If you’ve seen any modern video game graphics — or even have just spent more than five minutes in a conversation about video games — then you’ve heard of photorealism. We’ve got some pretty lofty goals for what we want our interactive digital entertainment to entail.
What is photorealism?
Photorealism means computer-generated graphics are indistinguishable from real life. We’ve seen this in movies for years (think about the incredible visual effects of blockbusters like Avatar), but it remains quite elusive in video games. The problem is simple: getting perfectly lifelike scenes is infinitely more complicated when it’s not prerecorded. Excluding cinematic cutscenes, in an interactive video game there is none of the hand-retouching and pre-rendering. The painstaking hours of work that post-production artists put into 30-frames-per-second movie scenes is a luxury that the realtime rendering of 60-frames-per-second games can’t afford. The processing power alone can get up to melt-your-extension-cord heights as it tries to respond to player input.
What do we have now?
Rasterization algorithms are what rules this world right now. Games look pseudo-realistic because of the image output from this “flattening” process, but at its core, it’s not reflective of real-world visuals. For example, rasterizing graphics use dark textures to draw shadows from the camera, to stand in for real-world, photorealistic ray tracing (where shadows come from interaction with light sources). There are, of course, shortcuts: video game developers have created techniques to mimic photorealism. Techniques like Unity’s “sparse voxel octree global illumination” is an innovative workaround for creating realistic lighting, and physically-based rendering and photogrammetry have seen incredible development in recent years. And it’s not just photorealistic ray tracing and global lighting we’re after: modeling and animation are all part of the struggle.
What’s the goal?
All of this might seem on a surface level to be a frivolous obsession with detail. But it starts to be less frivolous when one takes into account the time, money, and resources photorealism involves. Games with stylized graphics that don’t tread near uncanny valley still sell — so why all the effort? It seems to boil down to what we want out of a gaming experience. We don’t want a prerecorded movie when we play a video game: we want another world, complete with atmosphere that accesses our emotions with its reflection of real life. Perhaps it’s not worth meditating on the goals of photorealism: the scramble towards complete escapism will likely continue to rage ahead. One thing’s no secret, though: if you run a rendering farm or manufacture graphics cards, you’ve got money coming.
Want more 3D news, info, and insight? Read this post on iMeshup’s blog.
