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It's a common pattern that newly possible (usually due to hardware) effects are overdone for the wow / up-to-date look effect.
The thing that’s always bugged me about SSAO is the “jitter” visible when the player character or camera moves, which I would imagine is due to it being calculated in screen space. In some cases it’s so distracting it breaks immersion. Given that accuracy isn’t the goal anyway I’ve often wondered if it wouldn’t be better in many cases to apply a sort of pre-calculated AO that uses a relatively small atlas of shading…
"Baked ambient occlusion" does exist. It only works well in games where most objects are fixed. If there's a lot of flexibility in where objects are placed, then movable objects will stick out too much (they will lack the AO shading). It sounds like you're proposing using it only on static walls, which seems like it'd be totally viable.
https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012326/The-Rendering-Tools-an...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> videogames have to overcompensate And yet somehow we can understand videos and photos just fine. Videogames have to overcompensate when they're missing lots of other important cues, but the closer they get to realism the less they have to overcompensate.
I think you may be underestimating how much photographers and cinematographers also compensate for this by choosing subjects and lighting carefully to re-convey a sense of depth lost by stereoscopic vision. This is, I think one of the biggest differences between a skilled and amateur photographer. Amateur photo and video work looks flat because they are pointing the camera at a scene that looks fine to them in realit…
Any course on landscape photography will teach that landscapes should (usually) have a foreground, middle ground, and background. It seems kind of too obvious and too restrictive at the same time. But most of the time when I take a landscape photo and feel dissatisfied, it either breaks this rule or has very bad lighting.
I agree with his overall point, but I would point out: realism is not usually the point, the point is to look good. The problem with realism is once you get past "wow the computer can do that now", it's not very interesting -- most of reality is pretty dull looking!
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.
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 :)
Literally nothing real looks like CG. Shadows and lighting don't look like that. Optical effects don't look like that. People don't move like they do in games and CG animations. Physics IRL doesn't work like it does in games. Real world doesn't look like filtered JPEGs stretched over wireframes with LODs.
I agree with his overall point, but I would point out: realism is not usually the point, the point is to look good. The problem with realism is once you get past "wow the computer can do that now", it's not very interesting -- most of reality is pretty dull looking!
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-the-colors-in...
I don't think the author makes a persuasive argument. Most of the photos they're analyzing are obviously lit by various point light sources, e.g.: https://nothings.org/gamedev/ssao/IMG_0064.JPG You can see a sharp shadow near the door frame. So yeah, ambient occlusion is not going to simulate that, but it was never supposed to? It's supposed to make 3D shapes look good without the need to place lights or do more comp…
The main issue it solved was normal lighting at odds with the world, it was for fast general approximation of global illumination.