Comment by Geee
1 day ago
I don't think this is true at all. I've been experimenting with a physical sky / atmosphere modeling, and it really seems that the most physically accurate sky is the most beautiful. I think this applies more generally to all light and shadows, and all natural effects which people perceive as beautiful, and at the same time difficult / expensive to recreate on a computer.
Not to disagree with you, but I've noticed that many people have very little clue about what nature looks like. I see that in CGI/games a lot, trees, clouds, atmosphere, grass, moon... totally wrong from what actually happens in the world. But it looks good! :D
I recall a GDC presentation about a physically-based atmospheric model developed for a (good) AAA game released sometime in the last decade, and it reportedly took up a noticeable part of the frame budget, so evidently you’re not alone in this opinion.
I'm not sure you would need that unless you're making a space simulator. Surely the model just spits out a color gradient which you might as well hardcode?
There are indeed precomputed LUTs, but apparently you need to be a bit more sophisticated than that if you want your sun angle to be dynamic, and they also did clouds: https://www.ea.com/news/physically-based-sky-atmosphere-and-....
Modern games struggle with readability which is why there is a trend to paint interactive objects yellow. So arguably the realistic visuals are interfering with the purpose of the game.
I personally love the Quake 1 sky textures. It's possible to have a stylized sky in a game that looks good.
Golden hour light shining through leaves is literally the gold standard
> I think this applies more generally
I would say the sky and a private eye's dimly lit, smoke-filled 1920s office are pretty different, actually.
While the resulting looks and aesthetics are very different, the same physical model for light scattering can be used to describe both. Any approximations of that are a concession to available computer performance.
I would suggest that both are true!
It's common for games to have an intentional designed aesthetic which uses cultural and social and graphical "languages" to create specific emotional impacts and effects. The lower the budget the more this is leaned into for expedient reasons but that in turn creates genre expectations! Low-poly and 8-bit are fine examples of what were once a product of technical limitations becoming their own target.
Subject matters also, and the overall aesthetic of the game; triple-A games often push towards what you're describing, that the most impactful and compelling may also be the most real...
...or at least, contain elements of it. Lots of games mess with color shading and saturation etc for the impact-reasons...
I do look forward to the era of more "photorealistic" rendering as you prefer, especially for natural landscapes like those I enjoy IRL. Some of which can have very "unnatural" feeling swings in tone and all sorts of things! I was just up in the mountains this week and saw a lot more variation in lighting and its impact on a consistent landscape (mountains across a lake) than I've ever seen in a game engine so far :)
> It's common for games to have an intentional designed aesthetic ... to create specific emotional impacts and effects.
And before games this was true of movies and before that photos and paintings. A master cinematographer can spend hours lighting a shot that will later be praised for its 'gritty realism' :-).
One theme that is common to almost all visual art that strives for some form of realistic appearance is that they start out with real material appearances and physical lighting behavior. Both are inescapable parts of the reality in our physical world, anyway.
By extension, this means that it is highly desirable to have a renderer capable of reproducing the real world as a baseline for highly controllable aesthetic tweaks. When you look especially at VFX specific tools, they have - almost without exception - two layers of tools: the first creates a realistic simulation (e.g. water/fire/shattering...) and the second layer allows for tweaks to control the final look.
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Yup. I once came across a (picture of a) test print made by one of the old black-and-white street photography greats, and it was all marked up with development adjustments for better lighting, contrast, and subject separation. Those were always a photographer’s main concern.
I think a Horizon Zero Dawn developer characterized their approach as “more realistic than reality” or something along those lines, i.e. they were aiming for the kind of perfect saturated look that you would only get in that golden hour with ideal surroundings but that we all recognize as real and at the same time don’t find too dull to stare at for hours. And I think for daytime HZD did do that quite well.
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