Naughty Dog working on million poly game ready characters?
http://playstationlifestyle.net/2012/01/20/naughty-dog-working-on-next-gen-game-with-million-poly-character-models/
So i was just wondering what you guys thought on this? is it even technically possible or a typo? i think it could read either, million poly game ready models, or taking those million poly models and making them game ready.
Would that mean the baking of normal maps to cease? or maybe higher resolution normal maps for the high poly models?
Ive seen what poeple here can do with 1,000 polys, so having that much to spend seems amazing,
So i was just wondering what you guys thought on this? is it even technically possible or a typo? i think it could read either, million poly game ready models, or taking those million poly models and making them game ready.
Would that mean the baking of normal maps to cease? or maybe higher resolution normal maps for the high poly models?
Ive seen what poeple here can do with 1,000 polys, so having that much to spend seems amazing,
Replies
this^
the quote they picked says: this digital sculptor will be responsible for making million poly models game ready"
Everybody I know would assume that to mean: "bake a normal map to a game res model from your sculpt"
I think the article writer is just unfamiliar with dev terms.
http://area.autodesk.com/userdata/image/inhouse/w/4a527-b3xij-2a32s-7u75t.jpg
Pretty dense geometry, almost pre-rendered cinematic kind of dense.
Million polies is probably over-exaggeration (and I can't imagine skinning and handling million polygons in any convenient manner) but since their titles seem to be so character-oriented I would not be surprised if they threw even more geometry to character models in their next game.
iWerez it will probably take 1 or 2 more generation of consoles or 5 years before its possible, doesnt mean its a good idea though.
In this case though, this is a simple case of the author jumping the gun, not doing any research and therefore not understanding his sources.
But no somewhere said that the characters in UC 3 were ~40k tris
Unless every part of a model is going to get super close to the camera. Then its pointless.
sculpting a char with several million poly... bake some vectordisplacement maps into ptex...
mixed with realtime tesselation to get 1 million poly in closeup...
dream end...
amd is working on hardware support for realtime ptex and megatexture stuff...
http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/1601#1
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/6
Rigging a few million poly character is not something i think i would like to do. Thats why they use sub-division surfaces with the above maps.
Imho, engines are already pushing enough polies, especially with tessellation that character can already have good silhouettes.
Id love to see lighting and shaders pushed even further, over trying to render more polies on screen.
Proper GI and Physically correct illumination models make much more believe scenes than rounding off some characters finger.
they probably do go over 1mil
the high count is probably more to do with the quality of the render. The higher your polycount, the crisper the shader responds to it. Things like specular really respond to seemingly unnecessary polygon resolution.
if you store the displacement data into textures you could do similar also ingame...
refering to my post above... texture streaming shouldnt be the problem annymore...
The in PS3 era, we get at most 30-40K for a character, this the MC in the grill type of setting.
So by the time the PS4 rolls out, we should be around the 70-80K limit for character.
Please not I'm talking about vertices with bone and other added stuff to make it feasible.
In UDK, you can already run into the 72K limit they put per mesh, so I'm not sure what the consoles can do to even catch up to this.
We're not going to get double the amount of polygons for character, we'll get several amount of doubles, but then again, that is also irrelevant as we'll focus more on workable meshes using proper tessellation and shaders to add detail.
So I don't believe we'll suddenly start making these heavy and hard to work with meshes when we just as well can start pushing tessellation to bring in a non-polygonal silhouette and shape.
Also consider that there's no definite amount of polygons you use for a character, as it always varies depending on how many you'll have in your scene, which in this generation has been from 1 up to 1 mirrion.
Typically you only do it once, you'd have to be pretty fast to do it at 60fps
arf arf
Another thing to consider is that launch titles never use the hardware as efficiently as those that come out in the end of a console's lifecycle.
Because the current generation has lasted quite a few years, there will certainly be a big jump in possibilities, but nothing compared to what will be possible once companies have more experience with the platform.
I guess what I wanted to say was that it'll be a bit more than 'just' twice as much polygons considering the console hardware was set over 5 years ago.
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Also, a very recent game, RAGE, seems to still use just a fullbright diffuse for the skybox. No movement, nothing. Just a huge wallpaper. =( We seriously need some more detail in our console worlds.
Also, the comments on the op article are just so... I guess it's the authors fault not understanding what he was reporting but... damn some people are stupid.
One cool thing to know about Uncharted is they do not LOD anything really. They say its more of a cost to do LOD's than it is to just leave it well enough alone. Pretty crazy. Dunno if that changed in UC3 but I think it was that way for 2.
So I wonder if we'll actually see it double.
That's a good point, but it really only applies to characters and deforming meshes - and those have already gotten pretty high, if you look at the Uncharted or Gears LOD0's. I could see a lot of possibility for insane mechanical/environmental scenes that are very complex, with lots of stuff that breaks this silhouette. It seems like that's getting easier and easier to do without the sheer number of tris causing any sort of a bottleneck.
And for the most part we dont use LOD's that is true. There are some things that have them, generally its things like vehicles and such. For environments we used progressive meshes to a very slight extent. Really depended on the level, the artist and the asset they had if they wanted to use them/they would work for there level. Things like fade out were more relied upon then LOD's.
For example, I never used them at all for my level. Having LOD's doubled the memory cost per asset for the overall level memory and every single one of my levels was at the cap and took months to even get it within runable rates (silly big levels haha).