3d Rendering... has come A LONG WAY in 10 years...........

[Xzin]

A bit off topic to boxing but some of us were waxing poetic about UO and how great it was.

We hit upon the topic of 3d rendering and how far it has come.

Now.... back 10 years ago, this is what we had.

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x45/Xzin-WoW/account3_keep.jpg

Ultima Online. The pinnacle of MMORPGS 10 years ago.

Then we moved to a 3d world: EverQuest

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x45/Xzin-WoW/225034491_d34d25d749.jpg

I can't say that was amazingly better but all of a sudden we were 3d.

Ok so now we were 3d. But everything was..... still .... well... basic.

But doing some research recently, I had no idea how amazingly far things had come.

This apparently (!) is the FOURTH year Playboy has done their "girls of gaming" feature.

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x45/Xzin-WoW/633295921191613448.jpg

Now, those are professional renders. Ok sure. Nice. But how accessible is that to the average person? That level of detail?

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x45/Xzin-WoW/Full35582.jpg

Turns out, with newer software and some time rendering.... pretty darn accessible.

I mean these are not PHOTO QUALITY enders but they look like drawings!

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x45/Xzin-WoW/product_image_full_79070.jpg

Now... WoW will maintain their current graphical requirements. They are NOT going for photorealism. Which caused some people to complain that the game looked "cartoony" upon release. Well, it kind of is. They don't want to go for photorealism. Why? Graphic cards can't handle that. You don't get 9+ Million subs with a requirement for CUTTING EDGE $3000 computers (*looks at Vanguard*).

I guess my point is that I had absolutely no idea that CG art had come this far in a fairly short time period.

And yes, it was really hard to find SFW images for you guys. Consider yourself lucky (or unlucky considering on your perspective).

[Gallo]

Growing up in the generation of gamers has been great. Seeing one of the best games of all time in my living room in 4th grade (The Legend of Zelda), both me and my father thought that graphics were so cool. Now, we have games that rival movie effects from just 5 years ago.

On a side note... that last picture is hot :)

[Xzin]

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x45/Xzin-WoW/pong.png

Or even more amazingly....

http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x45/Xzin-WoW/Zola.png

In it's native resolution.

Of 256x224 pixels.

Which is 57,344 or .057 megapixels.

To put that in perspective, my main monitor array is 25 megapixels.
I could display roughly 436 NES games. At the same time. With my off the shelf processor, I have no doubt that I could actually emulate all of those at the same time.

How far we have come.

[Xzin]

Another update. Because running 40 copies of Jnes and seeing the same CPU load (although 40 copies of Zelda with the sound desyned is a bit odd) made me think about this:

From Joystiq:

The New Gamer has a fascinating video, with analysis, of the "averaged gameplay" of fifteen different gamers playing through level one of the classic shmup, Gradius. Why Gradius? Because it's "an auto-scrolling shoot'em up, is programmed so that the stage automatically scrolls at a fixed rate. With the stage constant, that allows us to compare how the player interacts with the AI and how, retroactively, the AI responds to that."

http://www.thenewgamer.com/content/archives/averaging_gradius

Averaging Gradius

I saw this movie a year or so back and found it fascinating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfvsdBq9RrQ
http://www.thenewgamer.com/img/screens/averaging_gradius/avergrad_shipspawner.gif

For those of you who want the quick and dirty flash youtube version.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Have you seen Beowulf?

Its kinda clear that in 10-20 years there will be no movies made with real actors.

[Xzin]

Hell, they made parts of the Matrix II and III without actual actors.

http://www.andrewferguson.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/matrix-super-punch.jpg

Was almost all done digitally.

De-aging Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen was done completely digitally.

http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/thumb/2/2f/200px-Xmen3patrickstewart.jpg

I believe it.

[Wilbur]

Semi-naked chicks can now be rendered on my PC? Hurrah!

[Xzin]

They have been able to do that about 2 milliseconds after the first computer said "hello world".

The only difference is now they happen to be more than 2 pixels.

[Zseth]

Have you seen Beowulf?

Its kinda clear that in 10-20 years there will be no movies made with real actors.


My god, if I could go the rest of my life without seeing such a horrible movie like that I would be happy. The worst part was, it was like a trainwreck, I didn't want to stare, but I couldn't look away. I think I was more horrified at just the crappiness of the CG editing. Idk, I think the Matrix and the Yoda fight scene have spoiled me too much, or IDK the fact that Crysis ingame puts the entire movie to shame. Rant complete

[Shogun]

Amazing how far it has all come from my first console the NES, or my Commodore 64 before that :D Used to play Tetris on the NES with my parents, even they can appreciate how far games have come since then :)


also, wtb NSFW links >.>

[henrik.falk]

Hell, they made parts of the Matrix II and III without actual actors.

A remark on Keanu Reeves' acting i take it :-)

[Shogun]

Hell, they made parts of the Matrix II and III without actual actors.

A remark on Keanu Reeves' acting i take it :-)

Well, apart from all his scenes... alot of it was done with CGI characters such as the more complicated fight/camera scenes, like when a camera bullet times through/between 2 people, the complicated setup they use to go around the action simply isn't doable... Also, the hundreds of Agent Smiths...

[Ellay]

I watched Beowulf last night and the CGI didn't mesh well. I even got the 3d glasses but the characters were a mix of real and CG, and at a point they felt non realistic because the CG made them that way. The facial structures were just way off at points.

The Final Fantasy movie Spirits Within and Advent Children both were incredible without real actors and the characters felt more real than that.

[Zseth]

I completely agree Ellay, the Final Fantasy films were amazing, but they took the time to make them amazing. The rendering farms they needed for those movies spanned acres of ground, and took almost a year to render. Not create, to render. Beowulf just seemed rushed and poorly thought out on the technical side, would have like to have seen all real characters doing it instead.

[beyond-tec]

It's still simply amazing where we came from and where we are now.

I've started with a C64, went over to a PC with 2 MhZ and a Turbo button, bought an 750 MB Hardisk for 500 DM, I've seen Prince of Persia in monochrome, bought myself a GFX-Card and played it in EGA Graphics and it was phantastic. OMG! Colors! :-)

I've seen all this and I'm not that old... so there is a lot of stuff incoming during the next years and I'm looking forward seeing it.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I remember in about 1985-1986 playing a fantasy game that used asiic characters for walls and stuff lol ...


LoL this was it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack_%28video_game%29


Dang how far we have advanced in so few years.

[Hippieman]

Semi-naked chicks can now be rendered on my PC? Hurrah! "semi"? :p

Personally I know a few people that make animated "porn" using 3D apps like Animation:Master, 3Dmax, etc. etc. It's become widely popular, apparently, seeing as everything is "customisable"

aaah, development...

[Xzin]

Just look at second life.. which despite its low poly counts....

is really something else.

[Tonuss]

I've started with a C64, went over to a PC with 2 MhZ and a Turbo button, bought an 750 MB Hardisk for 500 DM, I've seen Prince of Persia in monochrome, bought myself a GFX-Card and played it in EGA Graphics and it was phantastic. OMG! Colors! :-)

Same here. Keep in mind that so many different parts of computer systems have continued to be improved as time passes. CPU power has increased in leaps and bounds. 2D graphics were off-loaded from the CPU to dedicated video cards, then 3D was as well, then PCs were given a dedicated channel for graphics (AGP then PCIe). Sound was off-loaded from the CPU. Hard disks have increased in size and speed and have larger data caches. Memory, etc...

Some of this isn't all that new. Anyone who remembers the C-64 and Amiga know about systems that run separate CPUs, video, and sound. But the leaps in pure processing power are hard to appreciate sometimes. The people who work on those 3D models that Xzin posted, as well as 3D animation... they know all about it. I can remember when simple 2D graphics filters took 40 minutes to apply to an image, or when a basic 3D render took a day or two. Now the filters are applied instantaneously most of the time, and the 3D renders run in hours, or only minutes.

I think Blizzard went the right route, not pushing the boundaries too hard in order to accomodate older hardware. But just compare it to the first Everquest and you can see the improvement. What I'm really wondering is how long it'll be before we can render environments where the trees are actually full of leaves instead of a few flat planes with textures. Stuff like that, it's really a sort of frill but the first time you see it you're knocked off your feet.

Lots of good stuff ahead. And some of it will be SFW! =D