How long before there's photo-realistic characters in games?

Ay Cee

The way games are developing and the storage on discs.

How long do you think before you're actually controlling an "actual" person as opposed to a computer rendered scan, if ye know what I mean

The movement on COD4 was the closest I've seen to "real life", how much further can the games go?

nedd

not really sure what you mean by "Real People".

i dont think people will fit onto discs. unless all games use midgets.....

Ay Cee

They'd have to be be very thin.
I mean an actor instead of a motion capture of their movements. They're face, body etc. Ah I can't really explain what I mean

Roar

Ay Cee wrote: »

They'd have to be be very thin.
I mean an actor instead of a motion capture of their movements. They're face, body etc. Ah I can't really explain what I mean

i think i get ya, photo-realistic characters is what you mean?

it'll happen eventually,

not for years though

nedd

yeah i dont really get what you mean. to get a controllable character in 3d then there has to be some computer generation involved. so you will never get real people, just as the graphics get better it will look more and more like real people.

that movie Beo Wolf was computer generated but they looked pretty real.

FuzzyWuzzyWazza

Yeah, and I think it took them two years to create the visuals, after all the 'acting' was done.

I am not too sure but I think to render just one frame of that movie it would take a minute or so, and I don't think that even our next generation of consoles could do that amount of work 60 times a second.

nedd

ah yeah it will take years for interactive 3d rendering to catch up to animation. if you look at Toy Story now it still looks better than graphics on a game. i dont know the numbers but there are probably more polygons involved in the rendering of toy story than the PS3 can handle. and toy story was 13 years ago now.

AtomicHorror

Given the speed at which raw processing and GPU power is increasing , this may come sooner than we think. Not the PS4 generation though and probably not convincingly the PS5 generation...

Here's an interesting article on how we might define and test real-time photorealism:

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13585-matrixstyle-virtual-worlds-a-few-years-away.html

There's still some debate as to whether the above is a valid testing method but you get the idea of what will be required. People will look at something they've been told is CG and judge it to look fake- the only way to test this properly is "blind testing" of a sort.

Seeker

But but but.....playing Playstation 2 is like being in the Matrix!

Krieg

Id say it will reach a point where technology will overcome the need to "build" an image, quite soon

Something along the lines of taking a picture of someones face and slapping it into the game. Im not talking about a simple 2d image, but some type of 3d imaging camera that takes into account aesthetics as well as the contours. Then add some l33t algorithim and bang! Photo-realistic person
If that were succesful then it wouldn't be long until enviroments could be done

Games are taking longer and longer to create, there is bound to be some innovation (A new form of graphic engine perhaps), that will do away with the current method of development

Mark Hamill

How long do you think before you're actually controlling an "actual" person as opposed to a computer rendered scan

The technology for kontroling actual people has been around for years : link

K.O.Kiki

I would prefer if we could have decent fantasy realms.
Like, cartoony fantasy realms full of colour & magic.

L31mr0d

eh its already happened. Does nobody remember Mortal Kombat?

EDIT: damn you Mark Hamill

Giblet

Rendering photo realistic faces in real time is done. Hair, looks a bit fake and requires intensive physics calculations to move out of the "decent, but dodgy in lots of scenarios" to being a solved problem. We then have to move on to realistic muscle and skin movements and deformations. I'd say a few real time cut scenes will show up in the next generation that you will have a hard time distinguishing from the real thing, but as far as game play goes, you might have to wait for a generation or two beyond that.

Imagine throwing an object at this guys face and his cheek deforming, leaving a mark that fades away, and has visible muscle contractions across his face.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkgYret8syk

K.O.Kiki

Ack! The Uncanny Valley!
Make it go away!!

MooseJam

I'd guess in 5 years you'll have that

silvine

Didn't a few reviewers say Crysis on full-whack on a top of range PC is near photo-realistic?

L31mr0d

silvine wrote: »

Didn't a few reviewers say Crysis on full-whack on a top of range PC is near photo-realistic?

The character models, specifically prophet, are very close to looking realistic with all settings maxed out, however the fact the environment doesn't look as good as them makes them look odd. Also their movements don't look as realistic as CoD4, they suffer from the usual problem of looking like they are running above the ground rather than on it.

Giblet

silvine wrote: »

Didn't a few reviewers say Crysis on full-whack on a top of range PC is near photo-realistic?

Crysis looks good, but not THAT good. Most games using shadow maps now and they are pretty dodgy looking.

Blisterman

Buildings can quite easily be modelled to a degree where it's hard to tell reality from computer generated image.
Look at my sig below. Photo or CGI?

It's a photo

It's organic things like people and plants which are hard to do.

Call Me Jimmy

I wouldn't say that it's "around the corner" at all, that implies 2 or 3 years... photo realistic characters in games implies photo-realistic games, and they will be a long way off... 20 years even! I saw some of that beowolf stuff and the thing is, in some rare situations where the lighting is perfect ye think "that's close" but in the vast majority of shots it looks very far from realistic. This is why a computer game will take so long to be photo-realistic, the player can look anywhere, in all kinds of light - the shots won't be set up.

Blisterman

The thing is, the trend is for the improvements to get more and more subtle, as time goes by.

The difference between the PS2 (2000) and the PS3 (2006) is not as big as the difference between the Colecovision (1982) and the Mega Drive (1988), which were released roughly the same time apart from each other.

I'd say there be much further gaps between the releases of consoles in the future, as the improvements will be less and less noticable.

thelordofcheese

There is something called the uncanny valley where up to a certain point people are happy with semi-realistic representations of humans in robots and CGI but after a certain point they cross a line and begin to look too human, and this usually has the effect of revulsion in people.
Somewhere in the back of our minds we are too aware of the unnatural nature of what we're looking at.

This effect is why i don't think we'll ever have "photo-realisitic" characters in games, it adds nothing and will only alienate people.

Blisterman

Well, photorealistic first person shooters could be given the extra quality of unease, as it looks like you're really shooting someone.