Ya, haha sorry. These are coming from the community after the games been out a while. The shots they showed of the game on its release weren't this good.
Re: It's cool to see tech that's expandable past its release date.
These Crytek guys are unbelievable. I would go as far to say that they are the new id Software. What id Software were doing for the games industry (technology wise) 10 - 15 years ago, Crytek are doing now. Amazing.
These Crytek guys are unbelievable. I would go as far to say that they are the new id Software. What id Software were doing for the games industry (technology wise) 10 - 15 years ago, Crytek are doing now. Amazing.
-caseyjones
Yeah.
Cool stuff. Too bad nobody can really run it like that yet for the most part.
This went around work earlier today, I'll just post what I responded with:
(This was in response to, "They don't have much more tech than we do, just better artists!")
"No doubt their env art is amazing. They (at least once) went on texture/reference vacations to Fiji. . . and spent a very long time, making high poly versions of every plant, and rendering those down to lower poly versions. They are using ridiculously high res textures on pretty much everything. They have some pretty awesome sky stuff as well (lighting is helping these out a LOT) Such as the atmospheric perspective, and dynamic god ray tech shown here:
Later, my lead responded with a comparison shot between ULTRA-HIGH and LOW graphics modes. LOW basically looks like most games, and ULTRA-HIGH looks like the above. So obviously the "art" isn't all of it.
The grass is a little bit lol in the bottom right-most image. Still impressive, though. I think it's the lighting they use that makes the most difference - It's looks so natural.
Is their lighting setup mostly hands off with a lot of baking and pre-calc beforehand, or are there a lot of carefully placed point and spotlights in these images that are done by some very good lighters?
I was bashing cryengine quite alot yesterday. Fuckin program crashes when you go into special menus if you have a wacom installed. I mean, whattafaaaack.
And that you have to export a material, then rename it and then rename it back again to the original name for settings to save and get it to work with your mesh.
COME OOOOON!
(These are issues that more than I have so it´s not a matter of my suckiness ) *artist rage*
the 2 secret things that make crysis look so crazy realistic at times is the really good SSAO they have, and the slight desaturation effect of color in shadowed areas . Theres quite a bit of bad artwork in crysis, but this together with the really good foliage really hide it well and pull everything together! oh yeah and then theres the other standard stuff done really well, textures, shadow projection, HDR etc etc etc. Wish I had this futuristic computer than can run it though
yeah skanker, all i see is deca-wheels... which i find crazy considering they probably modelled more polys into some hooks on a coat rack i saw on a wall inside somewhere.
hehe i couldn't play crysis very good till i bought a new videocard for my new computer. I'm now re-playing crysis and warhead with all settings ultra high/fanatic, and all is O.o
Is their lighting setup mostly hands off with a lot of baking and pre-calc beforehand, or are there a lot of carefully placed point and spotlights in these images that are done by some very good lighters?
I played with the engine recently here are my thoughts(please forgive me if I amde any mistakes)>
I think Cryengine`s main strength lies in the realistic lighting of huge open ended environements.
It closely mimicks the physical world and its controls(there is a few) can be accessed through the Time of Day window (http://doc.crymod.com/SandboxManual/TimeOfDay.html)
While you can place all the usual light types(spot, omni etc.) manually it is only to add local points of interest(like a torch emitting light or something ).
SSAO or screen space ambient occlusion is awesome and adds a consistent AO pass to your objects without the need to bake it yourself.
The editor is more WYSIWYG than the unreal editor mainly because there is no need to bake lightmaps whatsoever.(that`s kinda cool right?) What you see is really what you get, you dont have to rebuild lighting everytime you change something.
That said, as Notorious P.I.G said, working with the editor can be a bit of pain sometimes as there is some weird bugs you have to learn to live with.
You would except from an engine that cost $22 million to make to have a more decent editor without the silly bugs. But it`s not too bad overall, and stabilty wasnt a real issue for me either. One more thing, if you are used to Max I think you will find the editor UI familiar.
Tumerboy`s post said something about ultra high res textures. Playing with the editor I found that`s really not the case. Most of the props for example use really small tiling textures.
Texture sizes of 256x256 and 512x256 etc. are much more common than 1k textures. Some of the props doesnt even have any specular/normal texture at all. The only 2k textures I have seen were on some characters.
Compare that to the huge texture sizes of Unreal where pretty much everything is uniquely unwrapped. Obviously, this is because the two games have completely differnt designs, so what is working in Unreal wouldn`t work in the huge environment of Crysis.
All this aside I was wondering why no more games use Cryengine, wouldn`t Fallout 3 look gorgeous in it? Or is it because companies worry that the high system specs scare away some of their potential customers?
Or is it because the engine is only suited for games with huge environemnts?
It really is about the lighting in CryEngine 2, we used it last year and we found that even freshly imported models with no texture just looked so good in the editor lol.
The editor was really buggy when I was using it, and there loads of workarounds to do things pre-SDK and even after. Lol I can't believe they haven't fixed that material stuff and you still have to rename it, I had that problem too.
The SSAO as mentioned before works great, you don't have to bake in any AO in your texture and it will still look great. If you do bake in some subtle AO it looks even better
The physics should also get a mention, it's really simple to create breakable objects using labeled dummies in max and equally as simple to create objects to interact with.
It's an amazing engine, I managed to run it on high with my 8800gt and quad core so it looked pretty nice all the way through and my frame rate almost never went below 30 apart from some intense moments. Wish more games were coming out using it.
"They don't have much more tech than we do, just better artists!"
nah they surely have some of the most insane tech around. A bit too much yet for mainstream, but still lots of impressive stuff... It#s not just more hi-res stuff and some cool effects, but mostly organizing all the data for it... And that is not easily matched by other engines. The effects "standalone" have been around in demoscene or research projects, but its really the putting it all together that well, that makes the difference...
You can shoot a barrel and oil comes out and if enough oil is on ground you have realtime reflection and little details like that... Or seeing some of the physics mayhem user videos, where thousands of objects collide...
Ya, I think many engines these days have a lot of the same tech, and could be doing a lot of the same things as Crytek, but choose not to because they don't want to sacrifice performance. I think the amazingness of Crytek's engine is the fact that they have all of those things, and while you still need a good computer to run it, you CAN run it with all of those do-dads turned on.
Ya, I think many engines these days have a lot of the same tech, and could be doing a lot of the same things as Crytek, but choose not to because they don't want to sacrifice performance. I think the amazingness of Crytek's engine is the fact that they have all of those things, and while you still need a good computer to run it, you CAN run it with all of those do-dads turned on.
no, not really.
the performance hit is because of the real-time ambient occlusion.
if other engines added all the stuff the cryengine has put in, they would all be MUCH slower than the cryengine.
no, not really.
the performance hit is because of the real-time ambient occlusion.
if other engines added all the stuff the cryengine has put in, they would all be MUCH slower than the cryengine.
The SSAO as mentioned before works great, you don't have to bake in any AO in your texture and it will still look great. If you do bake in some subtle AO it looks even better
It has some kind of strange inverted SSAO aswel, that slightly highlights edges. It's really clever, because of this stuff it's very hard to make a surface look flat in crysis, which makes everything feel alot more realistic, even crappy models with tiling boxmapped textures.
i am really interested in this inverted ssao but i am not sure where i should look can you do a pint over of that screenshot peris
i drew some arrows where it's best visible. Once you know where to look you can notice it on almost all crysis screens and see how it's really helping out the gfx
Replies
Re: It's cool to see tech that's expandable past its release date.
more
Does this link work for those unable to see the images?
Are they using a super computer or something!?
HOW IS THIS A GAME^
but "wow" for the screens aniceto posted...
-caseyjones
Yeah.
Cool stuff. Too bad nobody can really run it like that yet for the most part.
my quad core machine
What kind of bells and whistles have been added to the renderer since Crysis came out?
(This was in response to, "They don't have much more tech than we do, just better artists!")
"No doubt their env art is amazing. They (at least once) went on texture/reference vacations to Fiji. . . and spent a very long time, making high poly versions of every plant, and rendering those down to lower poly versions. They are using ridiculously high res textures on pretty much everything. They have some pretty awesome sky stuff as well (lighting is helping these out a LOT) Such as the atmospheric perspective, and dynamic god ray tech shown here:
Later, my lead responded with a comparison shot between ULTRA-HIGH and LOW graphics modes. LOW basically looks like most games, and ULTRA-HIGH looks like the above. So obviously the "art" isn't all of it.
I see no images ethier.
It all looks great until you see the head:
http://www6.incrysis.com/screenshots/asian.jpg
The grass is a little bit lol in the bottom right-most image. Still impressive, though. I think it's the lighting they use that makes the most difference - It's looks so natural.
And that you have to export a material, then rename it and then rename it back again to the original name for settings to save and get it to work with your mesh.
COME OOOOON!
(These are issues that more than I have so it´s not a matter of my suckiness
I played with the engine recently here are my thoughts(please forgive me if I amde any mistakes)>
I think Cryengine`s main strength lies in the realistic lighting of huge open ended environements.
It closely mimicks the physical world and its controls(there is a few) can be accessed through the Time of Day window (http://doc.crymod.com/SandboxManual/TimeOfDay.html)
While you can place all the usual light types(spot, omni etc.) manually it is only to add local points of interest(like a torch emitting light or something ).
SSAO or screen space ambient occlusion is awesome and adds a consistent AO pass to your objects without the need to bake it yourself.
When it comes to indoor lighting, however, it doesnt look much different from something like unreal could do>
[ame]http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=6GQwKBZKN54&fmt=22[/ame]
The editor is more WYSIWYG than the unreal editor mainly because there is no need to bake lightmaps whatsoever.(that`s kinda cool right?) What you see is really what you get, you dont have to rebuild lighting everytime you change something.
That said, as Notorious P.I.G said, working with the editor can be a bit of pain sometimes as there is some weird bugs you have to learn to live with.
You would except from an engine that cost $22 million to make to have a more decent editor without the silly bugs. But it`s not too bad overall, and stabilty wasnt a real issue for me either. One more thing, if you are used to Max I think you will find the editor UI familiar.
Tumerboy`s post said something about ultra high res textures. Playing with the editor I found that`s really not the case. Most of the props for example use really small tiling textures.
Texture sizes of 256x256 and 512x256 etc. are much more common than 1k textures. Some of the props doesnt even have any specular/normal texture at all. The only 2k textures I have seen were on some characters.
Compare that to the huge texture sizes of Unreal where pretty much everything is uniquely unwrapped. Obviously, this is because the two games have completely differnt designs, so what is working in Unreal wouldn`t work in the huge environment of Crysis.
All this aside I was wondering why no more games use Cryengine, wouldn`t Fallout 3 look gorgeous in it? Or is it because companies worry that the high system specs scare away some of their potential customers?
Or is it because the engine is only suited for games with huge environemnts?
http://www.cryengine2.com/index.php?pnr=1&conid=3
here's a page that lists the licences available to the cryengine.
The editor was really buggy when I was using it, and there loads of workarounds to do things pre-SDK and even after. Lol I can't believe they haven't fixed that material stuff and you still have to rename it, I had that problem too.
The SSAO as mentioned before works great, you don't have to bake in any AO in your texture and it will still look great. If you do bake in some subtle AO it looks even better
The physics should also get a mention, it's really simple to create breakable objects using labeled dummies in max and equally as simple to create objects to interact with.
It's an amazing engine, I managed to run it on high with my 8800gt and quad core so it looked pretty nice all the way through and my frame rate almost never went below 30 apart from some intense moments. Wish more games were coming out using it.
You can shoot a barrel and oil comes out and if enough oil is on ground you have realtime reflection and little details like that... Or seeing some of the physics mayhem user videos, where thousands of objects collide...
no, not really.
the performance hit is because of the real-time ambient occlusion.
if other engines added all the stuff the cryengine has put in, they would all be MUCH slower than the cryengine.
Uh. . . isn't that what I said?
[ame]
http://www.helderpinto.com/blog/wp-content/lostwordreturns.jpg
It has some kind of strange inverted SSAO aswel, that slightly highlights edges. It's really clever, because of this stuff it's very hard to make a surface look flat in crysis, which makes everything feel alot more realistic, even crappy models with tiling boxmapped textures.
example: Theres a lot of model in this scene with just generic tiling textures on them. Look at how the eges are nicely highlighted:
http://www.helderpinto.com/ssp_director/albums/album-1/lg/june_update_vulcano2.jpg
1. For someone (preferably a lighting artist) to actually watch the movie and see what the film actually looks like, especially that scene.
2. A decent animator.
3. A Decent skinning artist.
i drew some arrows where it's best visible. Once you know where to look you can notice it on almost all crysis screens and see how it's really helping out the gfx
-> http://www.brameulaers.com/images/trash/inverted_SSAO.jpg
i noticed it first when i put some mockup models in the editor when working on unearthly challenge.