What Uncharted 4′s million polygon characters will look like

You might have already read about a Naughty Dog job listing for a character artist responsible for “making million poly models game ready” for a “next-gen” game, and if so you probably got pretty excited. A million polygons is a lot, right? It’s certainly more than the ~30,000 poly models used in Uncharted 3. Is this evidence of Uncharted on PS4? Or a simple misunderstanding? Let’s investigate.

[mynd]

Million polys was always about the normal maps. Not in game assets, at least this article gets it right. So many people got the wrong end of the stick with the original article.

[LolololRumz]

Glad this artical contains a lot more people with the educated answer, there really won't be much difference between the million poly models and say the final 30,000 poly ones. It's just the quality of the normal maps and the person creating them, but it's in safe hands with Naughty Dog

[nveenio]

We're to the point now that processing power is better spent on dynamic systems. Procedural environments, for instance. Or advanced physics, particle effects and lighting. Procedural animations.

The next level of gaming won't be controller or polygon based. It'll come from more realistic simulations.

[im_right]

Waiting for this to come :)
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

[Kurylo3d]

@im_right
problem with that is if u notice... nothing at all is animated within that video. The technology has been around for ages... i mean a long long time ago... This company is just trying to be slick and rebrand it... its garbage for now that has no support for awesome shaders or skeletal animation or animation at all for that matter.

[specialguest]

Notch, the creator of Minecraft called this tech a scam. Euclidean responded stating that Notch based his statements on limited info and understanding of the tech, and that it isn't a scam.

Let's hope this new tech rolls out soon. Euclidean tech could be revolutionary and change the industry.

[ProjectVulcan]

This is what they should look like. http://www.youtube.com/watc...

This was a tech demo that ran realtime to promote the performance of the 8800GTX 5 years ago. The head had a big poly count: http://img22.imagevenue.com... but the lighting/shadows are completely realtime too.

The demo only renders this head, it is exceptionally taxing for this one object, not least of all because of the superb lighting effects of the skin. This is really the sort of thing that would be amazing to see on next generation hardware.

This is what you can do with huge counts.

[bozebo]

The normal maps (and depth maps) will be tessellated back into polygons so in the end, if the camera is close enough to the character (i.e. face close-up) then they will easily have a million polygons if you took the density of the polygons on the screen and assumed that density across the whole model.

Of course, that's presuming Sony opt for something a lot beefier than a 6670 lol, otherwise tessellation is a no-go.

[Pandamobile]

I'd say 100,000 to 150,000 polys in a player/lead character with high quality normal maps and all that should be more than sufficient for next gen games.

After that, you're just needlessly throwing geometry at the GPU with no benefit to the game

[moparful99]

Thats what I've always thought.. The thought that a million polygons have to not only be rendered but you have texture maps, colors skeletal animations, and physics it seems like an awful lot of resources for a character model.. I could be wrong though...

[ProjectVulcan]

We are reaching the point where you can afford to throw 10 million polygons on screen at once. You can have as much as you want to build very detailed surfaces and characters, objects etc. when tesselated.

I agree that there is a finite number of polygons needed to describe an object and we aren't that far away from reaching that. At this point the GPU architecture is likely to shift increasingly to other more important areas.

[hesido]

I don't think we'll be talking about exact polygon counts, that the next gen hardware would probably have feasible tesselation capable hardware. As tesselation becomes a standard, the original assets will be designed with tesselation in mind, with lower polygon meshes coupled with displacement. Good times! Currently, the only thing tesselation does is to slow down the gpu for the sake of looking better, as core assets have to have higher than needed polygon counts to account for hardware incapable of tesselation. When it becomes the standard, it will make things faster, and still look more beautiful.

Based on distance to camera, on close-ups, the characters may have immensely detailed curves with very high poly count, although the base mesh could contain as little as, say, 5000 polygons, tesselated and displacement mapped (displacement mapping adapted from a billion poly source on zbrush).

Then, tesselation would be real memory saver, as characters in memory will take even less memory, but will be displayed in even higher quality than current gen. This will allow lot more objects on screen with unique geometry.

[bozebo]

Hesido you said what I have been saying for years but made it easy to understand :P

+bubs

Key point - tessellation can only be used properly when the game is only going to run on hardware with heavy tessellation. Which means MS have already gimped this gen IF they stick a ~6670 in the nextbox :/ or maybe they are going casual? I don't know. It's strange because last gen the consoles were good performers when they launched so the ~6670 rumour was probably BS anyway. (a 28nm chip would make a lot more sense for many reasons)

[raptor302]

You can basicly get the same result with normal maps. So I don't really see how having a million polygon model is gonna make any difference to the detail of characters.

It's prob like they say in the article though. Most models these days are sculpted with millions of polygons and then brought down to a much lower amount with different textures maps on them so that they still look very detailed.

[LightofDarkness]

It would make a difference only if you were very close-up and could examine the smallest details. Otherwise, normal maps are absolutely worth the detail/performance trade off.

Besides, something with that much geometric detail would also suffer from tremendous aliasing at the resolutions we commonly game at on PS3/360, which would just make things uglier.

Funny enough, when I saw the fist headline on N4G I shrugged it off as "they probably mean the high-poly renders for normal maps" and a bait headline, but I guess some people took it to heart (probably the original article writer didn't understand it him/herself).

But yeah, poly-counts aren't exactly left wanting right now on PS3 or PC, lighting and more advanced shaders are the stuff that's going to be making the big differences for the next while.

[ravinash]

Once you get down to a certain level, it's the bump map which bring in the real detail.

[Pandamobile]

The likelihood of Uncharted 4, or any game in the foreseeable future having million polygon in-game characters is slim to none.

Using high-poly models is the standard for just about every game developer in 2012. Every 3D character has an extremely high poly version that they use to extract normal maps from. This practise will continue into next-gen and beyond because it's a lot more efficient and artist-friendly.

All that job listing was asking was for a 3D modeller/sculptor that has experience making high poly models in Zbrush or Mudbox. Game journalists really need to learn a bit about what they're writing about before they write all these ridiculous, sensationalist articles.

[PersonMan]

This is exactly what I was going to say. Thank you for saying it better :-)

[Oldman100]

Rendering at that amount would be a waste of resources. Just look how little of a difference there is between this strangers wrath 20,000 poly ps3 render and 529,000 poly cg render.

[LNDCalling]

Not the best of comparisons being such low resolution images, now try showing those images (Raw) on a 60"+ 4k TV, now that would show the difference!

As things currently stand 'hardware wise' I would agree, but industries (Gaming included especially so) are always looking forward not just at what's possible now!

[SephirothX21]

Exactly. I think there needs to be a greater commitment to getting more on screen rather than making things look better. Better AI, better physics and bigger environments. Hopefully by next gen, more developed countries will have faster broadband speeds which will mean less lag and more players in online multiplayer matches.

[LNDCalling]

One word strikes me.. 'necessarily'..

I quote: "that doesn’t neccessarily mean they’ll show up in the game in such high detail"..

Make of this as you wish, but the job listing itself isn't detailed enough for anyone to be sure therefore its only speculation from either side.

ND could indeed be looking to have 1m+ poly 'playable' models on Sony's next console (if it was a huge leap in power) which is all the more possible if Sony forget the 'Next Gen / Console cycle' and release in their own time. Additionally ND and devs in general have to look forward 5-10+ years and beyond when it is most plausible that games will be played at 4k+ or beyond!

[Pandamobile]

I'd expect Naughty Dog to be smarter than to just throw a million polygon character into a game.

[Totoro17]

Hmmm...not that I'm not excited for millions of polygons, but haven't we learned that it's the detail, not the polygon count that makes the difference? Remember Final Fantasy 12 for the PS2? I emulated my PS2 copy and play it with antialising and 1080p and it looks INCREDIBLE!! Like it could easily pass for a PS3 game (maybe year 1 or year 2 PS3 game lol). Either way, Naughty Dog has rarely failed us and I can't wait to see what they have in store for us.

[Anti-Fanboyer]

I'll just leave this here.

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

[Ares84HU]

Having a higher polly count in games is nice but I want to see how this will affect things in a distance. How will this affect drawing distance.

[Scenarist]

what i want is better lighting/shadows ...
give me real time ray-tracing or go home...

[NotSoSilentBob]

Who said the million polygon characters were from Uncharted?

[Mrmagnumman357]

real time ray tracing ? Based off the fact that next box may have an entry level radeon 6670, you wont get ray tracing for a long time, us pc gamers will get it in probably 5 years, just an estimate though....

[ninjahunter]

I explained this in the last article, get something like 20 down votes and called a troll, A journalist says the same thing everybody agrees, its sensible so on so forth. I just cant catch the logic behind PS3 fans.

[Ares84HU]

Why? What did the PS3 fans say???

[ninjahunter]

Mostly that I was trolling, But the down votes are what spoke to me the most. No room for logic.

[ilovemyps3]

I think the problem is something else, and not those thousand billion polygons we will have, one day.
Maybe lighting is more important than poly count.
Come on, make a small 640*480 movie, with and old phone, highly compressed, and it will still look better than CGI. You will still be able to say : this is real life, and this is cgi. Even a 320*240 will be the same.
We can have as many polygons as we want, in a scene, it will still look, well, not real. I don't know what they can do, to make it look more real.

One thing is cool, today, our consoles can render a toy story movie, in real time.
I guess in not so far away, consoles will be able to render a avatar movie, in real time, too.maybe in 4-6 years. That will be cool.
Today, we look at heavy rain, for example, and say wow, those faces are incredible. But in 5 years, we will say 'those awful faces are really static,etc'

A heavy rain 2, on a ps4, could be cool.

when we look at the first doom, and crysis 2, or bioshock,etc, its just incredible how tech evolved, these years. I wish ,in 2-3 years, we could find that same difference between doom and bioshock/another game, on, for example, crysis 2 and 3, or battlefield 3 and 4, etc.

It's so bad there is only amd and intel, as big CPU makers, they don't go really fast, on research. We could already have 100 core processors, if only they wanted. But they prefer going slow, I3, I9,I7, etc etc, since amd can't do much better, they don't need to develop he next 5ghz 200 core CPU.

On be other side, graphic cards are now big pieces of tech, with billions transistors, and every new model is 2 times faster then the last one.

I hope ps4 will be developer friendly, but I don't want a small upgrade from my ps3. I'm ready to pay 400$, but I want a system 10 times more powerful then the ps3. And not just a cheap 6 cores, like next Xbox 'should' have, according to speculation.

I want billions of polygons on my screen, at 30fps, and nothing else.

[Big_Dom]

Just stop. You don't have a clue what you are talking about. You did get one thing correct: lighting is more important than polygon count, or at least not as important when it comes to creating a pretty picture. but that is another thing entirely. No, we will not even have Toy Story kind of visuals even with the next generation. Why? Well, for one thing, Pixar and Disney CGI films all use ray-tracing to render each frame and produce high quality sub-surface scattering, global illumination, reflection, refraction, HDR etc, all of which takes an incredible amount of CPU resources just to render in one pass. Throw in particle effects like smoke and realistic fur, and you'd have something that would literally melt even a very high end PC if it tried to render all that in real time at 29 FPS. Even then, these films have to use tricks to look that good. A high poly model in the tens of millions is sculpted with all the detail, and then a lower sub div model is used inside of a package like Maya, where a UV is created for it and displacement maps are ported over to the lower poly model to be rendered. Now, a 40 million odd polygon model inside ZBrush ported directly into Maya without decimation would literally make the program beg for mercy or at least make it break a sweat, and yet you think that the renders seen in films like Avatar will be possible in 4-6 years? I wish it were true, but as per usual, gamers these days literally haven't a clue regarding the work involved in actually producing what they see on their screens.

[ilovemyps3]

Relax man, cool.. now breath.. slowly..
I remember reading the toy story , a few years ago.maybe they were talking about animations, etc, and not the ray traced version.

I don't make 3d, and don't care about it. But if I know a studio works 2-3 years on a game, with 100 or more people, I have the right to want great graphics with billions polygons, if they have in their hands a great system as a ps3.

Im not intelligent as you, to know how much time it takes to have this or that content in a game, but I do know tools have evolved, and I'm sure today, you can create a character or a full scene, in maybe 1 day, using the last version of 3d max or Maya or whatever, and 5 or 10 years ago, you would spend 10 or 15 days to do the same work.

Today you can apply an effect or texture or whatever, and see it in real time, when you had to render it during 10 minutes, some years ago. Today studios have much more content to produce, but they can do it 50 times faster, so your theory isn't correct,for me.

-Some years ago, a woman could type 10 letters a day, for her boss. today, she can deliver 1000 letters in one hour.
- some years ago, you had to spend countless hours to animate a text, on flash. A web designer could spend the whole day for just one animation. Today, the same guy will do 100 animations for 100 websites, using the same amount of time.

Much more content , using much better tools, can be done, in much less time. You looked quite smart on 3d, I hope you understand what I say... I really hope.

All this to say, even if games will require more content to fill 50-100 gb of data, and even if you only have 2 years to make your game, tools will let you do much more,much easier,with a much better quality, in less time.

[ilovemyps3]

About polygons, next Lara croft should use less CPU, because her breast will be smaller, it means less polygons to manipulate, and more stable frame rate ;)

Yes, I said breast and not b***ies, don't want the kids here to click on 'report'...

[sly-Famous]

Here breast are by no meens smaller, the difference is, she is not wearing a wonderbra, just saing. ;)

[Rageanitus]

Honestly I could care less about the massive amounts of polygons.... what we really need are games with super high rez textures.

[sly-Famous]

Kratos' facial modle looks better, for me anyway.