I agree with his overall point, but I would point out: realism is not usually the point, the point is to look good. The problem with realism is once you get past "wow the computer can do that now", it's not very interesting -- most of reality is pretty dull looking!
I don't think this is true at all. I've been experimenting with a physical sky / atmosphere modeling, and it really seems that the most physically accurate sky is the most beautiful. I think this applies more generally to all light and shadows, and all natural effects which people perceive as beautiful, and at the same time difficult / expensive to recreate on a computer.
Not to disagree with you, but I've noticed that many people have very little clue about what nature looks like. I see that in CGI/games a lot, trees, clouds, atmosphere, grass, moon... totally wrong from what actually happens in the world. But it looks good! :D
I recall a GDC presentation about a physically-based atmospheric model developed for a (good) AAA game released sometime in the last decade, and it reportedly took up a noticeable part of the frame budget, so evidently you’re not alone in this opinion.
I'm not sure you would need that unless you're making a space simulator. Surely the model just spits out a color gradient which you might as well hardcode?
There are indeed precomputed LUTs, but apparently you need to be a bit more sophisticated than that if you want your sun angle to be dynamic, and they also did clouds: https://www.ea.com/news/physically-based-sky-atmosphere-and-....
Modern games struggle with readability which is why there is a trend to paint interactive objects yellow. So arguably the realistic visuals are interfering with the purpose of the game.
I personally love the Quake 1 sky textures. It's possible to have a stylized sky in a game that looks good.
> I think this applies more generally
I would say the sky and a private eye's dimly lit, smoke-filled 1920s office are pretty different, actually.
While the resulting looks and aesthetics are very different, the same physical model for light scattering can be used to describe both. Any approximations of that are a concession to available computer performance.
I would suggest that both are true!
It's common for games to have an intentional designed aesthetic which uses cultural and social and graphical "languages" to create specific emotional impacts and effects. The lower the budget the more this is leaned into for expedient reasons but that in turn creates genre expectations! Low-poly and 8-bit are fine examples of what were once a product of technical limitations becoming their own target.
Subject matters also, and the overall aesthetic of the game; triple-A games often push towards what you're describing, that the most impactful and compelling may also be the most real...
...or at least, contain elements of it. Lots of games mess with color shading and saturation etc for the impact-reasons...
I do look forward to the era of more "photorealistic" rendering as you prefer, especially for natural landscapes like those I enjoy IRL. Some of which can have very "unnatural" feeling swings in tone and all sorts of things! I was just up in the mountains this week and saw a lot more variation in lighting and its impact on a consistent landscape (mountains across a lake) than I've ever seen in a game engine so far :)
> It's common for games to have an intentional designed aesthetic ... to create specific emotional impacts and effects.
And before games this was true of movies and before that photos and paintings. A master cinematographer can spend hours lighting a shot that will later be praised for its 'gritty realism' :-).
One theme that is common to almost all visual art that strives for some form of realistic appearance is that they start out with real material appearances and physical lighting behavior. Both are inescapable parts of the reality in our physical world, anyway.
By extension, this means that it is highly desirable to have a renderer capable of reproducing the real world as a baseline for highly controllable aesthetic tweaks. When you look especially at VFX specific tools, they have - almost without exception - two layers of tools: the first creates a realistic simulation (e.g. water/fire/shattering...) and the second layer allows for tweaks to control the final look.
If you want something realism-adjacent that makes sense. If you want to create Antichamber, which is a game about non-Euclidean geometry, maybe not. You can carefully try to match up the lighting on both sides of an invisible teleporter, but it's going to be much easier if your engine doesn't try to do lighting at all. (Antichamber is mostly flat colors, basic flat shading, and hand-drawn accents)
Yup. I once came across a (picture of a) test print made by one of the old black-and-white street photography greats, and it was all marked up with development adjustments for better lighting, contrast, and subject separation. Those were always a photographer’s main concern.
I think a Horizon Zero Dawn developer characterized their approach as “more realistic than reality” or something along those lines, i.e. they were aiming for the kind of perfect saturated look that you would only get in that golden hour with ideal surroundings but that we all recognize as real and at the same time don’t find too dull to stare at for hours. And I think for daytime HZD did do that quite well.
> I once came across a (picture of a) test print made by one of the old black-and-white street photography greats, and it was all marked up with development adjustments for better lighting, contrast, and subject separation.
Likewise, Ansel Adams is particularly famous for popularizing manipulation of exposure, both in-camera snd during development.
I don't know, I was very happy when I discovered what Radiance can do with what you give it. I hear people get very good looking rendering with Blender, but my brain doesn't work like that (anymore?). Point being that not everything is about games and looking good, we need reliable tools to render synthetic scenes to assess a lot of non-game related things, like quality of lighting in architecture before erecting a skyscraper or buying a house etc. To that end, every bit of knowledge like the author seems be focused on, helps. I absolutely relate to the problem with "faking" things. Even developers of Unreal engine had acknowledged -- all too late, as it is -- that it's _light_ that most affects our perception of "realism". That and materials, which is why they had some sort of field trip to Iceland taking raw photos of rocks they could add to their materials library.
Another problem with looking good is that it's a) subjective (since it has no real or objective reference point, really) and b) it quickly goes stale once something else looks "better". Just look at Doom. It looked good in 1993, everyone would agree on that. It's not realistic, never was realistic and will certainly never be realistic unless you take a particular cocktail of drugs, I guess.
Oh my! Agree 100%. Tangentially, I love games without motion blur, with perfect and unrealistic graphics, and they happen to need much less intensive graphics. Also, animations with intentionally unrealistic dynamics and appearances that are well thought and go well with their invisible (to my non-artist eyes) contribution to the story. Not a big fan of extreme depiction of emotions in some styles of anime or cartoons though, to be clear.
I was excited when seeing things that are wonderfully realistic, but just as a sign of how far we have gone in computer graphics.
Tangential, but sometimes real images can also seem unreal. I remember seeing a photo of Earth and the Moon with the Moon on the foreground that looked like a bad CGI. But it was actually a photograph taken by a space probe. Or, one can think about those photos of the Apollo lunar module that looked "wrong" (and probably helped some conspiracy theories spread), but were obviously correct - just there's no atmosphere to speak of on the Moon, so no light scattering etc. That said often, space images actually use "false colors" [1]
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-the-colors-in...
Condensed rant: Humans are blind to the most common gasses on our atmosphere (N2, O2) and sometimes have difficulty perceiving its most common liquid (H2O). This is sensible, since otherwise we'd be helplessly wandering through "visible" fog to fall off cliffs or be eaten by giant carnivorous bats. Our "colors" are mostly a quirk of where we're from.
Now suppose some aliens arrived at our planet and said: "Wow, your planet is the most-boring we've ever seen, it's all just one N2-colored ball." We'd be a little offended! Clearly, the dumb aliens are looking at it wrong!
Flip that in reverse, and we have an artistic obligation to choose "good colors" for planets that maximizes their interesting features. We already did it for surface-views on Earth.
We're living in a weak force superconductor. If we were living in an electric superconductor we'd see nothing because electromagnetic waves would be blocked from entering our eyeballs. Because we are living in a weak force superconductor, the weak force is blocked from entering our eyeballs (in fact it's blocked at all but sub-nuclear distances) and so we didn't develop weak force eyeballs.
If there's an alien living outside of the superconductor it probably has eyes that can sense all four components of the electroweak force, including the combination that we call electromagnetism, which is the only one that can pass through the weak force superconductor. Such a being would see the superconductor "material" as something like a block of red jello, only allowing one "color" to pass through and would be as surprised to see us there as we would be if we saw sentient beings inside a block of YBCu superconductor alloy.
Although we wouldn't have a way to see sentient beings inside a block of superconductor alloy, because we don't have any more long-range forces to probe it with, besides gravity. Our outside-weak alien could still see us with electromagnetism which is the one remaining long-range force we have, but that's disabled inside an electric superconductor too.
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these materials are transparent to light it is not a property of the human vision system that light goes trough N2
These materials are transparent to some light. They absorb a lot of infrared and ultraviolet. The human vision system can see the light that isn't absorbed and as a result is abundant in our environment.
The good news is that most stars have a spectrum roughly similar to ours (not too much infrared or ultraviolet) so we can expect that aliens can probably see these wavelengths.
I think there’s a value in realism, ARC Raiders is one of my favorite games right now and it reminds of of movies like Stalker or The Shape of Water, movies that show old run down buildings and industrial complexes in their full glory, paint flaking, water in the wrong place, it’s just fantastic. It really sells me on being in a once busy space that’s been abandoned and fallen from its former glory.
I watched a video essay about the nightclub in Hitman 3 and this is basically what they said, too. The place doesn't have to look completely realistic, it has to sell the vibe of the space. Plenty of nightclubs in games that have fine graphics and props but actually don't feel like nightclubs. That was the point of the video actually.
I’m not on the ARC Raiders art team, nor have I even played the game. But I can say with some confidence that what people react to in computer graphics isn’t realism per se, it’s verisimilitude.
Right, too many games pitch the "realism" of "really like a Hollywood movie", reproducing effects which are really telltale flaws in cameras, microphones, or the theater-experience.
This is in contrast to the realism of "if you were there in person". If you step outside and look towards the sun and see lens-flares, consult an eye-doctor. If you see polyhedral lens-flares or bokeh... consult a roboticist.
I think you have to exaggerate certain things to get them over certain mediums.
The lens flare isn't telling you the sun literally makes polygonal shapes. It's telling you the sun is fucking bright and it's dazzling you, and it's doing that by reference to something we've seen in films shot with cameras.
You can achieve it other ways. HL2 Lost Coast - Valve's HDR tech demo - conveys the same basic fact by delaying the tonemap change. As you walk from the dark area to the bright area, the tonemap stays set for the dark area so your whole screen is washed out in white, until it gradually shifts to normal over about half a second. This is also how your pupils work, of course.
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> If you see polyhedral lens-flares or bokeh... consult a roboticist.
It's not just games. I just saw an episode of a TV show in which two people were sitting in a car, talking to each other.
Whichever one of them was speaking was in focus. The other one was dramatically blurred. This traded back and forth rapidly, because that's how conversations work. It was incredibly bizarre.
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Not only look good, but also to be informative. His photos demonstrate the exact problem: Without the lighting hack you can have a 90° angle with almost no visible line, if the two surfaces are evenly lit. That's important visual information you've just left out.
As a player, I'd rather compromise realistic rendering in order to be able to see the contours of things.
> most of reality is pretty dull looking!
This is extremely untrue. It may be true that you spend most of your time in a dull-looking office or apartment, but most of reality -- at least here on Earth -- is quite visually interesting, and games are usually placed in visually interesting environments rather than set entirely within an office or apartment.
Beyond that, I would argue that the entire point of realism is not looking good (although it can look good), but rather immersion. The intent is to transport you to another world and make you feel like you're actually inside the scene. If your goal isn't to do that, then there's no need to bother with realism at all, and you can instead opt for highly stylized graphics that are intentionally designed to maximize aesthetically pleasing appearance and gameplay readability.
I think stylized scenes can be just as immersive. I've never been in a game and been like "GAH this pixel art is throwing me out of it!" I'm not saying realism is without value, just that it's probably a little overrated in the graphics space.
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