/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.7739257]

why has nobody ever mentioned that the idTech 4 engine (i.e. Quake 4) looks pretty much dead-on the style of 90s pre-renders? (hard light, no bounces) you could probably remake the donkey kong promo renders in it accurately

[Anonymous No.7739265]

no its not. look at the textures, polycount, lighting, and shadowing,. not even close

[Anonymous No.7739287]

>Quake 4
>vomiting-kermit.jpg

[Anonymous No.7739294]

how did they drop the ball on quake 4 so hard anyway? same with unreal 2. most of the time people forget they exist

[Anonymous No.7739297]

>>7739294
They were outsourced

[Anonymous No.7739314]

>>7739265
think dude. that's a screenshot from quake 4. a game made to run real time with 2005 computers. The assets are lowish poly for that reason. of course you can fucking make a model with a polycount 100x higher than one of those objects and run it now realtime on your current computer.

you could also render at 8k or some shit and then downsample which looks like what your pic does. that might not be real time but still

>>7739287
i'm not saying the game's good i've never played it. but the way the light works and the textures evokes pre-rendered backgrounds, if maybe not getting near the quality of promo renders

[Anonymous No.7739392]

>>7739257
No it doesn’t really but I get your point that was when it started to approach the cgi cinematics. There are some newer games that are exactly or better than the cgi movies, which at the time was thought of as impossible.

[Anonymous No.7739396]

>>7739257
good observation anon. my understanding is it's basically doom 3 + some very slight additions for weather and sky.

the distinct look comes from stencil shadow volumes which is wildy unpopular for performance reasons.

I would guess it looks like pre-renders because they just used simple raycasting which creates similar hard shadows.

[Anonymous No.7739456]

>>7739257
This (or the lack thereof) is probably a big factor.

[Anonymous No.7739653]

>>7739392
>There are some newer games that are exactly or better than the cgi movies, which at the time was thought of as impossible.
I don't know about this.. you often see the complaint on here "why didn't they do this style but in real time" because pre-renders had a certain look - quite like this guy says >>7739456, the top line, and where everything in a scene is fucking black unless a light is hitting it directly which is harshly unrealistic so nobody makes graphics like that.

[Anonymous No.7740556]

>>7739294
Activision sabotaging Id and Raven over CoD2
Ritual Died after it when they were making the expansion for Q4 that had Grunt in it.
https://imgur.com/a/gQUnZ

[Anonymous No.7740575]

>>7739257
Ray tracing is going to be the key to recreating the effects of 90s pre-renders.

[Anonymous No.7740706]

Quake IV was testing Raytracing years before they started forcing it into vidya
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5GteH4q47s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKQU9cKwNyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2lRW79i1k4

[Anonymous No.7740725]

>>7739294
Lol, I actually did forget about it. I was thinking, "quake 4? Wait, was that real or an imagined memory? Oh yeah, it actually happened, how forgettable.

[Anonymous No.7740763]

>>7740725
Quake IV was damn good, but Activision fucked id and Raven, which led to id burning all bridges with them and let Zenimax buy them.

if Id was still with activision, they would be another COD company.

[Anonymous No.7741064]

>>7740556
Activision didn't do shit they were never anything more than a publisher. Besides bethesda/zenimax published quake 4 as well so you can stop

[Anonymous No.7741125]

>>7741064
>Being this retarded

[Anonymous No.7741154]

>>7739294
I actually liked Quake 4 a lot more than Doom 3 or Quake 2.

[Anonymous No.7741364]

>>7739257
I sort of see what you mean OP. It has that early 3D Studio Max pre-rendered look.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoRXLTMv7OE

[Anonymous No.7741571]

>>7740575
they don't use raytracing . don't just babble nonsense

[Anonymous No.7741580]

>>7741125
Stfu nigger provide proof or kys

[Anonymous No.7741792]

>>7741364
>3D Studio Max
exactly. Like this reminds me a lot of shit i attempted to make in Max. The only noticeable differences are that things are lower poly, for gameplay reasons and similarly lower res textures.
If you were going to do a little diorama scene instead of a game/mod/level, you could up res-and high poly your geometry, and then you'd basically have a 3D max scene ----that you could move around in in real time.

This WAS the dream and people just haven't cottoned on to doing it because tastes changed

[Anonymous No.7741954]

and regarding also the polycount issue, the engine has support for bezier curves just like 3dmax etc so you have curves that aren't hexagons. If you ever modelled in 3d in the 90s just look at this and tell me the metal on those curved walls and much of the rest doesn't look like what you were making

[Anonymous No.7742195]

>>7741954
>bezier curves
you're an idiot

[Anonymous No.7742231]

>>7741571
He's not saying they did. He's saying that ray tracing can help to recreate the look.

[Anonymous No.7742276]

>>7742195
I just got this info from here, and I used to use them in max etc. What part is wrong?

>>7742231
What am I missing though, why would it help when the whole 'look' is the strong unrealism, and raytracing increases realism?

Making the old pre-renders was doing 3D in a style where light does not bounce ever. Raytracing is a way of implementing bounces ...

[Anonymous No.7742489]

>>7739314
>think dude.

This is how most sentences explaining poorly thought-out bullshit spoken by retards with no skills or ambition generally start. Just go smoke more weed and fuck off.

[Anonymous No.7742787]

>>7742231
If developers didn't make games that looked like early renders before, what makes you think they will now? There's even less of an excuse now that realism virtually comes for free.

[Anonymous No.7742809]

>>7742276
I'm not experienced with Id Tech 4, but curved surfaces in Quake 3 were pretty limited. Only surfaces that were tagged as such were affected, but it leaves all other surfaces blocky.
It also entirely client-side, so the collision would be completely fucked up.

[Anonymous No.7742861]

>>7742809
so...?

[Anonymous No.7742916]

>>7742276
i think the argument for real time raytracing is that promotional renders had raycasting. im personally not that impressed of current state rt.

[Anonymous No.7742949]

>>7742916
I don't know about this - I know there's lots of terminologies that get mixed up but in renders like this >>7739265, except for possibly to implement the reflection, i don't think there's any ray-anything. It's raster graphics, isn't it? With per-pixel lighting
Like when I think ray-casting I think of the fake 3d from wolfenstein ... I dunno what that has to do with renders

[Anonymous No.7744403]

>>7742861
It hardly has a huge effect on the environment. The levels were pretty detailed anyway, at least when you compare it to games of similar engines. The real shortcoming seems to be the characters. You can go up to a person and see a super detailed and rounded face, but when you actually look at the edges of their heads, they quickly begin to appear like lego bricks.

It's interesting how Riddick appears to be the complete opposite. You see these highly detailed people walking around in shiny flat corridors.

[Anonymous No.7744417]

Doom 3 had great lighting but looked like shit compared to HL2

[Anonymous No.7745492]

>>7739265

i never realized dixie had one finger more than diddy until now

[Anonymous No.7745508]

>>7739257
>why has nobody ever mentioned that the idTech 4 engine (i.e. Quake 4) looks pretty much dead-on the style of 90s pre-renders?
But I have. I'm waiting for someone to demonstrate so with some high poly models and perfect antialiasing.

[Anonymous No.7745608]

>>7745508
this is what i'm going to spend a few weekends doing next time i have a functional computer

[Anonymous No.7746717]

>>7739265
>tfw you can kind of see the car bodies in the monkeys skin
you know because this is made in poweranimator which uses nurbs and nurbs were something that 3d tools imported from the auto industry software and which they'd been using because those types of curves are suitable for stamping from sheet steel
lol at his stamped steel car hood upper lip. lol in a good way i mean

[Anonymous No.7747398]

How about this gem.

[Anonymous No.7747578]

>>7744417
>Doom 3 had great lighting but looked like shit compared to HL2
Valve did a really clever trick where instead of having the shadows go to 0% brightness it only goes down to 50%. It fakes out ambient light you would see from the light bouncing off the nearby environment. It looks good most of the time but can be jarring in certain situations (basically pitch black darkness), but you would only see that in shit like Gmod or map making where you brush up against the engines limitations by doing weird shit with it.

[Anonymous No.7747589]

>>7744417
>>7747578
This pic actually demonstrates it better. The dot product is basically the angle between the light and the surface. So they're pretty much saying "Take whatever the angle is and add a flat 50% brightness to it."

[Anonymous No.7748003]

>>7747578
>>7747589
That's a double-edged sword. Half-Life 1 did the same, and it looks extremely boring outside of the areas that use true physically correct point lights. Picture related.

[Anonymous No.7748045]

I didnt know quake 4 existed

[Anonymous No.7748056]

>>7748003
looks like HL source

[Anonymous No.7748067]

>>7739265
>people say you still can't make a game that looks like this

Why is it? because of the smoothness/roundness of everything?

[Anonymous No.7748079]

>>7748056
Probably because I restored overbrights, but it's very much a thing even without any modifications.

[Anonymous No.7748095]

>>7745492
Are you ok, anon? They have the same number.

[Anonymous No.7748317]

>>7748056

[Anonymous No.7748323]

>>7748317
Soul/Soulless

[Anonymous No.7748643]

>>7748323
*Soulful

[Anonymous No.7748669]

>>7747578
>>7748003
>a great trick
>shadows only go to %50 dark
holy shit i knew these engines look washed out but nobody wanted to hear it. now here's the proof

[Anonymous No.7748686]

>>7748317
>I restored half life
This is just different gamma settings with the in game slider. STOP fucking claiming you did this. You did do something which is useful which is the over-bright feature which is *not shown* here

[Anonymous No.7748724]

>>7748686
What the fuck are you talking about, schizo? The overbright is shown here. The ground at the bottom wouldn't be able to glow like that without it.
There's more to it than just gamma - there's a lightmap modulation under the hood that tries to compensate for the lack of overbrightness, which seemingly cannot be disabled in the Steam version.

[Anonymous No.7748807]

>>7748724
yeah yeah blah blah compensation blah blah - show the current xash build vs yours

[Anonymous No.7748820]

>>7747398
If this is a screen shot and not a magazine scan than actually there's a really good recreation here of the warm lighting and soft look that defined those beloved dk/mario promo renders.
Look at the highest tree where the light is hitting it.
Gonna have to look into this

[Anonymous No.7748878]

>>7748807
Jesus fucking Christ, this interrogation shit again? Are you the one from the other thread? I thought I had already gone through this shit.

But anyway, I just opened Xash3D and moved the gamma slider down. Looks pretty dark to me, and I received similar sentiments from others when I tried experimenting with this and the code some weeks ago, and so I decided to restore overbrightness to address that.

[Anonymous No.7748895]

>>7748878
It's dark because of other settings you've put wrong, color pick that scientist's coat it's at 70% grey level, which it wouldn't be with any sensible slider setting. You turned brightness or something down.
But I don't care actually, this is the thread for engines that look like pre-renders so make a different thread for shitass cardboard looking goldsource.
We want the plasticy look in here

[Anonymous No.7748912]

>>7748895
Scientist's coat? I had HD models installed, so I am guessing that's a factor.

[Anonymous No.7748913]

>>7748669
The HL2 never looked washed out to me, but a lot of early 00s late 90s shadows did. Deus Ex, HL1, etc. Ultimately those games were made for CRTs and when I finally got around to trying one the problem was solved. I think a MicroLED OLED TV would also fix it since it operates over an even larger range of colors.

[Anonymous No.7748921]

>>7739257
normal mapping + shadow volumes

>>7739396
>wildy unpopular for performance reasons
it produces very sharp shadows too. but performance-wise it only takes a second render pass using carmack's reverse

>>7740575
well, that's because that was the rendering technique used

[Anonymous No.7748935]

>>7748921
>it only takes a second render pass using carmack's reverse
Shadow volumes cannot simply be measured in passes. There is a lot of overdraw from intersecting volumes that can be arbitrarily complex to render. Shadow maps perform better, not because they are necessarily cheaper per se, but they have a mostly fixed cost.
Really, though, I don't see why you wouldn't use both, like ARMA 3 does with great results.

[Anonymous No.7748976]

>>7748921
>well, that's because that was the rendering technique used
I don't think this is true

[Anonymous No.7748994]

>>7748976
(for example every 2010s goober assumes that toy story 1 was ray traced. but their renderer did no ray tracing, it's something called scanline. with renderman
>It uses the "REYES" algorithm, which is a scanline method (see the proceedings of Siggraph '87 for details).
)

[Anonymous No.7749007]

>>7748976
It is. Toy Story 1, Reboot, every CG movie since forever use raytracing. The difference between real time raytracing used now is that that RTX, or whichever implementation of direct x raytracing, only renders a grainy version of the scene and fills in the blanks with AI reconstruction. Or sometimes it uses ray tracing on top of traditional real time rendering methods, for reflections or whatever.

[Anonymous No.7749023]

>>7749007
Why are you fucking speaking so confidently while being completely wrong? Above I quoted a guy from Pixar in 1995. Let me link you to his post:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/c/EXo7RWM-10M
and here you can read a bit about the technique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reyes_rendering
See the part about the bucketing - how it does (raster rendering of) 16x16 squares at a time - is that why you think it's doing raytracing? I just wonder what is your experience that you to be so certain of your mistaken view.

[Anonymous No.7749073]

>>7749023
Reyes architecture uses a bunch of techniques, one is raytracing as-needed, for reflections and shadows.
But you're right that I'm not certain that toy story 1 uses raytracing (but I'm like 90% sure it does due to the reflections etc).

I'm going based on remembered shit from when I went to college for computer animation.
Pixar uses render man, an implementation of reyes, and I know that render man did raytracing when I was in college. Whether or not it did it in toy story 1 or was added later, I don't know 100%. But I'm pretty sure it did as a reflection/shadow pass at least.

[Anonymous No.7749106]

>>7749073
I'm positive I read somewhere that it uses shadow mapping, or something close to it.

[Anonymous No.7749117]

>>7740556
Holy shit those concept drawings are so fucking cool, they look like illustrations from Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark. I like that they were looking to bring back the Quake 2 tank, and it looks like a couple enemies were actually fully completed? What a damn shame this expansion never happened.

[Anonymous No.7749119]

http://www.irtc.org/

This is a raytracing competition that ran from 1996 to 2006. You can see what raytraced images in the 90s looked like.

[Anonymous No.7749130]

Ahem.

[Anonymous No.7749134]

>>7749106
>>7749073
>I'm like 90% sure it does due to the reflections etc
read the linked usenet posts please. straight from the fucking pixar man
>If by "ray traced effects" you mean simple reflections, it's quite
>easy to do this with environment maps using PRMan. If you stare at
>certain frames long enough, you'll notice that the reflections are
>often not quite right. But you only get to look at each frame for
>1/24 of a second, so the tiny imperfections are almost never worth the
>5x or 10x performance penalty of ray tracing.
>
>_The RenderMan Companion_ gives examples of both images and shaders
>that do environment and reflection mapping. PRMan was used by ILM for
>"The Abyss" and "Terminator 2" (among other projects), and you can see
>refraction and reflection based effects in these movies, too.
>-- lg
>--
>Larry Gritz Pixar Animation Studios

[Anonymous No.7749136]

>>7749073
so you're captain of the ss dunning kruger

[Anonymous No.7749143]

>>7749130
well, what is it?

>>7749134
(in response to, btw
>>If renderman is a scanline based renderer, how did they acheive ray traced
>>effects in the movie? Is it some totaly new custom made renderer ala BMRT?
)

[Anonymous No.7749150]

Quake 4 after stroggification is more fun than Quake 1 and 2's campaigns.

[Anonymous No.7749191]

>>7749023
>citing 1995 usenet posts to BTFO anons

[Anonymous No.7749282]

>>7749134
Fair enough, I was busy so I didn't read your links. Looking further into it, render man got raytracing added later. So yeh, Toy Story 1 didn't use raytracing.
>>7749136
You know, Dunning and Krugar thought they were so fuckin slick with their studies on perceived intelligence, but I don't think they were as smart as they thought they were.

[Anonymous No.7749642]

So now that we're all on the same page about raytracing being irrelevant...
It seems like doom3 engine or in fact, looking into it, surprisingly some of the techniques coded ahead of their time in this >>7747398 Shrek for XBOX, 2001, have got quite a lot in common with what's used for >>7739265

but what jumps out to people as being still so different, and what turns out to be the computationally hard part, is micropoly generation.

REYES, which is what Toy Story is, and presumably whatever comparable implementation made the old mario/dk takes parametrically defined curves - i.e. sphere here, this radius (a math object with no polys - NURBS are another example) and at render time generates like a billion polys that are almost a pixel's size each, to cover the sphere and renders them raster style i.e. normal game graphics. It takes so much memory that you actually do a small part of the screen/sphere a time, save the pixels and throw away the polys

This is what now is called real time tesselation which you did see a lot of research and demos of around 2009. But then I dunno I haven't heard much about it lately and I suspect GPU availability and doing a different technique more suitable to GPUs took the focus

I will do more research into whether anyone's pulling off real-time micropoly/real time REYES

In the mean time check out how easy it is to use modern rendering to completely Botch and Fuck an attempted recreation... Look at their dead eyes:

[Anonymous No.7749724]

>>7749642
>So now that we're all on the same page about raytracing being irrelevant...
I wouldn't say irrelevant. Maybe not necessary, but it still might be a good way to mimick certain effects of old renders.

Unreal Engine just demoed a micropoly style thing last year didn't they? The cave demo for UE5 I think.

[Anonymous No.7749772]

>>7749724
>it still might be a good way
it's an anon board, you don't have to do this "well... i could have still been right in a different way" coping

>Unreal Engine just demoed a micropoly style thing last year didn't they? The cave demo for UE5 I think.
This is true though. I just noticed this (claim):
>UE5 - on next-gen at least - is the realisation of the micro-polygon engine
>You know, the philosophy behind it goes back to the 1980s with the idea of REYES" says Tim Sweeney.
So, you know when the dev corpo man says something is The Dream you want to be armed with scepticism but like at least we can say, they are actually aiming at what we've been talking about in the thread.

Though if one gets hands on UE5 editor you're going to have to go in and fuck up the gamma and everything else

[Anonymous No.7749861]

>>7749772
>it's an anon board, you don't have to do this "well... i could have still been right in a different way" coping
It's not coping. I didn't say I was right. Real time shadowing currently sucks shit at mimicking prerendered. Stop being a cunt for no reason.
And a lot of the effects of the old renders people are interested in mimicking were ray traced, even if toy story itself wasn't.
Hell, why even mention any of it on a public forum, you got this all yourself. You're king shit of this fuck mountain. Go make your game engine.

[Anonymous No.7749905]

>>7749861
because the whole point of making this thread was to correct the misconception that you're still pushing in this post. Specifically about the shadowing. The shadowing in pre-renders is precisely the sharp shadows that were achieved in idtech4 (and shrek it turns out). That is the claim of this thread.
I'm happy for you to argue against it by presenting some evidence. Currently you just seem to be sputtering in annoyance that your assumptions were wrong and hoping to mislead people that some of "your truth" must still hold.

Tell me where the real time hard-edged shadows of doom3 etc fall short of the laser-sharp hard edged shadows in >>7739265 (aside from being cast by lower-poly geometry in the first place, which isn't an issue with the shadows)

[Anonymous No.7749959]

>>7749905
You can get those same shadows with raytracing, you just reduce the bounces. plus you get the reflections seen in other ads. And you get it at a consistent overhead, whereas if your tossing potentially millions of tessellating polys at stencil shadows you're going to drag your engine to a crawl.
But the doom 3 engine is open source. Maybe you're right. Do a test scene with it, toss a couple complex super high poly models at it.

Kkreiger. Look that up. Might have some tricks you're looking for.

[Anonymous No.7749987]

>>7740725
the only thing good to come out of quake IV was the stoggification scene
i remember almost nothing else

[Anonymous No.7750194]

>>7749143
It's the Ati 9700 demo.

[Anonymous No.7750524]

>>7740556
Every time I see this it feels like a gigantic feck yew to what Quake 4 should've been...

[Anonymous No.7750536]

>>7747589
You can also add a fake bounce light using this by a normalised dot check against the global XYZ-axis which subtly lerp into effect based on fuzzy distance/collision detection.

[Anonymous No.7750640]

>>7750524
Kotick was pushing CoD against Battlefield
Sci Fi Shooters weren't selling anymore, and guess what he did?

[Anonymous No.7750731]

>>7750536
Is there an example of that? I'm picturing it like ambient light but based on a physics object.

[Anonymous No.7750746]

>>7739265
>Anonymous 05/09/21(Sun)21:30:35 No.77

The original DKC1 promotional renders didn't have fur shading seen in DKC2. They came the closest to their DKC2 promotional renders with Star Fox Adventures on the GameCube and Conker on the Xbox.

[Anonymous No.7750749]

>>7750746
>The original DKC1 promotional renders didn't have fur shading seen in DKC2.


Here's a promo render for DKC1. Clearly the popularity of the first game allowed Rare to purchase a lot newer SGi workstations for DKC2.

[Anonymous No.7750757]

>>7750749
DKC2 promotional art. They are using better shader effects.

[Anonymous No.7750761]

>>7739257
Download Blender 2.49 and use Blender Internal. It would be painful to use and very slow... but it would still be better than whatever they were using in the early 90's (probably Power Animator. I bet rendering programs were external, then, too).
>inb4 blendlet go back to /3/
If you can still somehow get early versions of Max or Maya or Alias or whatever and geg them to run on your computer, go ahead. Thing about Blender is, you can access its entire history anytime.

[Anonymous No.7750764]

>>7750761
id Loved to use Vertex animations and NURBS over bones.

[Anonymous No.7750796]

>>7750757

The Donkey Kong Country 1 renders were 1993-1994. Though probably 1994. The Donkey Kong Country 2 renders were 1995. Donkey Kong Country 1 made Rare so much money that they invested in a lot of new workstations. Look at the fur on the OG Donkey Kong render. It looks like bump mapping. Also, disjointed hands from wrists. Looks more seamless in the DKC2 renders.

[Anonymous No.7750804]

>>7750761
/3/ is such a bad board.

[Anonymous No.7750816]

>>7750764
Perhaps I can help. Vertex animation is possible using a series of Relative Shape keys, each key relative to the last. What do you mean by 'NURBS over bones'?

[Anonymous No.7750840]

>>7750816
He means he would like to use nurbs, and also vertex animations over bones.

[Anonymous No.7750841]

>>7750764
Oof. I'm retarded. I read that as "I'd love to..."
Still curious about how I can learn more.

[Anonymous No.7750860]

>>7750841
Oh. So did I.

[Anonymous No.7751004]

>>7750757

Funky Kong's DKC1 render (left) vs Funky Kong's DKC2 render (right)

[Anonymous No.7751156]

>>7742489
Except he's right and you're wrong lmao

[Anonymous No.7751629]

So you need,
High poly
Phong, blinn, lambert shading
Some method of hard shadowing
Bump mapping
Fur if you want to replicate the donkey Kong stuff
Sometimes reflections
Procedural texture generation was big at the time.. what else?

[Anonymous No.7751643]

>>7751629
Anti-aliasing

[Anonymous No.7751976]

>>7751643
Are they anti-aliased? I thought there are no jaggies because they are rendered at insanely high resolution.

[Anonymous No.7751986]

>>7750746
>that pic
fuck, that looks disgusting. Maybe they 'did fur' but there's nothing good looking about it and nothing else from the technique is there. This atrocity could never be described as 'close to DKC2 renders' with a straight face.

[Anonymous No.7752020]

>>7750749
So for all the people who harp on about ray tracing - even thought you now know it's not used - "still maybe helping", I want you to look at the lighting in this image carefully.
Because you'll find it does not make physical sense, this unrealism, i.e. the opposite of what raytracing gives you, is the whole 'look'.
See how the main light is in front of them and there's a backfill. Well, why is there bright light between diddy's fingers? Why is the backfill light hitting Donkey's mouth right where diddy's foot should be blocking it.
It's because of three things, light going through shit, light being weirdly implemented, and an artist coming and manually placing lights in physically nonsensical places and making them apply to one bit of geometry and not another.
You will never get a fucking raytraced light to recreate any of this specific look

[Anonymous No.7752137]

>>7751986
The silhouette looks a little dicked, but the effect works well around the mouth and such. I bet you could do it better now with higher res maps and more layers.

[Anonymous No.7752153]

>>7752020
Stencil shadows would also block that light.
And there's nothing to stop you from placing lights in nonsense places with raytraced shadowing. And you can make raytracing pass through objects as well if you want, at least in Maya, though I don't know what real time engines that may or may not be available in. Pretty sure you can't in UE4, unless light linking has been added in the last two years, but I know it was an often requested feature.
You can set raytraced lighting to one bounce with whatever falloff you want, and it will essentially just trace objects, so long as you only use point and directional lights. If you use volumes you'll end up with the blurry shadows you want to avoid (thigh some older renders has blurred shadow maps too).

[Anonymous No.7752157]

>>7752153
>thigh
>has
Phoneposting. What a nightmare.

[Anonymous No.7752181]

>>7752020
>even thought you now know it's not used
Oh, and it's irrelevant that it's not used. Neither is stencil shading. You're trying to approximate a style. If you want to only use only the methods used in those old renders then have fun with your 2fps gameplay.

[Anonymous No.7752192]

>>7752153
this is just silliness though since the right, era-correct lighting/shadow calcs are TRIVIAL and the actual reason we aren't seeing this running in real time is the micropoly generation step.

[Anonymous No.7752195]

>>7752192
Yeah, the best I think you can do in that regard atm is hope UE5 isn't bullshit.
Or just make things as smooth as you can, and focus on other aspects.

[Anonymous No.7752696]

>>7739314
Bro just think

[Anonymous No.7752715]

>>7751976
They aren't AA'd but we're discussing how to recreate the aesthetic in realtime, correct? If that's the case, then you would definitely need AA.

[Anonymous No.7752726]

heres your shadows
fighting all the camera effects in unity is a pain in the ass. it wants to act like a physical camera with all the bloom and blowout and shit.

[Anonymous No.7752746]

>>7752715
I don't know the answer to whether AA'd looks visually distinct from 'massive resolution downsampled' but i'm guessing it does.
My reasoning is there shouldn't actually be that much difficulty running a 20 year old engine at ~4k resolution today

>>7749959
>Do a test scene with [doom 3 engine], toss a couple complex super high poly models at it.
i would do that instead of making the thread if i had a computer

Someone else do this pls lol

[Anonymous No.7752754]

>>7752726
red box looks weirdly unlit/unshadowed - are you demonstrating light going through geometry as discussed above?
btw can you run this real-time at 8x this resolution?

[Anonymous No.7752853]

>>7752754
The box is floating in the air, with lights on either side. I'm just screwing around, not trying to demonstrate anything in particular, just seeing what I can do with Unity since I already had it installed.
I should be able to make light pass through that block (you can only faintly see the shadow it casts on the lower blue sphere).
right now it says this is running at ~60 fps in-editor at 1280x720
I'm sure a lot of it can be optimized, this is pretty slapdash atm. I only have a gtx 1060 too, which is pretty shit for raytracing anything,
pic, box with no shadows

[Anonymous No.7752862]

>>7739314
The low polycount is precisely what makes it not look like 90s prerenders.

[Anonymous No.7752891]

>>7752853
>raytracing

>>7752862
yeah nobody is saying quake 4 the game looks like pre-renders. i was saying if you put high quality models and let that engine render them, at high res, which it should be able to do 20 years later, you'd be getting a good approximation

[Anonymous No.7752920]

>>7752891
Oh. That might be possible, but I'd still like to see attempts with my own eyes.

>>7750761
What about writing custom shaders for a current version of blender? Granted, you could only do CPU rendering, but you *might* be able to get a proof-of-concept done with it.

[Anonymous No.7752921]

>>7752891
>raytracing
Can't get sharp shadows otherwise.

[Anonymous No.7752923]

>>7752891
>raytracing
can't get sharp shadows otherwise
deleted post with wrong image

[Anonymous No.7752927]

>>7751156

Except you're gay and OP is a smalltown faggot

[Anonymous No.7752930]

>>7752923
>can't get sharp shadows otherwise
i really hope you're trying to say 'in unity'

[Anonymous No.7752934]

>>7752923
can you re-render this at like 6600x4000 and resize it to this size in ms paint or smth. that would be worth a look

[Anonymous No.7752963]

>>7752930
Well yeah, this is a Unity scene.
Unless there's a stencil shading plugin (I haven't looked), or I crank the shadowmap up to a retarded resolution.
>>7752934
I'm not sure how to render an image in Unity, I haven't used it in like 10 years before this, I'm taking screengrabs. But here's ~1600x800 screengrab scaled 50% in GIMP.

[Anonymous No.7752964]

>>7752963
forgot image

[Anonymous No.7752967]

>>7752964
same thing (almost, I had to fuck with some screen scaling things in the last one), but with FXAA.

[Anonymous No.7752976]

>>7752967
this is actually running at 180 fps too. Not sure what I did to change that. I've been toggling a bunch of shit here and there. Sorry for the multipost.
I'm done for right now. Was just something to play with. I'll have to learn Unity's material editor (and unity in general) in the future to play with procedural textures and seeing if I can get some better reflections. apparently unity uses some sort of volume... something something for reflections.

Anyway. My biggest issue with this atm is the materials I'm using are over-done. They only need to be the basic phong, blinn, and lambert style, but I sorta have to approximate that with the roughness and metallic sliders.

[Anonymous No.7752989]

>>7752967
>>7752964
interestingly these both look worse than your 440p one.
The 800p one is now visibly low-poly. i dunno why that happened but it suggests that to get any kind of magazine page size render, you'd need to increase polys by about.. 100x

FXAA, lets not see that again

but in general, there's something to these... maybe if unity can use NURBS there is a path here

[Anonymous No.7752996]

>>7752967
>render an image in Unity
It doesn't seem like that's an option but what about AA that's not the shittest option, like MSAA or, FSAA/ssaa (which is actually doing overes-scale down anyway)

[Anonymous No.7753030]

>>7752989
These are just Unity's basic sphere. I don't know if it needs to be THAT much smoother. dynamic tessellation might be fun to play with, but I dunno how to do it in unity.
>>7752996
I'll try another method tomorrow maybe. I gotta hit the hay now.

[Anonymous No.7753073]

>>7753030
> I don't know if it needs to be THAT much smoother
at the edge, which is important, you can clearly see sharp hexagon-edges. this is in a 4/800 p render. something like the DK2 pic up thread is rendered at like 3000p
you're gonna fuckin need it.
but, when you make the sphere or look at it's properties, doesn't it have a ' divisions ' or some shit?

ok will check back, it's quite intriguing what you have done so far

[Anonymous No.7753329]

>>7752923
>>7752930
>>7752963
You don't need stencil shadows for sharpness. You can use a custom filter for shadow mapping without brute-forcing with high resolutions.

[Anonymous No.7753937]

>>7753329
I'm on your side about that, but by default I have raytracing, and the last time I tried filtered shadow maps it was kinda blobby.

[Anonymous No.7753943]

>>7753937
I fucked up that sentence I just woke up.
I have that with ray tracing by default.

Except for the directional lights that scattered some rays for some reason...

[Anonymous No.7754606]

>>7752920
I donno how easy it is to do, but thr BEER renderer is promising for that sort of thing.

[Anonymous No.7754759]

>>7752964
>>7752967
add banana hoard pls

[Anonymous No.7755102]

>>7752020

Donkey Kong Country was a huge game for Nintendo of America. This was their first big hit game that they produced with Rare. Nintendo's Treehouse studio was created to QA the game. Nintendo even made this little documentary VHS and shipped it out to anyone with a Nintendo Power Magazine subscription. If you watch the video, they say that the renders for Donkey Kong Country 1 were produced on a SGi Challenge. Which were produced between 1991 to 1993. This video was filmed in the 'new' Treehouse offices and features a young Ken Lobb. .

https://youtu.be/Wgw-TEWuCQc?t=388

For Donkey Kong Country 2, which started production right after DKC1 became an instant hit. It is clear that the Donkey Country 2 renders were made with something newer than a Challenge. Maybe an SGi machine from 1994-1995. Or at least a generation newer.


>>7751986
>>that pic
>fuck, that looks disgusting. Maybe they 'did fur' but there's nothing good looking about it and nothing else from the technique is there. This atrocity could never be described as 'close to DKC2 renders' with a straight face.

The game came out in 2005, the 360 was released months later. But the fur effects of Conker reloaded were still impressive. But not comparable to the DKC renders. Outside of Star Fox Adventures and Conker on the Xbox, these are the two only examples I can think of using fur shading in generation 6 consoles.

[Anonymous No.7755198]

>>7755102
>https://youtu.be/Wgw-TEWuCQc?t=388 [Embed]

[Anonymous No.7755838]

>>7755102

Would it be possible to use AI learning to find all the polygons in this mesh (using this video), and recreate the original DK model?

[Anonymous No.7755875]

>>7755838
It would probably be faster to just do it by hand.

[Anonymous No.7756021]

And to add to the ID Tech 4 thing. One game that I always liked was Human Head's/ 3D Realms Prey from 2006. This is a game that uses ID Tech 4. I played Prey using a Geforce 6800 with 256MB of RAM with an Athlon 64, and the game had a very mid 90's CG look to it with the character models and environments. The monster designs were pretty creepy with some amazing animation. The game is linear like Half-Life. The portals are cool, but a gimmick. I still enjoyed the game...

https://youtu.be/x8R1XCojhdI?t=573

[Anonymous No.7756071]

>>7756021
watching this the standout difference is still the lowpoly - so i thought, well, what about idTech fuckin 5 6 and 7 - did they up the poly?
and i went and watched some 'doom eternal' footage and... they did up the poly but the problem is now the style has changed.
There is just too much detail/geometry. Every piece of a character's armor or something that would be a detail in a pre-render, has like 50 more detail pieces on it itself

That does suggest though that you could possibly use those engines to do the 90s style, if you wanted.

[Anonymous No.7756085]

>>7739314
>It looks just like the prerenders
>I will now go on to admit of course it doesnt look like them

[Anonymous No.7756097]

>>7755102
>The game came out in 2005, the 360 was released months later. But the fur effects of Conker reloaded were still impressive. But not comparable to the DKC renders. Outside of Star Fox Adventures and Conker on the Xbox, these are the two only examples I can think of using fur shading in generation 6 consoles.
I remember Conkers Reloaded when it first came out. Thought it looked like shit even back then and they tried too hard to make the game look realistic.

[Anonymous No.7756110]

>>7756085
op says the style not the quality level

[Anonymous No.7756148]

>>7756071
They don't do shadowing the same way.
As an aside they are impressive engines. Super optimized.

[Anonymous No.7756208]

>>7756148
there is so much fucking busy clutter crap on the screen at once in the doom games i can't even see a shadow to compare lol. These games i guess are designed for giant screens, as in inches like 50" 80" tvs and shit.

[Anonymous No.7756236]

>>7756208
I kinda agree. There's too much shit going on. I like the games. 2016 is better than Eternal in that regard imo. Better in all regards imo actually, but that's another thread.

[Anonymous No.7756285]

>>7756071
>watching this the standout difference is still the lowpoly - so i thought, well, what about idTech fuckin 5 6 and 7 - did they up the poly?
>and i went and watched some 'doom eternal' footage and... they did up the poly but the problem is now the style has changed.
>There is just too much detail/geometry. Every piece of a character's armor or something that would be a detail in a pre-render, has like 50 more detail pieces on it itself
>That does suggest though that you could possibly use those engines to do the 90s style, if you wanted.

Back in the day Doom 3 was criticized for it low poly models. But, it was a decision to go with low poly + bump/normal maps and stencil shadows. A compromise to go with less polygons and more visual effects. Doom 3 still had really underrated character model animation. The lip syncing looked as good as Half-Life 2's. The game was released in 2004. the Geforcce FX 5 series and ATi Radeon 9700/9800 were the top cards targeted for Doom 3. Though the Geforce 6series and Radeon x1xx series came out in 2004. The top CPU's were the Pentium 4 and AMD64. Prey did come out in 2006, when there was the GeForcce 7xxx series and Radeon X10 cards and Quad2Cores. Prey does feature higher polygon models and textures. The ID Tech 4 engine can do some high polygon models. But it came at a performance cost.

[Anonymous No.7756339]

>>7756285
> it was a decision to go with low poly + bump/normal maps
hey, there's merit in it - check out the three pipes at 11:09 i the prey video in >>7756021
They look fucking great - and then you can see from the fence's shadow they only have like 12 sides.

It's an effective technique- it just means that before you up the polys you're going to see a difference from pre-renders that were done with micro-polys generated from parametric nurbs.

After up-polying models .. we're yet to see

[Anonymous No.7756381]

>>7756339
>hey, there's merit in it - check out the three pipes at 11:09 i the prey video in >>7756021 (You)
>They look fucking great - and then you can see from the fence's shadow they only have like 12 sides.

The environments look fantastic in Prey. I think Human Head did a good job creating something kind of grotesque. The weird organic fused with mechanical look. But the models are undeniably still low polygon, even for 2006 standards. Maybe it is a limitation of OpenGL? Look at this scene. These kids are pretty low polygon, but their animation looks great. I do like the look of ID Tecch4, myself. Wolfenstein 2009 and Quake Wars as well.

https://youtu.be/x8R1XCojhdI?t=2101

[Anonymous No.7756409]

>>7756285
>Doom 3 still had really underrated character model animation. The lip syncing looked as good as Half-Life 2's.
The lip syncing was as well timed, but HL2 used blend shapes to great effect for much better facial animations. Furrowed eyebrows, muscle mass displaced properly when smiling and such...
I'm not sure how doom 3 did theirs. Of they animated it just with controls alone or what...

Doom 3 was animated at a pretty high fps though so the monster animations look pretty great.

[Anonymous No.7756430]

>>7756409
>The lip syncing was as well timed, but HL2 used blend shapes to great effect for much better facial animations. Furrowed eyebrows, muscle mass displaced properly when smiling and such...
>I'm not sure how doom 3 did theirs. Of they animated it just with controls alone or what...

Tom be honest, facial animation is where Valve beat ID, Just look at Team Fortress 2. One game that was released a year before Half-Life 2, and Doom 3 was Max Payne 2. Remedy did try to up the production values of MP2 from MP1 by adding "cinematic models" to the game engine. Basically custom models that were made for specific cut-scenes. The game also added lip syncing. But the facial animation looked very stiff. The Remedy Entertainment were trying to go for a CG movie look.

https://youtu.be/426cKcjfuKw?t=219

[Anonymous No.7756476]

>>7756381

RIP Prey 2:
https://youtu.be/SZh6vTxRDnw?t=2076

Yes, Prey 2 was using ID Tech 4, like Prey. Human Head probably didn't want to deal with that Mega Texture shit in ID Tech 5. Prey 2 would have had much higher polygon models.

[Anonymous No.7756539]

>>7756476
I knew someone who used mega textures In a canned idtech 5 game. They sound awesome to work with as a designer. If you have a scene with baked lighting and you want a little more highlight on something you just paint it in. The engine itself was neat because it had networked editing. So more than one person could be working on a map in real time.

I dunno. Sounds fun. Megatextures had some performance issues on some cards, and they didn't release the high res version which was silly. But I'd really like to play with them. I think you could do a lot with them.

[Anonymous No.7756563]

>>7756539
>I knew someone who used mega textures In a canned idtech 5 game. They sound awesome to work with as a designer. If you have a scene with baked lighting and you want a little more highlight on something you just paint it in. The engine itself was neat because it had networked editing. So more than one person could be working on a map in real time.


I never used Mega textures. but I saw some videos of it being used. I like the canvas edit idea and the group editor. I thought Rage looked really good. But there were low resolution textures and detail "pop-in" issues. cool tech. maybe Carmack just wanted to push for faster data transfer times and lower latency? I'm not sure if the IDTech4 engine for Prey 2 was custom or not. It is interesting that Human Head was still using it in 2012. I wonder what happened behind the scenes? The footage had me always interested in the game. It looks like recommended specs were an i5 with a Geforce 460 or something. They were going with much higher polygon models and textures.

[Anonymous No.7756626]

>>7756381
>https://youtu.be/x8R1XCojhdI?t=2101 [Embed]

Just want to add that hearing the Art Bell Coast 2 Coast radio broadcasts in Prey were amazing. Art Bell recorded original dialog for the game. Prey does have a nice 'CG' presentation to it. Maybe update the polygon model count. While I am adding more. The original far Cry also had that kind of 'CG' look to it:

https://youtu.be/D0Vw2BijeyM?t=861

But more like a cheaper CG look production. It was from 2004.

[Anonymous No.7757562]

Luigi's Mansion on the GameCube had a bit of a Dreamswork look to it.
https://youtu.be/-pfYHmf0Wak?t=743

Also, the cancelled Donkey Kong Racing by Rare for the GameCube. Cancelled because Microsoft bought a large stake in the company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ThbbN3o5yw

[Anonymous No.7757590]

https://youtu.be/24s8oWJ2m7E?t=1574

[Anonymous No.7757725]

>>7749119
>http://www.irtc.org/

From a 1997 comp.

[Anonymous No.7758128]

>>7757725
Pic related is the style I want a game in.

[Anonymous No.7758130]

>>7758128
Also this.

[Anonymous No.7758521]

>>7758130

I don't know exactly what machines were used to develop Mario 64. I'm going to take a guess and say Silicon Indy, Indigo2. Maybe the CG art was rendered on a Challenge M?

[Anonymous No.7758538]

>>7758128
>Pic related is the style I want a game in.


I think Deadly Premonition was going for this look. But they didn't have the ray tracing, obviously.

[Anonymous No.7758554]

>>7758128
>http://www.irtc.org/

[Anonymous No.7758930]

[Anonymous No.7758951]

>>7758538
back at it again with the "ray tracting". perhaps you should read the rest of this thread. Or even just look - look at this >>7758130. are you going to call this raytracing? even when if you look at his belly you can literally see the environment map?

[Anonymous No.7758958]

>>7758930
is this in-engine?

[Anonymous No.7758970]

>>7758958
Couldn't be anything else.

[Anonymous No.7758992]

>>7758951
Not him, but I don't see why that couldn't be ray traced. We only see the scene behind him, and the reflection seems to contain the tile floor right in front of him, as well as the red girder off the side. The fact that the sky is shown could indicate that they didn't bother modelling the world behind the camera.

[Anonymous No.7759115]

>>7758992
>Not him, but I don't see why that couldn't be ray traced. We only see the scene behind him, and the reflection seems to contain the tile floor right in front of him, as well as the red girder off the side. The fact that the sky is shown could indicate that they didn't bother modelling the world behind the camera.

Not sure if the Mario 64 promotional renders were raytraced. I think the SGi systems/ software they were rendered on have their own approximation of ray tracing, or use some other techniques that can somewhat mimic the look while reducing rendering times. I'm sure it is possible to do raytracing on them. But it probably came down to how much time the artist had to invest in the renders. The N64 is interesting in that third parties had to invest in SGi workstations that were a requirement for N64 game development. Most of the CG promotional renders were done using the same hardware as the development.

[Anonymous No.7759126]

>>7759115

[Anonymous No.7759159]

>>7759126

[Anonymous No.7759163]

[Anonymous No.7759173]

>>7758992
please look again more carefully. please. look closely. do you know what environment mapping is? it's the same technique they used to do metal mario ingame (mario 64).
If you stop trying to find what isn't there to fit your comfortable old assumptions, and look at what's really there, you might find something even cooler

[Anonymous No.7759187]

>>7759115
>some other techniques that can somewhat mimic the look while reducing rendering times.
yes it's called reyes (scaline rendering). read the thread.
Your own attached pic is very clearly not raytraced, you can see the blinn/phong out the ass on every curve

[Anonymous No.7759254]

>>7759173
>If you stop trying to find what isn't there to fit your comfortable old assumptions
Holy projection. You're the one trying to make a claim here. I'm being purely skeptical.
> please. look closely.
You gotta be more specific than that.

[Anonymous No.7759279]

>>7759187
>read the thread.

yeah, now that I look back in this thread. There is it. Makes sense. It's not really impossible for most CPU's to do ray tracing. The problem is the speed and complexity. Reyes was most definitely used in Toy Story and many other early Pixar movies. They didn't use raytracing completely until Monsters U.

[Anonymous No.7759295]

>>7759254
>You gotta be more specific than that.
Not that anon but I can explain it in a way that actually makes sense. The "reflections" you see in that mario render aren't "real" reflections. It's simply a texture.

[Anonymous No.7759324]

>>7759295
>>7759254
which part of the texture gets 'reflected' is determined only by the angle of the surface to the camera, that's why it looks distorted like its chrome reflecting something.

I found this which shows they did have a go at using a render of the scene (minus mario) as the texture, but they didn't use that in their final scene and it seems pretty obvious why: Since his surface would be made up of all the same colors in the scene, he would smear into it unpleasingly.

[Anonymous No.7759340]

>>7759295
this is the texture used in-game (downsampled).
It's a default on SGI Indys.
I don't know of a clean shot of the texture used in >>7758130, probably because, as you can see by looking at the belly etc, it's a render itself, so presumably they used this >>7759324, said ah fuck, it looks shit he blends in - give him a different scene texture. and someone rendered a basic flat plane with sky and some kind of red structure at the edge

[Anonymous No.7759371]

It looks like Final Fantasy VII was rendered with SGi workstations. Rareware really did set the tone bigger developers to invest in them. DKC1 was a huge hit. Square's first game to use SGi renders was Super Mario RPG. They went all-in with the PS1 era. Every game they produced used SGi workstations. Capcom used SGi workstations for the pre-rendered backdrops in RE1-RE3.

[Anonymous No.7759374]

>>7759295
>The "reflections" you see in that mario render aren't "real" reflections. It's simply a texture.
And how can you determine that? What points towards it being an environment map?
You can easily tell in-game because there's an obvious mismatch between the surroundings and the reflection, but can you here?

>>7759324
>which part of the texture gets 'reflected' is determined only by the angle of the surface to the camera, that's why it looks distorted like its chrome reflecting something.

Mirror distortions are a natural effect of rounded geometry. Things in the real world don't tend to be that smooth.

But I think this image is more telling. What you should really look for is parallax. It looks like there is no difference between the reflection on the shoes and his belly here, so the environment map may be at his center of mass. Still not certain, though.

[Anonymous No.7759403]

>>7759374
>there's an obvious mismatch between the surroundings and the reflection, but can you here?
....yes??? mate LOOK at it, it's reflecting a blue sky green grass and sand do you seriously have something wrong with your eyes?

>so the environment map may be at his center of mass.
it sounds like you have are hearing about this technique for the first time but trying to act like you know what you are talking about.
You ignored where it was explained to you that the environment mapping is angle only, it doesn't have a position.

[Anonymous No.7759419]

>>7759374
>>7759403
also there's an extremely obvious tell. I'll see if i can let you work it out looking at this >>7759324. You though about parallax that's ok, physical reasoning, ....now what else should happen?

[Anonymous No.7759453]

>>7759115
Could be mixed. Raytraced floor, env mapped Mario.
I can't really tell if the floor reflection on Mario marches up enough to tell if it's raytraced or not.

Either way, it's an era appropriate render, and while you may not need raytracing for it, it would still match stylistically.

[Anonymous No.7759459]

>>7759159
That one I'm petty sure does use raytracing for the reflections you can see the light in the smoke stack, and it looks like some of the characters in the front of the engine.

[Anonymous No.7759469]

>>7759403
>....yes??? mate LOOK at it, it's reflecting a blue sky green grass and sand do you seriously have something wrong with your eyes?
Blue sky? Yes, I already gave a plausible explanation for that.
But sand? All I see are floor tiles that look very similar to what we can see directly in front of the camera, albeit oddly dark, especially the gaps.

>>7759419
Are you thinking of recursive reflections? Those could in theory have been optimized away to avoid infinite recursion (though I would expect it to be substituted rather than ignored). I kind of thought I saw his arm in the first image, but they are definitely not here.

[Anonymous No.7759490]

>>7759403
Projecting again?
Environment mapping is not one specific thing. There could be many ways to calculate it. Cube mapping is a form of environment mapping, and it does not suffer from the same projection artifacts that some of the more simple models do, given a high enough resolution.

[Anonymous No.7759505]

>>7759403
>it's reflecting a blue sky green grass and sand
It's reflecting a blue sky, but that could easily be behind the camera. It's not reflecting sand or grass that I see, it's reflecting the same tiles that are in front of him, you can see the line going straight up his belly.
It's also reflecting the red torches properly, which if it were 100% an environment map it wouldn't be doing.

[Anonymous No.7759518]

>>7758130
Oh
Nope, this is definitely reflecting the world, not an env map. You can see his arm in the reflection of his belly.

[Anonymous No.7759575]

>>7759505
>>7759469
>>7759518
There is a "is the dress blue or yellow" situation going on here. The "grass" pixels are undeniably greenish (you can use color picker) but not really grass green, and when you look more closely at the floor, actually the floor is yellow with a greenish bumpmap, but so shiny that it seems red because all the shit above it is red.
So probably the "grass and sand" is the same floor he's on, but under lighting conditions more related to the sky and sunlight, than the red torches, bringing out its yellow and green.

As for whether this is self-reflecting (which the other isolated mario definitely is not) i'm torn. In several places it seems to be doing so.

This one could be a 1 or 2 bounce raytrace

[Anonymous No.7759623]

>>7759459
>That one I'm petty sure does use raytracing for the reflections you can see the light in the smoke stack, and it looks like some of the characters in the front of the engine.

It does use raytracing for this one. Good eye. I can see it on the shadows.

[Anonymous No.7759653]

>>7759126

This Wave Race 64 render uses ray tracing as well. Look at the reflections on the jet skis.

[Anonymous No.7759693]

>>7758128
>>7758130
Amid Evil is doing a pseudo-raytrace look.

[Anonymous No.7759695]

>>7759575
>This one could be a 1 or 2 bounce raytrace
Has to be more than one, or the fully reflective Mario hits would return black, since there's nothing to return.
It's at least two.

[Anonymous No.7759710]

>>7759693
They have an rtx version either out or coming out soon.
They don't quite do the style I'm looking for, but it is visually distinct which is nice.

[Anonymous No.7759723]

>>7741954
>and regarding also the polycount issue, the engine has support for bezier curves just like 3dmax etc so you have curves that aren't hexagons. If you ever modelled in 3d in the 90s just look at this and tell me the metal on those curved walls and much of the rest doesn't look like what you were making

Oh, that's right. It has like a tessellation around the splines. I thought the game looked amazing, and it did have a cg look to it. Mostly because of the lighting and normal maps and such. I remember Half-Life being hailed for its character model animation and models. But the environmental lighting was basic in comparison to Doom 3. But keep in mind that Half-Life 2 also had a update in 2009 with an enhanced lighting model and Bloom. I was actually pissed when that update was released. Because my PC ran the game like shit after that Dx9 lighting update. Before that, it ran pretty well. Above 60fps most of the time.

[Anonymous No.7759960]

>>7759723
I would've abused the shit out of these little bastards if I mapped for that engine.

[Anonymous No.7759967]

>>7759723
>Because my PC ran the game like shit after that Dx9 lighting update.
You can re-enable the Dx8 lighting via console command. That's how I played TF2 back in the day.

[Anonymous No.7759978]

>>7759967
Did the same thing for my old laptop back in the day.

[Anonymous No.7760063]

>>7759978
My autoconfig was all fucked up and the only map I could play was Orange variants. I think the FPS counter was broken because it was much lower than 9 FPS. This screenshot is really late (2009), because I know most of the time I played TF2 was before that Spy v Sniper update. After that every single server had dead ringer spies and I just stopped playing.

I really miss the old orange servers that played a shitload of different maps. Now every single one is 10x mod with 100% crits.

[Anonymous No.7760224]

>the alias renderer that made DK1 only runs on IRIX operating system
>alias was merged into Maya and the renderer was "rewritten from the ground up" and it looks different
>tfw you can't render donkey kong unless you have fucking SGI hardware running IRIX

[Anonymous No.7760503]

>>7759967
I want to see how a DX7 tier GPU runs the game.

[Anonymous No.7760531]

>>7760503
I had the absolute worst GPU that could possibly run the game and it looked like this >>7760063
It would not run if I didn't use 100 console commands in my autoconfig to break the thing inside out, and it still had 2 fps on a map with no props in it.

[Anonymous No.7760551]

>>7739257
>90s pre-renders? (hard light, no bounces)
AKA Direct X 8 lighting.

[Anonymous No.7760638]

>>7760551
Tell me a bit more please, what are some games

[Anonymous No.7760665]

>>7760551
>AKA Direct X 8 lighting.
No such thing. DX7 had a fixed lighting model, but everything past that is based on programmable shaders that can take any form.
If you want to be technical, it's DOT3 fragment lighting.

[Anonymous No.7760679]

>>7742489
Except you absolutely misunderstood the OP at a fundamental level. Several posters after you did get what he was talking about, but you rushed off to insult him before even reading the rest of the thread.

[Anonymous No.7760693]

>>7749642
>Look at their dead eyes
Isn't that at least somewhat a texture issue? Diddy and Dixie's eyes in >>7739265 are soft and have realistic looking light orbs in them while these look cartoony and horribly painted on.

[Anonymous No.7760701]

>>7758130
It's weird how you can see not only the walls and a little bit of the fire reflected on Mario, but also the reflection of the sky, even though he's presumably underground.

[Anonymous No.7760705]

>>7760693
yeah - that image isn't trying to imply any attempt with modern tools is going to look that bad it's just illustrating that the current real-time kong games that someone said look "almost as good" as the pre-renders, look nowhere near as good as the pre-prenders

[Anonymous No.7760708]

>>7760701
If people still want to talk about that one here's a higher res without fucked colors.

[Anonymous No.7760975]

>>7760708
Yeah, that's definitely a recursive reflection. Good luck doing that with environment mapping.

[Anonymous No.7760997]

>>7759653
>This Wave Race 64 render uses ray tracing as well. Look at the reflections on the jet skis.


I think these reflections were done with ray tracing. That's what it looks like. But it seems like only certain surfaces were ray traced, and not everything. Only one Jet Ski has a reflection.

[Anonymous No.7761091]

>>7760665
>everything past that is based on programmable shaders that can take any form.
It's still fixed "static" lighting until DX9 came along.

>>7760638
STALKER 1 in DirectX 8 graphics mode. Of cose it won't look like Monkey Kong, but it's static lighting alright.

[Anonymous No.7761164]

Left image is a Killer Instinct 1 promotional render. Right is a Killer Instinct 2 promo render. KI1 (1994) render was done on the same machines as DKC1. While the KI2 (1995) render was done on the same machines as the DKC2.

[Anonymous No.7761169]

[Anonymous No.7761284]

>>7761091
>It's still fixed "static" lighting until DX9 came along.
What do you mean? Nothing has to be static with DX8 or DX7 for that matter. What you won't get is limitless per-pixel lighting, but that of course didn't stop people from using very clever tricks on the Xbox.
Besides, 8.1 was already an important step in that direction before the real thing.

[Anonymous No.7761327]

>>7760531
What GPU?

[Anonymous No.7761410]

>>7757725
>Arale on the wall
How would a Westerner in the late 90s know about Dr. Slump?

[Anonymous No.7761436]

>>7761410
I don't even know that you're talking about. Why do you think they're from the west though?

[Anonymous No.7761530]

>>7761436
>I don't even know that you're talking about. Why do you think they're from the west though?

Going by the name, sounds Spanish. Also, those Simpsons raytraced models...

[Anonymous No.7761621]

>>7761410
Anime clubs and mailing lists selling fan-dubbed tapes weren't super uncommon. It's not to strange to imagine someone getting a copy of it, I mean it was Toriyama

[Anonymous No.7761626]

>>7761621
>fan-subbed

[Anonymous No.7761767]

>>7761530
>Also, those Simpsons raytraced models...

Simpson's did it first. They had a CG rendered Homer and Bart in Treehouse of Horrors from 1995. I don't know what hardware Fox used, maybe Lucas Arts? But I do know that they modelers had to use the Simpsons toys as a reference for the 3D models. I think this scene has ray tracing. Homer even makes a joke about how expensive the place looks.

[Anonymous No.7761907]

>>7761767
>Mmmm... Erotic cakes...

[Anonymous No.7762201]

>>7761327
Mobile Intel 940GML express

[Anonymous No.7762369]

>>7761767
I remember when that one came out and being super impressed by it. I was 8 at the time. We already had Myst and playes old cdrom edutainment games and such, but seeing it on tv was interesting.

[Anonymous No.7762773]

>>7762369
>I remember when that one came out and being super impressed by it. I was 8 at the time. We already had Myst and playes old cdrom edutainment games and such, but seeing it on tv was interesting.

The Halloween special only features about a minute and a half worth of CG, or less. I think (by looking at the footage) there may only be two scenes with some sort of ray tracing. One, when Homer drools into the pool of water. You ccan see the reflection in the water, and the lighting on the fish. The other is when he ends up in the "real world". I vaguely remember watching a video with the CG animator who made the CG. They said that the hardest part was trying to render Bart Simpsons hair, as they couldn't;t imagine what iit would look like in 3D. But they discovered the toys made by Mattel,and realized that the toy had the hair solved for them.

[Anonymous No.7762790]

>>7762773
the water scene is above and it seems to be a simple flip reflection but.. if it is raytraced it certainly isn't off the water surface because the ripples go crazy and his reflection stays recognizable.

I think most likely, since the ripple reflection shot doesn't include his normal self, it's just him moved under the water

The earlier shot shows both but it's just a flat plane reflection you don't need rays to do that i'm almost certain

[Anonymous No.7762801]

>>7761164
I prefer the Killer Instinct 1 look.

[Anonymous No.7762841]

>>7740556
>>7750640
>muh COD
you guys are aware that CoD didn't really blow up in popularity until CoD4 or that WWII games were an oversaturated market that people were already sick of at that point right?

[Anonymous No.7762845]

>>7740763
no lie i'd love to see an id software CoD.

hell, treyarch's zombies is basically off brand wolfenstein.

[Anonymous No.7763330]

>>7762790
>the water scene is above and it seems to be a simple flip reflection but.. if it is raytraced it certainly isn't off the water surface because the ripples go crazy and his reflection stays recognizable.

I agree with the water not being ray traced. And yeah, hard to say. Still the first time Fox ever rendered the Simpsons in 3D.

[Anonymous No.7763409]

>>7762801
yeah i dunno why they turned the face into michael jackson.

[Anonymous No.7763441]

>>7747398
First shipped game with a primarily deferred rendering pipeline

[Anonymous No.7763448]

>>7761767
In terms of rendering this obviously looks dated, but the artistic direction is still strong.

[Anonymous No.7763450]

>>7747398
>>7763441
This fucking pic is the best thing to come out of the thread and I went and looked up the game, lots of great tech etc but I can't find a part in a video where it looks quite like that pic - can someone help with that? ie what part of the game is it?

[Anonymous No.7763467]

>>7763450
Might be a beta screenshot. That skybox texture looks a bit weird, but I know that the sun looks like that in the final game. It looks like one of the first levels. I've only briefly played it to mainly check out the graphics, it's neat, but it's an otherwise mediocre to poor platforming collection game.

[Anonymous No.7763509]

>>7763409
I was thinking the same thing. It fell flat in the uncanny valley. Like Michael Jackson's face.

[Anonymous No.7763536]

>>7763509
>I was thinking the same thing. It fell flat in the uncanny valley. Like Michael Jackson's face.


I hear they modeled her after Latoya. This is a joke, because it was speculated in the past that Latoya never existed and was a persona of Michael Jackson.. The KI2 renders are much more complex than the KI1 renders. But I kind of agree. I love the look of the original arcade Killer Instinct. All of the FMV, artwork, game sprites and backgrounds were rendered using SGI Challenge units.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMLHHxV0vWU

[Anonymous No.7763558]

>>7763536
I don't think I've ever played ki2 thinking about it.
I had the original on SNES with the killer cuts cd that came with it. But I lost it years ago somehow. I suspect my brother may have taken it, or my parents lost or threw it away when I went to college.

[Anonymous No.7763580]

>>7763558
>I don't think I've ever played ki2 thinking about it.

Neither have I. I have seen the KI1 arcade unit in a few different arcades back when it was new. KI1 machines were not uncommon to come across. Never seen a KI2 machine, never played the game in mame. I did play quite a bit of KI:Gold on the N64, which is KI2 with many updates. Apparently the arcade KI2 is a bit of a disappointment?

[Anonymous No.7763692]

>>7763448
>>>7761767 (You)
>In terms of rendering this obviously looks dated, but the artistic direction is still strong.

It was animated by one of Dreamworks studios. PDI/DreamWorks. The same studio that made Antz in 1998. I think it still looks good. Yeah, dated? sure. But it was released in 1995.

[Anonymous No.7763720]

>>7763692
How does it look dated? Does a pencil sketch look dated? No, shit only dates by using fad techniques that then become cliche/passe

[Anonymous No.7763725]

>>7763720
>>7763692
i mean, it looks shitty, sure - but that's because its a rough webm encode of a low quality youtube clip of a ? vhs recording of an analogue broadcast

[Anonymous No.7763756]

>>7763720
>How does it look dated?

Older rendering techniques.It looks about as dated as most of the other 1995-era renders. I never said it looked bad. The scene where Homer walks down the street with real actors still looks really good. and yeah, it's the same studio that made Shrek 1 and 2

[Anonymous No.7763995]

>>7763720
>How does it look dated?
It just represents a (now) primitive way of shading and lighting. It doesn't look amateur, but even the highest quality/effort cg at the times will still look it's age after nearly 25 years.
>i mean, it looks shitty, sure - but that's because its a rough webm encode of a low quality youtube clip of a ? vhs recording of an analogue broadcast
That has nothing to do with it. Anybody who isn't a retard can see past the perceptual issues like that and judge the rendering on it's own considering the time it was made.

[Anonymous No.7764030]

>How does it look dated?
It just represents a (now) primitive way of shading and lighting. It doesn't look amateur, but even the highest quality/effort cg at the times will still look it's age after nearly 25 years.
>>7763725
>i mean, it looks shitty, sure - but that's because its a rough webm encode of a low quality youtube clip of a ? vhs recording of an analogue broadcast
That has nothing to do with it. Anybody who isn't a retard can see past the perceptual issues like that and judge the rendering on it's own considering the time it was made.

[Anonymous No.7764634]

>>7739294
I liked unreal 2 ill admit it

[Anonymous No.7764778]

>>7739265
OMG why is Diddy's belly one big bellend?!

[Anonymous No.7764786]

>>7763720
People still pencil sketch and have in some form for hundreds of years, and will for hundreds of years. You can't date a pencil sketch outside of it's content because the tools used stretch a wide breadth of time.
You can date the Simpsons 3D bit because it uses rendering techniques that are mostly unique to a time period.

[Anonymous No.7764845]

>>7752967
The longer I stare at this image the more inexplicably funny it gets

[Anonymous No.7764861]

>>7761767
dang, this still looks great

[Anonymous No.7765417]

>>7762201
>2006
I realize those early Intel chips were absolute trash, but I remember running Half-Life 2 on a Windows XP laptop with an Atom CPU. It didn't run particularly great, but it wasn't downright unplayable.

[Anonymous No.7765450]

>>7765417
That's the GPU. The CPU was some other integrated trash. HL2 and Portal ran fine. TF2 wouldn't even start without a few autoconfig settings.

[Anonymous No.7766165]

>>7764786
>You can date the Simpsons 3D bit because it uses rendering techniques that are mostly unique to a time period.

I don't think that Simpsons episode used SGI workstations either. They may have went the Pixar route and used their own hardware/ software. It might have been using Pixar's Renderman? I dunno. Mainframe Entertainment, who made Reboot didn't use SGI workstations either. I don't know if I would say "primitive". But it doesn't look like it came from any commercial software package. Though, interestingly enough South Park from episode 2 to season: ?? used SGI workstations as well to create the cardboard cutout look. They described it as "creating sand castles with a bulldozer". But they later switched to Maya, or something like that.

[Anonymous No.7767158]

well I tried to install "the opera" to host, but it ended up breaking my half life directory and I had to recajigger the whole thing... So I don't know what to do about that. Makes me hesitant to try Wizard Wars, but I'll probably give it a go tomorrow.

[Anonymous No.7767172]

>>7767158
whoops, wrong thread.