L.A. Noire gives me uncanny valley

[Xeogred]

I think most of it looks pretty good, but of all people... I honestly think the main character himself looks the most awkward.

[CFFJR]

I haven't experienced the feeling from L.A. Noire.

Its definitely realistic, amazingly so, but in this case it doesn't bother me. In fact, I think its cool.

[BRIK]

It's the skin. It just looks wrong. Maybe it's the shaders they used or the lighting engine. At any rate it looks totally creepy to me. I think shooting for such realism with the current gaming hardware was a bad idea.

I think we probably won't get realistic skin in games until the next generation of consoles.
The problem with skin is that in real life light doesn't directly reflect off it, it reflects off the layer under the skin or something like that. This is incredibly hard to replicate and needs a lot of power to make it happen.
Some games seem to do this alright like Heavy Rain but games that are open world (like L.A Noire) have heaps of models and textures in them and need to make sacrifices space and performance wise.

[Pulsar_t]

I don't think the level of detail present in something like the Emily demo will be available in mass-produced GPUs for another 4-5 years, IF developers chose that direction that is.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011- ... g-dead-end

I think L.A Noire looks good - honestly, it does - but I don't think they'll go much further than where they are. With the technology we use, we can improve; there is a lot of room for improvement and we hope to show very soon where we are now.

[Anayo]

It's the skin. It just looks wrong. Maybe it's the shaders they used or the lighting engine. At any rate it looks totally creepy to me. I think shooting for such realism with the current gaming hardware was a bad idea.

I think we probably won't get realistic skin in games until the next generation of consoles.
The problem with skin is that in real life light doesn't directly reflect off it, it reflects off the layer under the skin or something like that. This is incredibly hard to replicate and needs a lot of power to make it happen.
Some games seem to do this alright like Heavy Rain but games that are open world (like L.A Noire) have heaps of models and textures in them and need to make sacrifices space and performance wise.

Basically what you're saying is that the skin has no subsurface scattering. They can do that in pre-rendered CG to render stuff like wax, or the membrane of a bat wing, or human skin. I agree with what you're saying, cause the absence of that effect on the characters in this game weirds me out a bit.

[BRIK]

Yeah that's what its called, subsurface scattering. I remember a teacher talking about it about a year ago.
As Pulsar_t said, the technology just isn't really available for real time yet.

[AppleQueso]

Just how far along are we as far as real-time 3D is concerned anyhow?

Can we, say, render Toy Story in real time yet?

[BRIK]

Just how far along are we as far as real-time 3D is concerned anyhow?

Can we, say, render Toy Story in real time yet?

The earlier ones, not Toy Story 3 though. That would've taken a render farm and hours to render.
I was watching a review for the Toy Story 3 video game (don't ask me why) and the reviewer noted that the graphics in the game were about the same as the first movie made years earlier that would of taken hours to render.

[Anayo]

Just how far along are we as far as real-time 3D is concerned anyhow?

Can we, say, render Toy Story in real time yet?

It might be possible to render something that looks really similar, but I doubt we'll ever be able to take a given scene from that movie and run it like a realtime game.

For a lot of the lighting, shadows, mirror-like reflections on surfaces they use ray tracing, and from what I've read that doesn't lend itself to realtime. Most games use a simplified way of doing reflections that looks decent but isn't physically 'right'. You might have noticed most games shy away from very detailed reflective surfaces (I've noticed this in Valve games... In Portal there are stainless steel pistons you can't actually see the reflections in, in Left for Dead 2 there's mirrors in the bathroom that are inexplicably foggy.)

Other parts of pre rendered CG involve delegating different 3D objects in the scene to different 'render passes', then compositing them after the fact. So they could commit their render farm to rendering, say, just Woody, then go back and do it over again with just Buzz, then splice them together so the individual graphics on both of them look awesome. A gaming console couldn't necessarily have its resources 'take turns' like that cause it all has to happen on the fly.

Since they can wait so long to render it lets them do other stuff like max out shadow quality, include insane polygon counts (like the trees on Andy's street with all those leaves), include tons of particles for really detailed volumetric dust, hair, fur, explosions, etc. till the whole thing takes like 20 hours per frame, whereas consoles have to seriously simplify here. I've yet to see a game with shadows that didn't 'flicker' a little, or with fire that actually looked 'right'.

As far as L.A. Noire goes... I'm really starting to think they should have waited till consoles powerful enough for subsurface scattering came out. Or try to make it work on XBOX 360 and Playstation 3, somehow. Cause that realistic acting with plastic skin just creeps me out.

[Dakinggamer87]

I'm really looking forward to this game!! Tech is also impressive from I have seen