/vr/ - Retro Games

How about you follow you're own advice. Do you think they were ray tracing on an SGI work station in the mid 90s just curious.

>>5512169
>>5512172
shut up NERBS

>>5512172
my advice? I'm asking a question
and as for yours - dunno? there was a thing called lumosity i remember which was like a half-measure that could look kind of like bounced light. that was a lot cheaper

>>5512178
radiosity i mean

>>5512169
Did you know at least one of them is trans?

Too many polys/nurbs + lighting + Ray tracing. We'll be lucky if we get a game that looks this good within 10 years

>>5512181
Sorry but no, after her success operating a save point in the original Donkey Kong Country helped pay for her sex reassignment surgery, DK Island's sole transgender inhabitant moved to another island and quickly faded into obscurity.

>>5512343
He was talking about one of the Kremlins.

>>5512343
Candy Kong appears in DK64

>>5512169
Raytracing was standard since the 80s anon

>>5512357
like I said, into obscurity. :P

>>5512343
Stop namefagging dude

>>5512169
you don't know what you are talking about. just go back to your conspiracy theory that DKC sprites are "3d"

>>5512376
>>5512343
transvestite detected. ignore all posts.

op here you know maybe i had it backwards. i found out these guys used Alias at least for some stuff and watching some other examples from the time maybe it's not bounced light but *lack of* light bounces that makes the look. Like here you see a very harsh distinction between lit and unlit surfaces - high contrast at high frequency - you only get when you just have direct spot lighting to light everything

you mean the green on the kongs?
looks like just a directional light

>>5512590
i meant the way the whole scene looks pleasing to the eye. there's something i'd say about these prerenders that they don't look 'real' but they look 'really there'. As in, they look like plastic/plasticine figures in a diorama, but still look like the diorama is 'really there' more than Nathan Drake in his car or whatever real-time hacked box of cheats ever looks 'real'.
I thought it was becuase of ray tracing but it's not because for example the green light you mentioned is not realistic at all it's a spotlight that goes through geometry. I'm thinking now it's not raytracing but the fact that there's no ambient illum and everything's carefully hand spot-lit
and of course the high-poly (via nurbs)

>>5512597
Is there any reason this can't be done in real time? I mean having lights dedicated solely for the character set up in each area of the game, which don't necessarily interact with the environment, instead of a universal lighting system.

>>5512616
well that's why i'm confused and made the thread because that kind of lighting (or any except raytracing) is extremely computationally fast/cheap

>>5512637
If it's fast and easy, I wonder why no one does it. I think few would disagree that the toy-in-a-diorama look is aesthetically pleasing, plus it's nostalgic, and 90s nostalgia is in.

>>5512616
>>5512637
>>5512645
You don't understand anything about graphics if you think those models and the lighting is cheap

>>5512686
SGI is COZY

>>5512686
>you don't know but i do
well then answer the bloody question if you know - what exactly is going on - what kind of calculations etc., that makes it expensive?

>>5512701
The lighting, Ray tracing and poly count. If you don't know what ready tracing is, go look it up, it's very expensive

>>5512730
thanks but i asked in the op not to answer if you don't know anything. We've been over the fact that it's not as simple as saying "the lighting". These are not necessarily even raytraced. And what's so hard about a large number of polygons?
stop just repeating things you read in threads

>>5512745
>And what's so hard about a large number of polygons?

>>5512753
what is? (given you have 4GB graphics memory in a card or whatever now) if you can't answer the brainlet pic reverts to you

>>5512745
Are you retarded or something?

>>5512757
you can't samefag your way out of this

>>5512753
>>5512757
>OP asks legitimate question
>lol are u retarded
I'm >>5512645, before anyone accuses OP of samefagging. I know even less than he does (for instance I have no idea what raytracing means), I just want to know why modern consoles with all their computing power cannot duplicate the look of mid-late 90s CGI.

>>5512874
> I just want to know why modern consoles with all their computing power cannot duplicate the look of mid-late 90s CGI.
They can, the thing you aren't considering is they could spend as much time as they liked rendering a single image. So they could spend a week rendering an image if wanted to.

Ray tracing is not cheap, it's fundamentally not cheap because you are calculating every light ray. Ray tracing is actually the most expensive form of rendering, and the most high fidelity. But, as you probably know, nvidea are hyping the use of ray tracing in modern games, so real-time ray tracing may become a thing in games, but it won't be for complex scenes like the OP pic in real time, it will start with certain effects and enhancements that utilise ray tracing.

>>5512910
obviously he means in real time lol
and as has been mentioned it's not even clear these images are ray traced. Toy story was apparently not even ray traced and if you look at images like OP, it doesn't really look like the ray tracing we're used to unless you set bounces=0. The white or green lights on diddy's chin do not bounce and light the dark of his shirt under his chin. That's what i realised in this thread is an important signature of the look - that anything not directly lit is black/dark.

>>5512169
Ray tracing didn't exist when this RENDER was made. Ray tracing is for REAL TIME GRAPHICS. God you're retarded.

>>5512172
>Do you think they were ray tracing on an SGI work station in the mid 90s just curious.

Yes...? Fuck off with that smartass shit. Why wouldn't they be using ray tracing for 3D renders?

>>5513564
>Why wouldn't they be using ray tracing for 3D renders?
It was easier to do a simple render and then paint over the 2D image digitaly.

>>5512169
Old artfag here. These are rendered with the standard renderer of Alias, Release 4 or 5. No radiosity or raytraced shadows. Due to rendering time it was more common to use shadow mapped lights instead, even in offline rendering. The scene here is done with a few shadow mapped sportlights and a few point lights for fill, kick and bounce light.

Modeling in Alias was mainly done with NURBS for nice organic shapes, but it also had a toolbox for poly modelling(aka "stuff for games") .

>>5513554
Bullshit. Real time raytracing didn't exist, raytracing for offline rendering exists since the late 70s.

>>5513554
>doesn't read thread
>doesn't see where OP says multiple times that he realizes now it likely wasn't raytraced
>he's the retarded one

>>5513595
finally, thank god
Any thoughts about why this is look is too hard for in game graphics with current computing power? Since the lighting isn't too intensive to compute.
Is it nurbs - or even simply the fact that there's a lot of artfulness and skillfulness gone in to posing and placing the lighting for the single shot (and it would all fall apart under arbitrary movement like in gameplay)?
I guess if everything's direct lit you'd need a fuckload of lights for areas maybe it's too hard to design this look rather than compute it

There's a somewhat similar look in the early games that made heavy use of realtime per pixel lighting and shadows, like FEAR and Splinter Cell. It just doesn't look that hot in motion when you can't tweak the lights and camera for every shot.

>>5514206
I can't really tell you exactly why. OPs picture is rendered with a scanline renderer that has some raytracing features tacked on, similar to how Softimage and 3D Studio also rendered back then.
Alias had some support for 3rd party renderers like Pixars Renderman, but that was definitely not used here.

Can't tell what it is. Maybe because it's all phong shading, maybe because of the strong specular highlights, maybe because of the used materials(a lot less image textures and more procedurals) and how the scene is lit.

Someone with enough patience could probably recreate this look in a real time engine via shaders.

>>5514306
Shaders is the correct answer. If I wasnt working on my own project, I'd spend the weekend building something to make that look

>>5514308
>>5514306
>write this shader
i mean, I had this thought too guys but the fact that this has *never* been done despite obvious interest in this from various types of enthusiast over like 10 years - not with all the people in the world writing shaders for shadertoy etc, says there's gonna be something along the way during that weekend that's gonna make you go ah- fuck - never mind.
In a previous pre-render thread many anons realised for the first time that various pre-render backgrounds from games they'd enjoyed had actually used pre-render as bases for artists to digitally paint over - they were as much matte paintings as renders.
My current suspicion is that if you recreated the exact 'tech' that went to making this scene, and posed some models in a setting - a render from it would look like a bunch of meh until you spent hours hand tweaking every light's position, angle and manually switching on and off shadow mapping per light, per object, etc., till eventually the 'pop' like the OP image was there.

>>5514390
Your assumption is correct, often a lot of post work was done on these.

>>5514236
hmm now that you mention it

>>5514428
FEAR for me marks the end of the silver age of gaming

>>5512169
Probably not. They could have got someone to draw that in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost of having ti rendered. It might be hard to imagine if your only experience with artists is drawfags on 4chan. But IRL there are many very talented people who can do stuff like that cheap and quickly.

My mind would explode if I saw that in motion @ 60fps. Sadly the technology isn't there yet

>>5512756
Memory usage is going to depend heavily on various source factors that likely scale with higher poly models. But you're forgetting that it doesn't matter if you can store something in memory if you're still compute bound, and a parallel computation machine is rendered less useful if your rendering pipeline is comprised of linear phases that depend on each other before processing the next.

>what's so hard about a large number of polygons?
Is literally the GPU market's design task. If rendering this shit was possible to do easier, it would make it to market, and that's what happens over time.

Adding more resources is a whole separate thing compared to optimizing process as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth
Making operations faster and giving them more cache does nothing if you don't utilize them effectively at various lower levels (SDK/compiler, microcode, circuit, etc.).

I don't believe this. I think its totally possible for a modern game to look like this. Nobody will ever care to try is the problem. PC today are super powerful and only going to get more so as time goes on.

>>5514538
But every fucking one knows that. Doom wasn't the first 3D game it was just the most optmized one that ran on actual toasters

>>5514580
>But every fucking one knows that.
Apparently not if people are asking about it.

>>5514586
it's not that people don't know (the blah blah about muh pipeline you wrote) it's more that it has nothing to do the thread's question

>>5514596
I don't know where you got the notion that every reply had to pertain to the OP directly. I'm replying to the post which is linked, with information that pertains to that specific subtopic within the thread.
It's pretty standard around here to do so as the format allows multiple topics within a single thread to exist without obstructing other topics.
It's the basically the main benefit of reply links.

>>5514684
>blahdy blah
cos im op and i wrote the post you replied to and nothing you're saying is of any use to either
You need to not sperg out so much and focus what you were trying to say- high polycount is hard if 'your pipeline is comprised of linear phases'. So who cares? Who says that's needed for a look like OP image?

>>5514692
You complained about someone not providing enough information now you're chiding me for giving too much while also seemingly having little knowledge on the subject and leaving everything arbitrary and undefined.

>Who says that's needed for a look like OP image?
What are you even talking about, your OP is ambiguous in this regard when you say "like it".
It needs to be that way if you're asking why we can't render those images in real time today, if that's how they where constructed to be.

If you're saying it has to be similar enough, to what degree qualifies?

I doubt people are going to give you the patience you're expecting for such a broad question with a hostile and ironically spergy attitude.

>>5514702
Listen man, your writing is really hard to read and unfocused. You say 'it it it' and each time 'it' refers to some new unspecified thing. Anyway, other people knew what was being asked and the question has been well answered in the thread

>>5514713
>Listen man, your writing is really hard to read
I'm quoting your text so if it's hard to parse that's hardly my own fault and gives credit to me calling it ambiguous in the first place.
In the OP I assumed "why modern real time cannot do anything like it?" was a reference to the attached rendered image.


I don't think it's as "hard" as you say to understand.
You're asking who said it needs to look like the OP image. I'm saying you implied they have to look like that by saying "anything like it" where "it" likely references your image.

Just sayin.

>>5514724
Not the anon your crying about but I really hope you're just ESL and not brain damaged

>>5514757
It'd be more useful if you even attempted to point out flaws in anything I said. Given the content of OP's posts, I highly doubt English is their first language so I'm guessing you see the same and are just goading me for no obvious reason. Maybe attention.

>>5512172
yeah it was ray traced all these new shader tricks are shortcuts

Why does every thread derail into personal insults after 5-10 posts?

>>5514892
These soulful cgi renders really seem to trigger some people

>>5514892
>they add three whole letters to 4chan's name
>everyone is fully convinced that it's a brand new site
And-- still picturing you guys as CLOWNS-- you're going to tell me that 4chan is host to some bevy of erudite sages who are masters of civility.

Boy, shitposting has been cast from every other corner of the internet like some horrible pest, and now every site accepts exactly one brand of shitposting while 4chan remains one of the few bastions upon which all shitposting is more or less sanctioned.

Be happy they still deal with most of the lolicons and shit like that. You could be /r9k/ or /adv/ who have just been given up on and are full on garbage containment boards.
4chan is where derailing, insulting people go. Where else would they remain unbanned?

>>5514903
>shitposting is more or less sanctioned
No.
>>>/global/rules/6

>>5514580
>>5514596
Could you be any more rude? I was backing you up earlier in the thread (see >>5512645
>>5512874 >>5513859), but now I see you're just being a prick to another Anon who's trying to help answer your question).
>>5514713
>Listen man, your writing is really hard to read and unfocused.
You can use that as an excuse for being rude to the guy, but it's not going to work. Not when a dummy like me could understand his posts perfectly.

>>5515946
you've got different people lumped together. in any case I didn't make the thread for someone to kiss my ass and 'back me up' like a little sidekick