I've just finished watching Final Fantasy: The Movie on DVD (yeah it was pants) and I was wondering why the quality of the computer graphics on that film were so much better than say Quake3?
I mean, the detail looks so crisp and super high resolution, whereas Half Life looks like something from a Commodore 64.
Surely the resolution on DVD is so much lower than the standard 1078x768 PC screen, so why does, say Half Life, UT, or Q3 look so cr*p in comparison?
Answers on a postcard please.
PS. No flame mails plz.
[This message has been edited by davidstone28 (edited 02-07-2002).]
Athlon XP 3200+, TT Silent Boost (its rubbish as well as loud) Gigabyte nForce2 mobo (stable but lacks tweaking options), GF4 Ti4200 128mb, Lian-Li V2000
because everthing is pre-recorded and made on super-highend machines, and even then it takes several hours to process 1 minute of film.
we haven't nothing like this power in our systems today (although a Geforce3 can play a "cut-down" version of FF in real-time). and that's just it, it's done in real-time not pre-recorded.
it's like saying, why can't we have, say you, perfectly digitised and put into a computer and watch it(you) do stuff? well a video camera can, so why can't a normal computer do it. there just uncomparable.
someday the average user will have today's super-processing power in their home PC, and then we'll have FF like movies on our computers running real-time, which also allows you to change anything you want about the movie, such as play in it like you do in HL or Q3.
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people that are slow are easy to pass, it's people who drive fast that are hard.
people that drive slow are easy to pass, it's people who drive fast that provide a challange.
Game graphics must be computed in real time at around 60 frames per second. Many compromises must be reached to attain this level of performance such as lower resolution rendering, lower res. textures, less (if any) anti-aliasing, lower color depth, and lower polygon-count object models.
In contrast, movie graphics do not need to be computed in real time so visual quality is the highest priority. I am not sure about FF (which I thought had astounding graphical quality) but typically Pixar (Toy Story, Bug's Life, Monsters Inc.) computes each frame at a resolution of 4800x2700 and 48-bits of color per pixel with adaptive anti-aliasing. Plus, each object model has 10s of thousands of polygons if not more. Of course, they have an enormous renderfarm of SPARCs to do this for them also. They have so many computers that the heat produced is ducted to the rest of the building in the winter.
[This message has been edited by Gomez Addams (edited 02-07-2002).]
Something that I've often thought about is why CGI films still aren't attaining 100% realism, and how long will it be before Final Fantasy and the like "look real" rather than merely "very realistic". I'm sure that even now if the most skilled computer animators were given unlimited resources they would still not be able to produce a film that we couldn't distinguish from reality. They could get extremely close (FF was pretty darn close most of the time!), but never close enough that you'd be 100% convinced you weren't watching rendered polys.
davidstone28, I think the last two posts have answered your question pretty much spot on. It's just a matter of PCs currently lacking sufficient power to render Pixar/Dreamworks-level graphics in realtime.
So when's the Geforce 39 / Sledgehammer 75000++ going to be released then?
I is getting me an upgrade to watch these flashy graphics. Niiiiiiice.
[This message has been edited by davidstone28 (edited 02-07-2002).]
Athlon XP 3200+, TT Silent Boost (its rubbish as well as loud) Gigabyte nForce2 mobo (stable but lacks tweaking options), GF4 Ti4200 128mb, Lian-Li V2000
Don't forget the fact that a high quality video takes up a very large amount of CD space. If they start recording PC games on DVD, then there will be more real estate to put high quality video on it.
Give what you cannot keep to gain what you cannot lose.
and how long will it be before Final Fantasy and the like "look real" rather than merely "very realistic".
Well, there are some reasons, especially when dealing with "humans". Something that still needs to be improved is hair quality (it still looks so bad). Facial expresions are so artificial that even with the highest texture quality you can still tell that the character is animated.
The look in the eyes is also another thing, i'm not sure about you guys, but those how have seen into the eyes of a dead person will know what i'm talking about, there's a huge difference between an "alive" eye and a "dead" one, even if they are from the same person. Same goes to computer stuff, since those eyes have no "life" it would be very difficult to make them look real.
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If you were in a world full of crazy people, who would be the crazy person?
If you were in a world full of crazy people, who would be the crazy person? OTCentral
Originally posted by Luis G: If you were in a world full of crazy people, who would be the crazy person?
The person who is crazier that the average crazy person.
Athlon XP 3200+, TT Silent Boost (its rubbish as well as loud) Gigabyte nForce2 mobo (stable but lacks tweaking options), GF4 Ti4200 128mb, Lian-Li V2000
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