All cutscenes in UC4 will be rendered in realtime, allowing for seamless cutscene>gameplay>cutscene transitions.

You're right about what ND said, but wouldn't pre-rendered cutscenes be more conducive to seamless cutscene>gameplay>cutscene transitions since they can be loaded almost instantaneously and can actually be used to mask load times for the next sequence?
 
I don't know what's so hard to believe that the cutscenes will look the same as the E3 teaser? They already do look like that in the gameplay - it is the same quality.

Maybe people are still in denial that this is possible in real time on a PS4?

And sure the gameplay won't have the exact same quality as the cutscenes becasue it is dynamic and the player has the ability to influence what is happening.

But when we get a photo mode I am sure you can create incredible looking frames you never thought could be possible. Look at the Driveclub images they are insane when shot properly.
 
so ToD and if there is water/rain or not involvet always has the same requirements?

a scene during the day and during dry conditions will take es much processing power as the same scene set in a rainy night?

and it doesn't matter either, if it is a cloudy day, or a star-bright night during a full moon?

?
 
I don't know what's so hard to believe that the cutscenes will look the same as the E3 teaser? They already do look like that in the gameplay - it is the same quality.

Maybe people are still in denial that this is possible in real time on a PS4?

And sure the gameplay won't have the exact same quality as the cutscenes becasue it is dynamic and the player has the ability to influence what is happening.

But when we get a photo mode I am sure you can create incredible looking frames you never thought could be possible. Look at the Driveclub images they are insane when shot properly.
Haters gonna hate, I suppose.
 
*rolls eyes* Just give me a fun game. Looks like they're on the right track. Tomb Raider kind of took some of that "adventure game" mindshare but I have my eyes on this game.
 
*rolls eyes* Just give me a fun game. Looks like they're on the right track. Tomb Raider kind of took some of that "adventure game" mindshare but I have my eyes on this game.

The gameplay was the most exciting thing about this demo. I think some people who were expecting to be floored purely by visuals were a bit disappointed but the gameplay was spot on. The exact evolution for the series I would have done. I expect the game will look substantially better in a year's time anyway.
 
https://twitter.com/Corrinne/status/476888680376717312

@ZirpPop Our U4 trailer is an in engine real game level running on a real PS4,Paolo.Our trailer doesn't look good enough to be prerender CGI

Looking through Corrinne's tweets, she doesn't really mention real-time, just real PS4. Could be in-engine but not optimised for 60 (yet?) so the reveal trailer was captured on PS4 but frame by frame (whatever it's called; I remember Halo Reach used the technique in a trailer in which they make it 30fps but in real time it was not locked at 30fps at that time of development, but that subsequently got a graphics downgrade)

The gameplay was the most exciting thing about this demo. I think some people who were expecting to be floored purely by visuals were a bit disappointed but the gameplay was spot on. The exact evolution for the series I would have done. I expect the game will look substantially better in a year's time anyway.

To me it's pretty straight forward. If they achieve 60fps the graphics are impressive as hell, I can't wait to experience it; if they make it 30fps by release I can say I expected to be floored even more, yes.
 
https://twitter.com/Corrinne/status/476888680376717312

@ZirpPop Our U4 trailer is an in engine real game level running on a real PS4,Paolo.Our trailer doesn't look good enough to be prerender CGI

Looking through Corrinne's tweets, she doesn't really mention real-time, just real PS4. Could be in-engine but not optimised for 60 (yet?) so the reveal trailer was captured on PS4 but frame by frame (whatever it's called; I remember Halo Reach used the technique in a trailer in which they make it 30fps but in real time it was not locked at 30fps at that time of development, but that subsequently got a graphics downgrade)

Very few trailers of games in development actually run anywhere near the framerate they appear to us at.

To me it's pretty straight forward. If they achieve 60fps the graphics are impressive as hell; if they make it 30fps by release I can say I expected to be floored even more, yes.
Yeah, same here. If this is their visual bar for 60fps then I'm ecstatic.
 
The gameplay was the most exciting thing about this demo. I think some people who were expecting to be floored purely by visuals were a bit disappointed but the gameplay was spot on. The exact evolution for the series I would have done. I expect the game will look substantially better in a year's time anyway.
Agreed. Really liked what I. Looks like they really opened it up a bit. They seem to be giving you options for how to approach each set piece which they only did some of the time previously. Hand to hand combat still looks a little bunk though.
 
They don't normally talk about it though, or have a PC version to fall back on, which is why I remember the Halo Reach comment specifically.

Yeah, I've just talked to a few programmers in the past. You'll almost never hear anyone say it openly or confirm what the actual framerate was.
 
CG hair has the benefit of not having to render in real time, and even then it's still something being worked on to be more performant.

CG movies have 100s of workstation that calculate a frame.
Also hair isn't really worth it, are you playing a lot of hair-cutting sims or what?
It mostly fills like 2% of the screen.

Like the posters above me said, movies don't have to do it realtime.

Besides, TressFX sucks. It cut my framerate in TR nearly in half, and still manages to look faker than the "solid mass plus some strands with physics" ND approach had with Ellie's hair.

I don't want excuses. It looks awful, a decade behind current CG.

shrek_2,_fiona.jpg


That came out 13 years ago, at the very least we could have something similar =/
 
I don't want excuses. It looks awful, a decade behind current CG.

shrek_2,_fiona.jpg


That came out 13 years ago, at the very least we could have something similar =/

That hair in CG takes at multiple minutes per frame to render at that quality. Up to multiple hours.

Game engines need to render the hair in 1/60th of a second.

It's not the same environment or conditions.

We're still not doing Toy Story in full quality in real-time.
 
Corrie Yu (spelling?) said the environment is an actual part of a level in the game.

Naughty Dog never said real-time. For the Last Of Us reveal trailer many people assumed it was running in real time because Of Evan Wells tweet: "Btw, The Last of Us trailer was entirely captured from a Playstation 3."About the Uncharted 4 E3 trailer, Corrine Yu said "In engine capture on PS4."

zkUlnAm.png


Surely, Evan and Corrine Yu mean the same thing since they are very familiar with graphics terminology. Naughty Dog said that the E3 teaser was "captured" on the playstation like the prerendered Last of Us reveal trailer.

uncharted4inengine.jpg


Even The Last Of Us reveal trailer was an inengine real game level running on a real Ps3. It was not CGI, but it was prerendered by the game engine on the PS3.

Typically, CGI is a prerendered video using a rendering engine like Vray, Mental Ray, Maxwell, or Renderman. In film, each frame is rendered by a render farm of super computers. It does not use in-engine assets or a playstation to render the frame. Here is CGI by Hanno Hagedorn of a few Uncharted characters rendered using Mental Ray in Maya:

IpECoT4.png


Naughty Dog has never used prerendered CGI to render their cutscenes. They have always used their game engine and the console to render the scenes. The cutscenes typically use the same assets but with much more advanced lighting. Even the Last Of Us reveal video was not a prerender CGI. It was rendered by the game engine on the Ps3 just not in real-time.
 
Very few trailers of games in development actually run anywhere near the framerate they appear to us at.


Yeah, same here. If this is their visual bar for 60fps then I'm ecstatic.

I consider the Teaser a target render. A demo of their assets and animation systems, with no actual game processing happening. Probably with some effects baked/faked, because the dynamic system still isn't built.

The gameplay clip, is a demo of where they are at, right now, with everything running in real-time.

With a year to go of development:
features/systems will be added/changed,
effects will be added/changed,
assets will be updated,
code will be profiled and optimized.

Sometimes an optimization will result in a downgrade. But games development isn't about perfect simulations, it's about good/close enough approximations within a frame budget.

Personally, I'm more than happy with the obvious improvements to animation, resolution and AA, as well as the nice additions to some of the gameplay mechanics.

I expect the final product to be better than a live demo a year out from release. But I don't expect it to match the Teaser trailer exactly.

Whether they hit 60fps will be interesting, but having played all the other Uncharted's at 30, it's not a deal breaker if they don't.
 
Honestly, I don't expect Uncharted 4 to run at 60 fps, especially at this rate of graphics. But if Naughty Dog can make magic and the final build runs at 60 fps, I will happily have a meal made with crow :D
 
Even The Last Of Us reveal trailer was an inengine real game level running on a real Ps3. It was not CGI, but it was prerendered by the game engine on the PS3.

Typically, CGI is a prerendered video using a rendering engine like Vray, Mental Ray, Maxwell, or Renderman. In film, each frame is rendered by a render farm of super computers. It does not use in-engine assets or a playstation to render the frame. Here is CGI by Hanno Hagedorn of a few Uncharted characters rendered using Mental Ray in Maya:

IpECoT4.png


Naughty Dog has never used prerendered CGI to render their cutscenes. They have always used their game engine and the console to render the scenes. The cutscenes typically use the same assets but with much more advanced lighting. Even the Last Of Us reveal video was not a prerender CGI. It was rendered by the game engine on the Ps3 just not in real-time.
Thanks for pointing that out. Haven't understand the difference between prerendered in-engine and CGI (also prerendered)
 
Naughty Dog never said real-time. For the Last Of Us reveal trailer many people assumed it was running in real time because Of Evan Wells tweet: "Btw, The Last of Us trailer was entirely captured from a Playstation 3."About the Uncharted 4 E3 trailer, Corrine Yu said "In engine capture on PS4."

zkUlnAm.png


Surely, Evan and Corrine Yu mean the same thing since they are very familiar with graphics terminology. Naughty Dog said that the E3 teaser was "captured" on the playstation like the prerendered Last of Us reveal trailer.

uncharted4inengine.jpg


Even The Last Of Us reveal trailer was an inengine real game level running on a real Ps3. It was not CGI, but it was prerendered by the game engine on the PS3.

Typically, CGI is a prerendered video using a rendering engine like Vray, Mental Ray, Maxwell, or Renderman. In film, each frame is rendered by a render farm of super computers. It does not use in-engine assets or a playstation to render the frame. Here is CGI by Hanno Hagedorn of a few Uncharted characters rendered using Mental Ray in Maya:

IpECoT4.png


Naughty Dog has never used prerendered CGI to render their cutscenes. They have always used their game engine and the console to render the scenes. The cutscenes typically use the same assets but with much more advanced lighting. Even the Last Of Us reveal video was not a prerender CGI. It was rendered by the game engine on the Ps3 just not in real-time.

Yeah just saying that there is a very high likelihood we will see the actual scene.
 
Naughty Dog never said real-time. For the Last Of Us reveal trailer many people assumed it was running in real time because Of Evan Wells tweet: "Btw, The Last of Us trailer was entirely captured from a Playstation 3."About the Uncharted 4 E3 trailer, Corrine Yu said "In engine capture on PS4."

zkUlnAm.png


Surely, Evan and Corrine Yu mean the same thing since they are very familiar with graphics terminology. Naughty Dog said that the E3 teaser was "captured" on the playstation like the prerendered Last of Us reveal trailer.

uncharted4inengine.jpg


Even The Last Of Us reveal trailer was an inengine real game level running on a real Ps3. It was not CGI, but it was prerendered by the game engine on the PS3.

Typically, CGI is a prerendered video using a rendering engine like Vray, Mental Ray, Maxwell, or Renderman. In film, each frame is rendered by a render farm of super computers. It does not use in-engine assets or a playstation to render the frame. Here is CGI by Hanno Hagedorn of a few Uncharted characters rendered using Mental Ray in Maya:

IpECoT4.png


Naughty Dog has never used prerendered CGI to render their cutscenes. They have always used their game engine and the console to render the scenes. The cutscenes typically use the same assets but with much more advanced lighting. Even the Last Of Us reveal video was not a prerender CGI. It was rendered by the game engine on the Ps3 just not in real-time.


This is again, misleading. The Last of Us cutscenes were NOT rendered on a PS3, they were rendered on 6-7 PS3's working in unison.

The language of Corrine Yu suggests it was running on a single PS4, and also that it was running "in game" which was language that was avoided initially.


You wouldn't say "real game level running on A real PS4" "the PS4 is a joy to code for" if you were talking about a trailer prerendered by 7 PS4s.
 
Regarding precise language of tweets and PR statements, it seems like it would be fairly trivial to just ask for clarification about it from ND rather than analyse it with a team of PR scientists.

Regarding hair, it's the area of graphics for character models that currently stands out the worst and I would pay hundreds of dollars for a dedicated "hair card" for my PC to make hair look actually good in games. I'm kind of hoping some middleware will come out this gen to implement that improves it a lot.
 
Regarding precise language of tweets and PR statements, it seems like it would be fairly trivial to just ask for clarification about it from ND rather than analyse it with a team of PR scientists.

Regarding hair, it's the area of graphics for character models that currently stands out the worst and I would pay hundreds of dollars for a dedicated "hair card" for my PC to make hair look actually good in games. I'm kind of hoping some middleware will come out this gen to implement that improves it a lot.

I would love to see Nvidia or AMD try to market that:P
 
Well, there's TressFX and Hairworks. But I don't think they are going to stop being massive resource hogs anytime soon. It's just something that's inherently expensive.
Latest version of TressFX has quite good performance. And there's nothing wrong giving the players the option. I'd love to say more games with TressFX. I would have expected DA:I with TressFX since the partnership with AMD (and Mantle). A shame that in late 2014 swords still flying behind the back and haircuts look like wigs.
 
I'm going to preface this by saying the game looks good either way, but if anyone thinks that the PSX version of this game looks anywhere near as good as the E3 reveal or that somehow the finished game will magically look as good as the E3 reveal, then they are in some serious fanboy denial.
 
I'm going to preface this by saying the game looks good either way, but if anyone thinks that the PSX version of this game looks anywhere near as good as the E3 reveal or that somehow the finished game will magically look as good as the E3 reveal, then they are in some serious fanboy denial.


What about it looks worse?
 
Latest version of TressFX has quite good performance. And there's nothing wrong giving the players the option. I'd love to say more games with TressFX. I would have expected DA:I with TressFX since the partnership with AMD (and Mantle). A shame that in late 2014 swords still flying behind the back and haircuts look like wigs.

AFAIK TressFX 2.0, the one used in TR:DE, isn't quite as accurate as 1.0. Though it certainly is better than most game hair around. I too found its absence from DAI weird.

I'm going to preface this by saying the game looks good either way, but if anyone thinks that the PSX version of this game looks anywhere near as good as the E3 reveal or that somehow the finished game will magically look as good as the E3 reveal, then they are in some serious fanboy denial.

Care to point out those gigantic differences you're implying?
 
AFAIK TressFX 2.0, the one used in TR:DE, isn't quite as accurate as 1.0. Though it certainly is better than most game hair around. I too found its absence from DAI weird.



Care to point out those gigantic differences you're implying?

It is just that this doesn't look anywhere near the E3 teaser to him:

ibuILb0Uztrrml.png
 
Yeah, let's just take a highly compressed stream screen cap of gameplay during a different time of day, and try to pass it off as a genuine difference in quality.
You do realize this was supposed to be a joke pic that is now being taken seriously by most gaming sites, right?
 
You wouldn't say "real game level running on A real PS4" "the PS4 is a joy to code for" if you were talking about a trailer prerendered by 7 PS4s.

Sorry, this might get a little technical. I guess you are referring to this:

wEqm1.jpg


Evan Wells said that the prerendered Last Of Us trailer was from a PS3. The teaser was probably rendered by a single PS3. You don't have to use a renderfarm to render a small scene. However, it makes more sense to create a renderfarm when rendering multiple cutscenes since it will be faster. I'm nowhere as talented as the folks at Naughty Dog, so don't laugh. Here is a CG image, I rendered on my single PC using Maya's mentalray. It took 12 hours. I could have also rendered it using multiple PCs to render it faster.

eJlunsY.png


The cutscenes are generated by their ingame engine. There is a reason why you want the cutscenes to run in the game engine. I don't want to get too technical here. The engine is written with code. If your cutscenes are generated by the game engine, you have the ability to scale the lighting for the game depending on the situation.

For those who want a more technical understanding of this read Hable's realtime Uncharted 2 Real time Rendering Course. Let me warn you if you don't have a mathematical understanding of lighting or coding, it might seem like Greek. The paper goes over how they scale shaders such as the skin shader, cloth shader, and hair shader to work in the game and the cutscenes. When rendering lighting in realtime, you have to make a decision if it is worth the cost. You always have to approximate.

For the skin shader, I'll try to explain what they are trying to do. Naughty Dog is trying to take Nvidia's realtime SSS shader used on skin and use it in Uncharted 2. They say the original algorithm takes to long to compute. So they scale it back for the cutscenes with an approximation. Then they try to scale it back for the realtime game and decide "You spend most of normal gameplay staring at the back of Drake’s neck, so a separate pass for SSS was not worth the cost."

EoyucUZ.png


Here is what the previous Naughty Dog lead artist, Rich Diamant, said on Zbrushcentral: "the in game renders do use a fake SSS shader.. its used for our cinematics and the game version uses a slightly dulled down version."

Even with the same model, the complexity of the shaders and lighting can completely transform the way something looks. As I said before, Naughty Dog has always scaled the lighting and shaders in the game compared to the cutscenes.

The shader used on Drake's face is much more complicated in the E3 Teaser. You can see the light go beneath the surface of Drake's skin get absorbed and exit the skin in the E3 teaser. The shader looks very close to Nvidia's original SSS shader. The gameplay demo featured a much more scaled back version. To me it looks like an approximation of E3's "Jungle Drake" shader. There is a certain fleshiness present in the E3 footage that is not in the gameplay footage. It doesn't feel like skin when light hits it.

For comparison sake, I've tried to get a close up of real-time models of Joel and Ellie in Last Of Us Remastered to compare the shader with the shader used on Drake in the E3 teaser. I've included the orignal Nvidia SSS shader as well. Don't look at the difference in day and night, look at the detail in the SSS shader and the way light interacts with it.
Vu7sWja.png

jdpmpzU.png

XZ6fodm.png

kPJluhj.png


Even the shader on Drake's hair is scaled down. Look at the way light catches Drake's hair in the E3 teaser. In the e3 teaser there is an advanced lighting technique called scattering based on the Kajiya-Kay algorithm. You can see the light scattering through individual strands which illuminates neighboring hairs. There might be light scattering in the gameplay demo but it is not as pronounced. To me, it looks like AMD's simplified realtime hair shader. One thing not present in the gameplay footage version of the hair is self-shadowing. Based on previous games, it looks like Naughty Dog is using a diffuse follow off instead of actual self-shadowing. The E3 trailer used actual shadowing.
 
^ We know in-game Drake doesn't look exactly like teaser Drake. What you should be doing is comparing demo cutscene Drake/Brother (who gets a nice closeup as seen above) to teaser Drake.
 
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