ss_lemonade
Member
I remember this getting high scores for graphics on game magazines back thenFor reference, this is the Toy Story game that came out on Mega Drive/SNES in 1995:
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WE DID IT: Toy Story-Level Video Game Graphics Acheived - Literally
- Thread starter HotHamBoy
- Start date
Astral Dog
Member
This is starting to remind of Super Mario 64 DS when people were surprised to learn it used less polygons than the 64 original but rendering techniqes and experience have come a long way since then.
You can't respectfully disagree with this image. I think it says it all. It's not just the grass, it's every object in it. More than just dated, it looks like babby's first attempt at 3D modeling, which in all fairness it kinda was.
Toy Story honestly needs to be kicked the off this pedestal it has been put on. It's missing effects that were standard last generation, like ambient occlusion, which to me makes the movie look flatter than the game, not the other way around. The only thing Toy Story has and will probably always have over video games is perfectly round objects, which is something that a game would never waste resources on. This game running at 4K on the Xbox One X downsampled to a 1080p TV will probably effectively end the image quality debate too.
Well let's not forget it was made for 35mm projection, not for home video. Who even remembers what the image quality looked like then. This is what it looked like on DVD
I can agree with that.
I just think Kingdom Hearts III is doing enough and in some aspects beyond it to declare this goal as being accomplished. For instance I much prefer how the characters look like under KH3's lighting over TS1.
Close, but not quite there yet.
Real-time lighting/shadows still has a way to go, and that impacts on everything you see. There's geometry issues and other bits and pieces, but if the lighting was there it would get much tougher to spot the differences.
Not saying some team couldn't match it on a decent PC today, but that this team targeting consoles hasn't met the standard to my eyes, let alone surpassed it.
Real-time lighting/shadows still has a way to go, and that impacts on everything you see. There's geometry issues and other bits and pieces, but if the lighting was there it would get much tougher to spot the differences.
Not saying some team couldn't match it on a decent PC today, but that this team targeting consoles hasn't met the standard to my eyes, let alone surpassed it.
Cats Waller
Neo Member
I think a lot of y'all are blending toy story with better looking, later films in your memory. Aside from the accurate reflections toy story has being higher fidelity than any screen space reflection solution you're gonna see on a console, we surpassed toy story 1 in realtime 3d art years ago. It's a 20+ year old movie from a time before most of the shaders and rendering techniques that set film apart from games had been designed.
Who would let a game slide on looking like this in 2017?:
Who would let a game slide on looking like this in 2017?:
Wowfunhappy
Member
And there was no antialiasing at all? I feel like this would have caused noticeable aliasing in movie theaters if no where else.
Bubba_Sparks
Member
Really? So they use polygons, but rendered it offline?
nkarafo
Member
It looks better on a proper screen without smoothing filters.For reference, this is the Toy Story game that came out on Mega Drive/SNES in 1995:
Also, most of the charm comes from the animation. The game is one of the best looking 16bit games in motion.
We still aren't quite there yet, but man has gaming come a long way. I can't complain. I've been gaming since the Atari and NES in the 80's, and it always blows me away at what developer's are able to accomplish now. The technology is truly remarkable. Kingdom Hearts 3's Toy Story world looks incredible.
It doesn't matter that it's not 100% perfect to what Toy Story did in 1995. The fact that, at first glance, it even looks comparable is impressive as fuck, and worthy of praise. A generation ago, we wouldn't have been able to have the waters "muddied" like this. Under scrutiny, of course it won't hold up to a cg movie, even one from 1995. But just scrolling through the screenshots posted in the OP (except for that hideously compressed KHIII one), you wouldn't be faulted for thinking all of the screens were from a Toy Story movie.
It doesn't matter that it's not 100% perfect to what Toy Story did in 1995. The fact that, at first glance, it even looks comparable is impressive as fuck, and worthy of praise. A generation ago, we wouldn't have been able to have the waters "muddied" like this. Under scrutiny, of course it won't hold up to a cg movie, even one from 1995. But just scrolling through the screenshots posted in the OP (except for that hideously compressed KHIII one), you wouldn't be faulted for thinking all of the screens were from a Toy Story movie.
nkarafo
Member
Except that it looks flat because there is no self-shadowing.
And there are obvious edges since the polycount is lower.
Look at this pic. Look at the hat in the left picture. It looks like it's floating in front of his head, you can't tell he is wearing it. That's what flat lighting and lack of shadows do.
You can't respectfully disagree
Ha, I dont! You even quoted me saying so (the grass etc)
The rest is just us splitting hairs. We both agree consoles can pump out stuff better looking as a whole, than TS1.
Honestly, just the very fact that we can have this discussion in earnest now, is saying all there is to say.
Realtime rendering has come so far now, that games are able to mimic CG well enough where it looks comparable and some people even preferring the realtime stuff over the pre rendered stuff.
Sure, you can point to several things where prerendered will never be surpassed, but the point is that the approximation is close enough now.
Let's just all take a moment to appreciate this fact.
Realtime rendering has come so far now, that games are able to mimic CG well enough where it looks comparable and some people even preferring the realtime stuff over the pre rendered stuff.
Sure, you can point to several things where prerendered will never be surpassed, but the point is that the approximation is close enough now.
Let's just all take a moment to appreciate this fact.
gamerMan
Member
This is simply not true. Maybe artistically, but not in terms of technology. Most games today rely heavily on static lighting, which means most of the lighting is baked into the textures. You can put in unlimited static lights and the only expense is your lightmass render times. It's like prerendering all of your lighting and sticking a picture on it on the static models. You can't change anything about them in realtime since they are just like textures.
This makes static objects in games look good, but the problem with this type of lighting is that the lighting in the world doesn't interact with any of the moving objects in a realistic way.
This is why we don't get any self shadowing or even light bouncing from the world interacting with the objects in Kingdom Hearts.
While Toy Story didn't use global illumination, the artists could place unlimited lights that cast shadows into the scene to light the models and environment. Even though global illumination was not used, an artist can easily put a bunch of lights into the scene to simulate the bounce lighting you get from GI.
For Kingdom Hearts, you can put in realtime lights to light moving objects but unlike Toy Story, you can't put in unlimited lights without causing a huge performance drop. Even if you could, you would run out of memory for your shadow maps. Good luck trying to create Toy Story lighting on the models with those limitations.
Hence in Kingdom Hearts we don't get any self shadowing on the models or indirect illumination from the world. The models look unlit.
Although Inside Out used GI for indirect lighting instead of a bunch of lights to simulate this, here's a good illustration of this. The version on the left could be rendered on the PS4 in realtime. It contains no shadowing or indirect lighting. To calculate the image on the right would take hours.
While games have come a long way since 1995, we still have a long way to go before we can calculate unlimited light sources that cast shadows in realtime.
I agree. Plus the fact this is getting done in real time with the Xbox One being the baseline make it even more impressive.
potatohead
Member
It's pretty sad that people on a dedicated gaming forum can't tell how the CGI even from 90s still does the shading and IQ better than a current game. The shading is better than the real-time KH3 footage, this isn't an argument. That is a fact. The ran tons of passes of shadows far more than real-time can ever do, and even approximating that level of lighting quality is still extremely hard.
It should be obvious, but sadly it isn't apparent to people here. It tells a lot about people being able to tell "good graphics" between games and other games themselves too.
And it has nothing to do with nostalgia goggles or anything. Yes, the asset quality in a lot of ways is equally as good and sometimes even better in the KH3 footage, but not the lighting, not even close.
It should be obvious, but sadly it isn't apparent to people here. It tells a lot about people being able to tell "good graphics" between games and other games themselves too.
And it has nothing to do with nostalgia goggles or anything. Yes, the asset quality in a lot of ways is equally as good and sometimes even better in the KH3 footage, but not the lighting, not even close.
Arkage
Banned
For reference, this is the Toy Story game that came out on Mega Drive/SNES in 1995:
Psh, I played the GB version of that constantly. I think I even beat it, but it's hard to remember... had pretty good graphics but controls were laggy as hell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AXt2Wut1JM
JordanN
Banned
I was going to type up a long post literally addressing every detail but I feel like I can shorten it by posting my true feelings.
Toy Story graphics was possible since PS3. Proof of this is all those "doll-like" characters people use to complain about yet now a days, these are considered outdated.
Or look at KOF 14, which is often as cited as looking like 90s FMV's. Despite being on the PS4, it's clearly not seen as being the most advanced looking game on the platform.
Sora the Cat
Member
For reference, this is the Toy Story game that came out on Mega Drive/SNES in 1995:
It looked way better than that on the actual TV.
Crossing Eden
Hello, my name is Yves Guillemot, Vivendi S.A.'s Employee of the Month!
Not quite. But we're getting there. Need massive upgrades in terms of lighting when it comes to games.
You confuse people talking the difference between "power" and "technique"
I doubt anyone here would argue the power used to make toy story 1 Is achievable on consoles... But dont discount technique.
There are many advancements, shortcuts, tricks, etc these days with consoles that can oftentimes make games look better than toy story 1. Just because raw power let them use a bunch of lights in toy story doesnt mean it looks good. Just because its rendering large amounts of polygons doesnt mean games cant make their models look better with less.
Id say most games these days look better than toy story for the simple fact that the models, and techniques used in that movie were so new that no one knew any better.
We do now, so its easy to make most stuff look better despite raw power. Even lighting.
OrangeGrayBlue
Member
In some respects we've already surpassed Toy Story 1. It's kind of hard to make direct comparisons though, as various screenshots of TS1 in this thread have shown. The grass was a flat texture in one shot. That wouldn't fly in your typical PS4 game. If you watch TS1 today, I think it's pretty obvious that the ability and/or know-how to create realistic textures was severely lacking. I'm pretty sure that's a big part of why they opted to make plastic toys the main characters in the first place.
rodrigolfp
Haptic Gamepads 4 Life
nope. poly count obviously lower. look at the ears
Can someone explain to me why devs these days are heavily sacrificing shadows to the point of having zero point-light shadow casting?
Is it really that bloody expensive? I mean, most games at least have a single major light source in the form of the sun, so there's that, but why never any shadowed point light sources beyond just the sun?
And why in the world do these KH3 shots have no light source? This is really weird. Is this their idea of "optimization"? Because I don't think the trade-off was worth it. Sure, the assets are super-high quality, but that doesn't mean a whole lot when the only lighting is from SSAO...
That being said, lighting and polygon count aside, we've surpassed TS1 in so many respects that it makes this whole argument really annoying. Yes, TS1 had better hard shadowing and fully curved surfaces, but KH3 has PBR (which means better material shading across the board), better foliage, ambient occlusion (TS1 ONLY had hard shadows and whatever "shadowing" was produced by the radii of the various light sources they used), better fur rendering, and other advancements that have been accumulated through years of graphics research. Any answer that says one is clearly and obviously better than the other without taking these aspects into account is suspect.
They have different strengths, but TS1 is obviously the older work, and KH3 getting as far as it has in real-time is a worthy enough accomplishment on its own.
Is it really that bloody expensive? I mean, most games at least have a single major light source in the form of the sun, so there's that, but why never any shadowed point light sources beyond just the sun?
And why in the world do these KH3 shots have no light source? This is really weird. Is this their idea of "optimization"? Because I don't think the trade-off was worth it. Sure, the assets are super-high quality, but that doesn't mean a whole lot when the only lighting is from SSAO...
That being said, lighting and polygon count aside, we've surpassed TS1 in so many respects that it makes this whole argument really annoying. Yes, TS1 had better hard shadowing and fully curved surfaces, but KH3 has PBR (which means better material shading across the board), better foliage, ambient occlusion (TS1 ONLY had hard shadows and whatever "shadowing" was produced by the radii of the various light sources they used), better fur rendering, and other advancements that have been accumulated through years of graphics research. Any answer that says one is clearly and obviously better than the other without taking these aspects into account is suspect.
They have different strengths, but TS1 is obviously the older work, and KH3 getting as far as it has in real-time is a worthy enough accomplishment on its own.
Spiritwalker
Member
It looks better in almost every way except for lighting.
It might seem close, but we aren't even half way there yet. This is an approximation of the a 1995 CG movie that cuts corners everywhere. I think we now have enough of polygons as long as we don't go too close to the models. As soon as the camera moves in close, it is easy to see the polygonal edges and low res blurry textures. Look at how blocky Woody's fingers are. When the camera gets close, the button on his shirt looks like it could cut you with its razor sharp edges.
Yup, not even close. The fingers were the first thing I noticed when watching the trailer.
JordanN
Banned
Toy Story 3 PS3
Where's the news?
There was also the lesser known Kinect Rush: A Disney/Pixar Adventure.
It being a Kinect game is probably why it's forgotten, but I remember the visuals blowing my mind. It also seems the closest to matching the actual artstyle of Toy Story.
Sword Of Doom
Member
Can't watch the video. Are those prerendered? Cause that's what it looks like
LightofRohan
Member
People arguing that these Nurby Phongs look better than real-time stuff, good grief. Yes you are never going to surpass the smoothness of a nurbed up Woody ear from Toy Story 1, but that's not the argument. It's about achieving the same visual artistry as something that was rendered by something larger than most of your houses on a small box in your living room 30 times a second.
Like usual people need to relax all around and appreciate this accomplishment. I'm most impressed with rig fidelity of KH3, where it surpasses Toy Story 1's by far.
Like usual people need to relax all around and appreciate this accomplishment. I'm most impressed with rig fidelity of KH3, where it surpasses Toy Story 1's by far.
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
You have this misguided romantic vision of Toy Story, that's totally wrong. TS didn't use raytracing. Pixar hasn't used that technique until Cars. They actually faked just about everything until Monster's University, which is their first movie that used ray tracing with physically based shading. Lighting in toy story is super-simplistic compared to what is being done in UE4 today (i.e. stuff like realtime GI, volumetric lights, area lights etc), and indeed more simplistic than the lighting used in this game. Toy Story didn't have sub-surface scatter on plastic surfaces, this game does, giving plastic a much finer, softer look. TS didn't have ambient occlusion, this game does (just look at how unnatural it looks in TS every place where two surfaces touch under an angle - there's no naturally occurring shadow there. On top of that, original TS was rendered in something like 1600x900p for theaters, and was only re-rendered in higher quality for a blu-ray re-release several years ago.
What TS has that this game probably doesn't, is shadows cast from multiple dynamic point lights. That's about it. I'm not sure how much something like this would have been used in the movie, but it's the kind of thing that's expensive in realtime rendering, and generally is being avoided like a plague.
Btw, Rex's scales in TS are almost for sure not modeled or displacement-mapped. They look like very simple bumpmapping to me:
A technque that's been long replaced by much better things in realtime rendering, like parallax mapping or of course, actual tesselation.
For reference, this is the Toy Story game that came out on Mega Drive/SNES in 1995:
I remember this game vividly.
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
Shading != Shadows.
Material shading is by far more advanced in KH3 than it was in TS. Game is most likely using PBR. Shadows in TS could be cast from multiple light sources, which this game likely doesn't do (but overall, in a dedicated demo of some kind it would be possible). In terms of shadows, TS didn't have ambient occlusion, which is a huge contributor to its super-fake flat look by today's standards. AO is of course used in KH3, so you have things like shadows where two surfaces meet etc.
Also, the IQ of TS original release with 900p, even with the really good AA used, was certainly not better than the best we see in today's games.
This needs to be re-posted:
That's what TS looked like, resolution and all, before the recent blu-ray release re-render.
LucidMomentum
Member
Also y'all gotta remember when Toy Story rendered out it was like a frame a minute or something. Only when the project was done did it look smooth in motion as a video file.
KHIII renders 60 frames a second.
KHIII renders 60 frames a second.
Human Trashcan
Banned
Games have looked better than TS1 for a minute imo. The only thing a movie like TS has over games is that the animators can perfectly control what's visible in every single frame, and use resources on things that games can't, because it was all pre-rendered. But from a graphical technology and asset quality-perspective I think it's loooong been surpassed.
Metalingus5150
Member
Toy Story had frames rendered at 4 hours per frame. No way KH III is 60fps. Probably 30fps.
Edit: Post below me explains it better than I did.
Actually the original Toy Story was over an hour per frame "114,240 Frames of animation in the final film, requiring 800,000 machine hours to render at 2‑15 hours per frame." They obviously used early render farms and linked machines to do multiple frames at once and such. It takes me hours to render some of the 3D Art and Animation I do now on modern machines and render farms so while animation has improved the render times haven't drastically increased just the number of machines you can task with rendering has gone up so more frames can be done in similar time frames.
CopperPuppy
Member
It's pretty jaw-dropping, TBH.
They absolutely nailed the look.
They absolutely nailed the look.
Shading != Shadows.
Material shading is by far more advanced in KH3 than it was in TS. Game is most likely using PBR. Shadows in TS could be cast from multiple light sources, which this game likely doesn't do (but overall, in a dedicated demo of some kind it would be possible). In terms of shadows, TS didn't have ambient occlusion, which is a huge contributor to its super-fake flat look by today's standards. AO is of course used in KH3, so you have things like shadows where two surfaces meet etc.
Also, the IQ of TS original release with 900p, even with the really good AA used, was certainly not better than the best we see in today's games.
This needs to be re-posted:
That's what TS looked like, resolution and all, before the recent blu-ray release re-render.
They did a re-render? Any info on how long it took them this time and on what machines they rendered it?
funroll-loops
Member
The lack of real shadows always mess these things up for me. Having proper shadows is like, the most important thing after basic shading to give perspective and avoid issues like Woody's hat looking like it's magically floating in front of his head, or characters looking like they're hovering over the ground. It looks like they at least have AO in Kingdom Hearts to avoid the hovering character problem, but it's hard to tell for sure without screenshots where you can see the characters' feet.
You're right, there are apparently no self-shadows in the game, but I don't agree that the hat looks like it's floating.
For me it's the addition of ambient occlusion that enhances the game versus the movie, makes the scenery look fuller and nicer. I absolutely would not call KH3's lighting "flat."
You have this misguided romantic vision of Toy Story, that's totally wrong. TS didn't use raytracing. Pixar hasn't used that technique until Cars. They actually faked just about everything until Monster's University, which is their first movie that used ray tracing with physically based shading. Lighting in toy story is super-simplistic compared to what is being done in UE4 today (i.e. stuff like realtime GI, volumetric lights, area lights etc), and indeed more simplistic than the lighting used in this game. Toy Story didn't have sub-surface scatter on plastic surfaces, this game does, giving plastic a much finer, softer look. TS didn't have ambient occlusion, this game does (just look at how unnatural it looks in TS every place where two surfaces touch under an angle - there's no naturally occurring shadow there. On top of that, original TS was rendered in something like 1600x900p for theaters, and was only re-rendered in higher quality for a blu-ray re-release several years ago.
What TS has that this game probably doesn't, is shadows cast from multiple dynamic point lights. That's about it. I'm not sure how much something like this would have been used in the movie, but it's the kind of thing that's expensive in realtime rendering, and generally is being avoided like a plague.
Btw, Rex's scales in TS are almost for sure not modeled or displacement-mapped. They look like very simple bumpmapping to me:
A technque that's been long replaced by much better things in realtime rendering, like parallax mapping or of course, actual tesselation.
Heh I missed that comment about Rex's scales.
You can even see how low-res his texture pattern is in this shot.
I remember reading it was faster than real-time. It was done on Pixar's renderfarm, whatever it was at the time.
I think its important to point out that people shouldn't focus too much on the "smoothness" of meshes. The techniques used in TS1 weren't particularly flexible, and honestly I'm surprised they managed to do what they did in terms of animation. As soon as subdivided surfaces became a thing they changed ASAP lol. Also no one cares about pushing polygons anymore haha.
Also with regards to shading and lighting. TS1 kept things very simple by using a ray casting/ scanline rendering method much like video games today. It followed a direct illumination model. KH3 on the other hand(and many other games today) uses a plethora of new methods that approximate low frequency lighting to give it that softer less plasticky look that we see today. (things like AO, or irradiance caches in UE4) We can fake higher order portions of the rendering equation now. These methods gained popularity very soon after the early 2000's since many of them were developed around that time. Aside from reflections in very rare cases (Buzz's helmet) ray tracing is never used in the original TS1.
My point is that video games have far surpassed TS1 in terms of rendering techniques. Aside from shadow map fidelity its hard to think of things we haven't surpassed.
I mean for petes sake we have real time path tracers running in browsers now lol.
http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/
Also with regards to shading and lighting. TS1 kept things very simple by using a ray casting/ scanline rendering method much like video games today. It followed a direct illumination model. KH3 on the other hand(and many other games today) uses a plethora of new methods that approximate low frequency lighting to give it that softer less plasticky look that we see today. (things like AO, or irradiance caches in UE4) We can fake higher order portions of the rendering equation now. These methods gained popularity very soon after the early 2000's since many of them were developed around that time. Aside from reflections in very rare cases (Buzz's helmet) ray tracing is never used in the original TS1.
My point is that video games have far surpassed TS1 in terms of rendering techniques. Aside from shadow map fidelity its hard to think of things we haven't surpassed.
I mean for petes sake we have real time path tracers running in browsers now lol.
http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/