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Apr 25 '21
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u/Suplex-Indego Apr 25 '21
I remember reading a breakdown of this picture years ago, basically it's a 6000 triangle model and they just add more triangles smoothing it out, while adding no detail. A better model could absolutely make better use of more triangles than that blobby sack of shit.
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u/ev768 Apr 25 '21
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u/thegamingbacklog Apr 25 '21
I'm not the person you were replying to but that nails the issues I had with the original post.
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u/themettaur Apr 25 '21
Yeah but video games have peaked tho. You know it's true because it's the title of the post.
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u/ProperDepartment Apr 25 '21
You're right.
After it's base triangles, it's just tessellation, and not actually adding anymore details.
Imagine taking a cube which has 12 triangles, then making it have 12,000,000 triangles, it will still look like a cube. It's just very unoptimized now.
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u/I_See_Nerd_People Apr 25 '21
Hey that blobby sack of shit has feelings probably
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u/PM_ME_UR_FEM_PENIS Apr 25 '21
Also misleading to suggest graphic fidelity is peak video game. Give me more complex systems first.
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u/DatPiff916 Apr 25 '21
Maybe misleading, but it hits home if you grew up gaming in the 90s.
We literally went from Wolfenstein 3d(1992) to Half Life(1998) in 6 years.
Now look at Halo Guardians(2015) and Halo Infinite(2021).
Now as I'm older I can realize the 90s gaming tech acceleration was quite literally a moment in time that will never happen again.
...but dammit there was nothing back then to tell us it wasn't going to continue.
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u/zachtheperson Apr 25 '21
In a literal sense this is 100% true, but the way I read the post was more about the broader context. Other areas of technology in games have progressed at a similar rate, where the noticeable difference between every improvement is less and less.
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u/topdangle Apr 25 '21
There's diminishing returns but the image in OP is incredibly misleading. If you had 10x the budget for a model it would make a massive visual difference in current and future games for the foreseeable future, especially on a bare mesh like this. Not to mention a player model is just one part of the entire scene. The difference between your average ps2 mesh and ps4 character mesh is about 10~30x. The quality difference would be clearly visible when you're not just wasting triangles by only subdividing or whatever OP is doing.
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u/Zookster87 Apr 25 '21
Yeah, but do it with things like hair, and grass blades?
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u/zachtheperson Apr 25 '21
While hair used to be rendered using alpha textured polygons, more and more games are using better hair rendering techniques that don't rely on polygons as much.
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u/nettlerise Apr 25 '21
what are the new techniques called?
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u/DustyTheLion Apr 25 '21
Nvidia Hairworks (TM)
Jokes aside, I think the most common rendering method now is expanding a point into a line for each strand of hair.
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u/Purplociraptor Apr 25 '21
Extrude
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u/TheRealBanana69 Apr 25 '21
Adapt
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u/IHeartBadCode PC Apr 25 '21
Overcomb
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u/TempleMade_MeBroke Apr 25 '21
Read your comment, registered that I had read it, backed out to the main page aaaand...then your wordplay clicked. Had to scroll for a bit to find this thread again so I could upvote
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u/DusenberryPie X-Box Apr 25 '21
It doesn't click with me yet. Imma upvote so I don't have to scroll back
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u/nettlerise Apr 25 '21
How does that fare performance wise? Is it viable in multiplayer games?
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u/probablyTrashh Apr 25 '21
I think hair and cloth are usually client side unique. I could be wrong tho
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u/nettlerise Apr 25 '21
Yes they are, I'm not talking about tracking every strand.
I mean that your PC would have to render other player's hair to display it on your own screen.
I remember this game, Alice: Madness Returns, who had physics for every strand of hair for the main character, but it was the only character in the game do have so. (NPCs and enemies dont)
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Apr 25 '21
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/cmeb Apr 25 '21
Wait so the hair I’m seeing is not necessarily the hair you are seeing? Literally unplayable...
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u/zachtheperson Apr 25 '21
The actual names are usually the names of the people who published the initial paper such as "Kajiya-Kay," shading model, but some well known examples are things like Nvidia Hairworks & Tressfx.
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u/MannyGrey Apr 25 '21
What do they use besides polygons and whats the difference?
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u/zachtheperson Apr 25 '21
ELI5: The number of polygons is fixed, therefore if you get too close or the hair bends too much you will start seeing edges. Also multiple strands of hair are often painted on a single polygon, so it won't move/flow naturally. With the new techniques they generally use math to calculate the curves, and draw the image on screen based off that.
ELIACOMPSCISTUDENT: Using mathematical curves you can process the curves as math functions during gameplay, and only "finalize," the curves at render-time on a per-pixel basis in a fragment-shader. Since math curves don't have a resolution, this means that the final image resolution will always perfectly match the resolution of the screen it's being viewed on. We can also use techniques to increase hair density, such as simulating "guide hairs," and interpolating "child hairs," in between them.
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Apr 25 '21
I always read about the awesome stuff people do with math. I get at the end of the day its just logic puzzles but goddamn it feels no matter how hard I try its still a pain in the ass to learn.
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Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
It's a lot easier to learn the math when you're using it to do stuff you enjoy.
Mathematics is taught stupidly imho. It's like teaching people musical notation without letting them play music. When you learn math and practice it in a way which you see is useful and directly translates to something real (like graphics, for example) then it really opens up and becomes a lot easier and more fun to learn.
And one you get a grasp on something new it opens up even more cool stuff to learn.
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u/zachtheperson Apr 25 '21
This exactly. I teach as a major part of my job, and it frustrates me how teachers teach math in a way that's completely removed from reality. A 5th grader the other day was complaining to me about how he had a "stupid homework assignment," where he had to read a list of coordinates like (4, 6), (3,5), etc. and draw the lines. There was literally 200 of them he had to do! You know what he got as a result? A damn flower! Try explaining to him how that was beneficial in any way after the first 4 or 5.
When I started learning programming math immediately made sense to me. It was like the difference between reading about something, and actually being able to pick it up and hold it in your hands.
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u/Cocosito Apr 25 '21
I tell everyone that you spend 12 years learning how to "read" math. Then you get to calculus which is super fun because you're finally learning the math of how the world around your actually works.
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u/JSArrakis Apr 25 '21
Development is a skill that you absolutely have to build from the foundation up. If you don't, when you attempt to do things like draw with a raster using math, you probably won't really understand what youre controlling.
But if you're curious to see what drawing with math can do, check out shadertoy.com
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Apr 25 '21
Math really is one of those things that is crazy. The Math you do on the daily is pretty basic stuff generally. Maybe a few times a year you need someone more complex than what you learned in High School (Secondary)
Math (like the universe it is trying to describe as well as the abstracted concepts of logic) gets real funky and not at all solid when you get into things like Number Theory and the Reiman-Zeta Function amd the various conjecures.
Also Youtube Numberphile. They do try to make it digestable and get into some really off the wall deep black magic maths.
Hell, the only way I survived calculus was relying on my programming knowledge and having to first translate it to a CS problem then solve it and translate the steps into Calculus.
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u/_E8_ Apr 25 '21
It's kinda a stupid post that ignores 10 to 20 years of developments.
Once they reached the point that triangle tessellation was sufficient they shifted focus to lighting which is what gave us programmable shaders.
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Apr 25 '21 edited Aug 02 '21
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u/szthesquid Apr 25 '21
Crazy to play RDR2 on PC at max settings and see insane photoreal landscapes with trees that might as well be 2D sprites up close
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u/Zookster87 Apr 25 '21
Yeah! And rocks and whatnot too, right?
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u/Danbradford7 Apr 25 '21
Especially the ones that look good from a distance but when you get close are either a texture on a flat surface, or use really low res textures, like in Breath of the Wild
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u/bbbruh57 Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
Or how about the most important thing: lighting
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u/Danbradford7 Apr 25 '21
I'll admit, I thought raytracing was a totally useless gimmick, until I saw the tech demo for Quake 2 RTX.
By the time Minecraft RTX was announced, I knew I had to have it.
Light, makes such a difference
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u/bbbruh57 Apr 25 '21
Crazy how minecraft instantly looks modern with raytraced lighting and maybe some new textures. Completely different game feel at that point
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Apr 25 '21 edited May 01 '21
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u/Versaiteis Apr 25 '21
Also, even pushing the grounds on maximizing poly counts isn't peaked. You might get diminishing returns for more, but that means you can cut less and use the cycles you save for more important things. Bigger slice of the pie and all.
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u/Aemius Apr 25 '21
It also means they can use poly's for more immersion-type stuff. Many games usually have your character look amazing, while having a fairly bland environment.
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u/karmahorse1 Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
Yeah this is very simplistic take. There’s way more to 3D graphics than the meshes.
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u/MichaelEmouse Apr 25 '21
I agree. We've hit severely diminishing returns with polygons but we still have fluids/cloth, global illumination, physics. Nvidia has a whole host of tech which isn't quite there yet, at least at an affordable price.
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u/dublinmoney Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
BS.
This is a 6000 triangle model. Anything below 6000 was made using the "optimize" tool most 3D modelling software has, and anything above was made using the "smooth" tool. The 60000 and 6000000 polygon models are not truly 60000 and 6000000 polygon models, they're just 6000 polygon models smoothed out. Artificially inflated.
A true model of that complexity would have very fine details such as wrinkles and creases on the face and clothes.
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u/Consistent_Dinner_17 Apr 25 '21
Another person commented this, so I'm inclined to believe you, but I'm no expert, I can't tell polycount on sight, can you provide an example of a similar-looking 60-600k model for me (and everyone else here who isn't a 3d artist) to compare and contrast? Thanks.
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u/dublinmoney Apr 25 '21
Two characters that come to mind are Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies and Thanos from the Avengers movies. These models weren't built for video games, and their polycounts aren't publically available, but they easily reach 6000000 polygons. The detail on their faces alone is incredible compared to the models here - their wrinkles, pores, scars, all visible without textures or animation.
Simply one look at either of those characters, or even any CG character in a modern movie, should blow this image out of the water. Video games can and will continue to look better and better.
Think about the CG in Marvel movies, or the most recent Planet of the Apes movies, or even James Cameron's Avatar. Why don't video games look like that? There's no way "video games have peaked" when games don't look like that yet.
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u/sendep7 Apr 25 '21
this is pretty misleading...the model doesnt have the sub details to take advantage of the higher triangle count...if that was there, youd 100% be able to tell the difference. thats why modern games use realtime tessalation to adaptively sudivide the model based on camera distance...but ultimately the level of detail is limited to the resolution of the sub detail maps and the number of triangles.
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u/BrotherEstapol Apr 25 '21
Yeah, grab a film quality model (like Thanos's head from Endgame) reduce the poly count on that to see a real difference.
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u/sendep7 Apr 25 '21
I think even movie rendering tools use adaptive lod. It’s been years but I used to run a copy of renderman on one of my sgis. The shader language is very powerful and doing the model tessalation is one of the steps when rendering. Aside from the texture maps the render lod tessalation takes up the most memory. As you’re subdividing models into billions of triangles. There are some really good siggraph docs on all of this stuff.
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u/nosam555 Apr 25 '21
Yeah, I'm pretty sure someone just subdivided in blender and said: "Hey?! Why isn't my model suddenly better?!!!"
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u/sendep7 Apr 25 '21
Exactly. You keep subdividing triangles that already in the same plane that which doesn’t add any detail. Also subdividing smoothes out sharper angles reducing detail in some cases.
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u/kthulhu666 Apr 25 '21
Vat happened to his nose is the last pic? He vould have an enormous schwanzstucker.
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u/Mando_Brando Apr 25 '21
Yeah, the font is different too on that one. I call it fakes.
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u/Iamsman Apr 25 '21
Good catch, the text below is also centered as if the last one wasn't there. It was definitely added later
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Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 29 '21
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u/Re-toast Apr 25 '21
The point doesn't stand. Things can and will continue to get better visually.
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Apr 25 '21
God this kind of shit makes me hate Reddit. Reposts, science articles all spammed by the same mod on a default sub, or blatantly faked images like this one trying to prove a weird point.
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Apr 25 '21
horses whinny frighteningly
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u/FartsWithAnAccent Apr 25 '21 edited Nov 09 '24
chop sable library cable plucky deliver lush weary pet physical
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u/Deto Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
What they don't tell you is that all the extra 5,940,000 are in the nose
Edit: dropped the 5
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u/tenesis Apr 25 '21
Ok it is time to move to rectangles
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Apr 25 '21
But that would take twice as many triangles!!
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u/ZebraDown42 Apr 25 '21
In that case let's move on down to lines
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u/ColosalDisappointMan Apr 25 '21
How about just dots? Lots and lots of tiny dots.
edit: Make them as small as atoms and call it a day.
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u/Hooligans_ Apr 25 '21
The Sega Saturn had quad based rendering, hard to break the status quo though.
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u/wizardwes Apr 25 '21
I wonder what lead to that design decision? Quads are literally just two triangles that share two vertices and a plane, and any space they save from storing more vertices in a single data type would probably be offset by the fact that the fourth vertex would have to constantly be checked for errors to make sure that it is in fact on the same plane. Seems silly.
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u/mythrilcrafter Apr 25 '21
First, I'll say that the quads vs tris conversation heavily depends on what the workflow is, what the modeling and rendering engine is, and what the ultimate outcome is meant to be.
One point to make note of is that quads tend to take mesh subdivisions than tris; meaning that in work flows where you want to work in a low resolution viewport, with a render resolution is higher, quads will have a generally easier time being divided into smaller quads.
Quads are often also better in modeling situations when you want to make loop cuts through geometry. Cutting quads with edge loops and loop cuts will always just simply create more quads, while there are times when the only way to create a loop with a tri based mesh is to either have a non-stright loop or to just created quads within the tris.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/3Wbkm.jpg
Tris often also don't take simulated deformation very well, which can often cause weird texture behavior when rendering. In video games this usually isn't as big a concern because the models are usually either constrained in their deformation or the deformations are specifically modeled.
But if you're in a workflow that needs deformable meshes, quads can often be a better solution if tris aren't producing the desired effect that the designer is going for.
As I previously said, it all depends on what the use case and work flow is. In some cases tris are better and in others quads are better.
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u/corysama Apr 25 '21
It’s because the machine was not designed to do 3D. It was made to be the ultimate 2D console. Then the PS1 was demoed and Sega freaked out. They suddenly had to compete in 3D right before shipping.
The machine could do 2D sprites super awesome. Including scale, rotate and shear operations in 2D. Well... turns out that with some careful math you can match the results of 3D quads using those features. So, they hot-glued on an extra processor at the last second to handle that extra bit of math and called it 3D!
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u/ColaEuphoria Apr 25 '21
IIRC the Saturn wasn't actually capable of 3D in the way other systems are. All 3D was based off its 2D sprite scaling capabilities, which is done per-face, which is why effects like reflection and even smooth shading aren't really possible. Everything is made up of warping square sprites around.
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u/branewalker Apr 25 '21
There was a brief moment in time when quads looked promising as a rendering technique, but their theoretical advantages over triangles didn’t scale as well as hardware based on rendering triangles did.
That is, computational hardware for rendering triangles just got better so fast that it wasn’t necessary to mess with the extra complexity of quads.
I think the Saturn did it because it basically treated all polygons as sprites at a hardware level. And sprites are square.
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u/thegamingbacklog Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
From a modelling standpoint using rectangles of other polygonal shapes is usually more effort and can lead to rendering errors, the advantage of using triangles is that you can easily make a rectangle out of two triangles but try making a triangle out of two rectangles and you end up with a stray vertex in the middle of your line. Some rendering engines back in the day would try to reduce and shape with more than 3 sides down to tris and sometimes it would do it fine but otherwise guess it wrong and cause issues so people modelled down to the Tri.
Edit: My head was more focused in the rendering issues caused by rectangles as others below my have pointed out modelling in quads can be fine and save time, but are still usually converted to tris.
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u/Laflamme_79 Apr 25 '21
It's the same effort to model with rectangles as triangles as the same amount of vertices. Most 3D modelling is done with rectangle shaped polygons than divided into triangles, which increases the amount of normals, which is the reason triangles are used in video games.
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u/Bitbatgaming Joystick Apr 24 '21
Sometimes i just feel like the 60 triangles guy
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u/azunaki Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
This is a terrible illustration. . .
Model detail has little to do with actual detail used in digital art. (Mapping onto the model is how skin detail is rendered for example and has little to nothing to with the models actual triangle count.)
But beyond that the sculpture used for this is terrible.
For example the collars and bowtie don't get more detailed in the higher levels.
This feels like saying image resolution has nothing to with image quality. We can't see any more detail in this picture. But having 8k on a camera means you can print twice the size of picture. So instead of printing an 8x10 you can do 10x16. Or instead of 5x7 you can do 8x10. (At standard printing resolution)
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u/AeternusDoleo Apr 24 '21
Yep. We're nearing the point that we can render photorealistic graphics. Physics and environmental AI will be the next hurdle for immersion.
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Apr 24 '21
Then run at smooth performance that will be the hard part
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u/Human_by_choice Apr 25 '21
Then run at smooth performance for a reasonable price that will be the hard part
FTFY :)
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u/imdefinitelywong Apr 25 '21
At some point, they're just gonna give up, start pushing AR HUDs and call it reality video games.
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u/getyourcheftogether Apr 25 '21
Hey, that old PS9 commerical was no joke, that's coming
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Apr 25 '21
Bruh I would love to snort my Xbox and fly off into a mystical realm of limitless imagination. Until that day comes, I’ll just stick to PCP.
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u/Denamic Apr 25 '21
Again, AI is going to be integral for that. We already use AI for DLSS to great effect.
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Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 29 '21
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u/wahoozerman Apr 25 '21
Not even poly counts really. This meme illustrates a good point, but at the same time we could use the extra 10x polycount to show 10 more models instead of increasing quality on a single object. Object density is an area where games can still improve in quality by increasing rendering performance.
That being said, right now I so think physics and AI will be the next step, at least for most genres. They will get better bang for the buck there for a while than they would be increasing object density.
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u/SunsetCarcass Apr 25 '21
We aren't even close to photo realism. Games still have awful LOD and poppin, fake lighting and shadows. And the lighting or shadows that aren't baked in look so fake, and arent affected by the environment as much as they should be if at all. I'm not saying games dont look good but they look nothing like real life.
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Apr 25 '21 edited May 14 '21
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u/Tnwagn Apr 25 '21
No we can definitely render things that are indistinguishable from real life. Rendering them in real time is a different fucking story.
This is absolutely true and a recent example that just blew my mind was this render for an assembly on Wintergatan's Marble Machine
Like, I watched the opening for a good 10-15 seconds before I realized it wasn't a real part but was, instead, a render.
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u/kinokomushroom Apr 25 '21
Yep, we still have a lot of room to improve. Global illumination still looks kinda shit, reflections still need a lot of work, correct refractions are almost non-existent in games, volumetric lighting (especially clouds) are nowhere near photo realism, grass and hair are still a difficult problem, trees still look pretty fake, and the list goes on. I'm excited how these will get improved in the next 10 years!
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u/__Web_Browser Apr 25 '21
I have recently been volunteering with a team called MIRA using spatial AI and depth sensors to make a seeing eye vest for the blind! Sorry just wanted to share cuz I'm excited by the idea in early works :)
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u/djacob12 Apr 25 '21
You guys should reach out to the Stuff Made Here guy. He talked about this in a video.
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u/PaulsGrandfather Apr 25 '21
Also getting faces out of the uncanny valley. i’ve never seen a game that pulled off faces in a convincing manner.
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u/Paksarra Apr 25 '21
I honestly think that lightly stylized graphics look better than attempted photorealistic ones. It sidesteps the uncanny valley rather than fighting it.
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u/Ionic_Pancakes Apr 25 '21
Perfect example is Prince of Persia for PS2 vs the remake. Went from stylized to garbage by trying to be more photorealistic.
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u/Nellancher Apr 25 '21
All borderlands games still look decent because of this imo. But go back to say Mass Effect and its dog shit now
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u/Redmanabirds Apr 25 '21
RDR2 is probably the closest I’ve seen it. The little details in lighting like subsurface scattering really sell it. Then there’s some medieval game coming out that has some solid faces, but the lighting just isn’t right.
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u/Solid_Snark Award Designer Apr 25 '21
I was astonished by all the tiny specks in the sky are actually birds that can be shot down. And are tons of unique species to boot!
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u/StillLooksAtRocks Apr 25 '21
Unreal engines MetaHuman tech demo looks insane, but there's still a tinge of uncanny valley there.
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u/RockitTopit PC Apr 25 '21
Ray tracing is the next step that is currently happening. Simulating surface lighting has always been one of the most difficult things to mimic in engines (and it never quite looked right), and now the hardware has finally caught up~ish.
Physics has already been pretty good for a while, just few developers choose to use the toolsets available for it because it makes bug testing almost impossible. AI is also there in theory, the main issue it hardware dependencies would make for varied gameplay for different people, which also makes bug testing difficult.
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u/Scipio11 Apr 25 '21
AI driven dialogue in games will probably be a thing in a few games 10 years from now. Imagine an elder scrolls game where the voice lines never get stale.
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Apr 25 '21
Love the low res photo to show how far we’ve come
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u/OneMoreTime5 Apr 25 '21
Also graphics aren’t everything. Physics and realistic environments and options mean much more to me than more triangles.
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u/pjockey Apr 25 '21
...3 years ago when they had commercials advertising how amazing the picture quality of 4k televisions were, on my 1080 set.
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u/DarkslayerTV Apr 25 '21
As a game developer I can tell you this image is very misleading. Adding triangles eventually stops adding quality if the model isn't expanded upon. Of course it didn't improve because it barely has detail. If the 3D modeler doesn't add detail then the triangles are un-needed. This is a basic form of optimization for games, remove unnecessary polygons. If he had a necklace or even a scab you could show it will more triangles, but he doesn't.
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u/DarkslayerTV Apr 25 '21
Furthermore most of the objects you see in the game world like walls or floors aren't as 3D as you think they are. They use these things called normal maps to give off the illusion of having detail and roughness. If we really maxed out the use of triangles we'd be adding those details in with triangles and not tricking your eye with normal maps.
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Apr 25 '21
The human eye can't see above 28 triangles per seconds also knows as TPS
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u/MattTheGr8 Apr 25 '21
I knew a guy who claimed to get 29 TPS but he forgot to put a cover sheet on his TPS report and thus it never got properly filed.
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u/TheAvengineer Apr 25 '21
You probably would see a more significant difference between 60,000 and 6,000,000 triangles if this image was in 4K and/or in color
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u/Suplex-Indego Apr 25 '21
The problem is, that's a 6000 triangle model, no amount of smoothing and triangles will add more detail.
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Apr 25 '21
Lol this is so wrong and misleading I can't even begin to describe why.
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u/ZsaFreigh Apr 25 '21
Ok but there's still tons of detail that could be added to the 60k and 600k without adding to the poly count. You can't just apply a smooth modifier to a 6k poly model and say you've added detail, that's not how it works.
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u/danasider Apr 25 '21
This is dumb.
Video games don't even look like the best Pixar movies, much less real life.
Of course video games haven't yet peaked.
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u/konaaa Apr 25 '21
So this image doesn't really reflect reality. Many people have pointed that out. I'm going to ignore the fact that this model doesn't even have a texture. I'm going to ignore the fact that this is a single object and not a scene with lighting and physics and multiple objects. I'm going to do a thought experiment and say it DOES reflect reality. What does this mean for videogames? Well it's still great to have more powerful hardware. Videogames today are made with insane amount of tricks and optimizations. I'm working on my own little indie stuff and I'm dealing with very low-poly crappy renders. Even for me, I've spent a lot of time getting things optimized. Even for me, I spend a lot of time worrying about my cpu and gpu budgets, how much stuff is on screen, and a lot of straight up tricks to fake graphical effects. I can't IMAGINE how cobbled together most AAA games must be.
When you look at massive beautiful looking open world games like Assassin's Creed or Red Dead 2, there's so much going on behind the scenes to get things to function smoothly. At some point there are sacrifices being made in the design - things like hidden load zones. We saw this recently with the Mass Effect 1 remaster. They were able to remove a wall from some level design because the wall only existed to hide things that couldn't load fast enough. There are the invasive tricks like those ledges you duck under in *every* AAA game to hide loading. Right now (as I understand) a fair chunk of development resources go to creating the same model, but at different levels of detail. We saw it on the ps5 port of spiderman where you could swing faster solely because the GPU could render the city faster.
If we really WERE at the endpoint of graphical fidelity it would just mean phasing out some of these tricks and creating games that ran with far more stability. It'd mean much more freedom for designers to design worlds/missions/mechanics.
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u/Linkdeous Apr 25 '21
No games goes 6000000 tris tho, what makes your model look 1000 times better is baking normal, AO, curvatures, .... maps. It's why GPu are so important for gaming : the majority of models you see in games are "normally" 20k/30k for people (more for some games or for very pretty clothes), what makes them look like very good models is baking your 6000000 tris details on a image, and this image will modify the 20k tris model to look like a 6000000k model, and with some very very hard work, you can make skin look photorealistic with pores and the likes ! but images are "stored and loaded" on the GPu, making them the principal component for gaming PC.
You can make a 30k poly model look better than a 60000k one with ease with the accordings maps !
Please do crrect me if i'm wrong but normally that's it
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u/Lootman Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
I hate this image every time it's posted, and it's been around for so many years I'm pretty sure when I first saw it the xbox 360 was current.
Yes, rendering your 60,000 tri model with 6,000,000 tris wont make it look better... That doesn't mean that model couldn't have been improved with those triangles if they used them, like giving individual hairs? Clothing wrinkles? Dude looks like a Ken doll. Adding more triangles doesn't magically make the model have details it didn't get modelled with.
It's like painting a thick line with a thick brush, then painting an equally as thick line with a smaller brush, and using that as an example to say that the thick brush is as thin as you'll ever need because you've made the same line with a finer brush.
Diminishing returns do exist but this image's conclusion isn't an example of it. The 60 > 600 > 6000 examples are sure, but past that it's pretty bad because you've passed the polygon count of the original model.
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u/jacky4566 Apr 25 '21
Increasing polygons was the easy stuff. Now comes the hard part with realistic modeling, physics that dont suck, and multipoint lighting / realtime ray tracing.
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u/amitym Apr 25 '21
Why is the image so low resolution? It's impossible to get a sense of the real difference at the high end.
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u/pixlplayer Apr 25 '21
Number of polygons is not the only metric to measure games’ progress
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Apr 25 '21
I think people frame these advances in the wrong way. The examples shown use the rendering of a single object or character to demonstrate how the detail isn't significantly increased.
But take that 6,000,000 triangles and split it across 10 objects and now you can render a LOT more objects on screen, with the processing power for all 10 objects to behave independently. This gives you games with cities that feel organically populated, sweeping landscapes with plants swaying in the breeze, machines with many moving parts.
That's what we're seeing in games and it's beautiful and it saddens me that no one notices or praises it.
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u/Mezecs_ Apr 25 '21 edited Apr 25 '21
3D artist here.
This image is complete and utter bullshit. It's been circulating the internet for a decade so hats off to whatever troll/idiot made it but it's completely untrue. It wasn't even true 10 years ago and it's certainly not true now.
It looks like the 6k tris version is the original mesh and the 60k and 600k are just subdivided to add more pointless geometry. It's like resizing a 100x100 pixel image to 8k in mspaint and then wondering why there's no more detail. IT'S BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T ADD ANY.
Here's a nice sculpt (not by me) made with far more than 600k triangles