Video card and Textures question...

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dbu8554

Supreme [H]ardness
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May 7, 2002
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I have this crazy IDEA!!!!!


What if you took a game like HL2 and you took the texture for a road section and you decided you like it but it doesn't look like a road to you, so you took an image of a REAL road and a billion different angles and made them fit into the standard size for road textures for HL...

Would the road not look like a real road? And if you took it one step further and did that to buildings and shit?


I am just curious I don't know much in the way of 3d engines, are they not able to display pictures are semi real life resolutions yet or does displaying that much real life imagery slow all games down to where they cant be played, I am just curious thanks.
 
Sure, make your photorealistic 10 Gigabyte texture. Now try rendering it on the HL2 engine. Do you have 10-60 minutes to wait? Remember, we need 60 fps too. Rendering and realism is a constant tradeoff.
 
I was using Hl2 as an example so we can do it but hardware is not up to the task right?
 
yep, if you've seen modern animation (CGI) movies, even cartoons take months of runtime on hpc (high performance computer clusters).
 
Well then how long do you think untill we can see this stuff? just curious guys
 
10+ years to become decently photorealistic with photon mapping and the likes.
And your example is not realistic at all. You would have to take nearly an infinite amount of photos and have very high I/O capabilities of the storage medium etc...
 
I don't think it'll ever look 100% like real life. Even CGI rendered movies don't look completely real, and those have massive amounts processing power to use compared to a normal PC (plus they don't have to render in real-time).

I'd say the 10+ years estimate is accurate, but it's always hard predicting the future, especially with technology. It will also depend on the game, certain types of games are "easier" to make photo-realistic. Gran Turismo 5 for example is looking pretty close to photo-realistic in some shots, and that's running on hardware that's a couple years old
 
Games have been using photo's for textures for quite a while now.
Max Payne 1/2 are a good example of such a technique, you can quite clearly see that the textures are photographed.
One funny thing I noticed is that in Max Payne 2 there was a remote control for a TV that was exactly the same as mine (a Philips).

The problem remains that you have to relight the scene in realtime, so you have to remove the real lighting from your photo's to get an image as neutral as possible. Then dynamic light is added by the 3d engine at runtime. This is why even with photo textures the results still aren't completely realistic.
Engines like Crysis get closer and closer though.

I would say though that taking photo's and modifying them into useful textures (removing light, aligning them properly, making them wrap) is one of the most common forms of texturing in games today, and has been for some years.
 
Many textures are actually created this way already, more than you might think.

There is nothing wrong with the basic idea, what you're asking for is photo realism in games and that is perfectly possible right now. The problem is scale...each texture at high res takes up lots of memory and that's something we have a finite amount of, we could use very high detail objects, but just not very many of them, not enough to make a whole game.

You could for example use photorealistic textures and only render the inside of 1 room, it would be very limited but its certainly possible, we have a max limit of texture resolution in DX10 and OpenGL I believe, but you can split one large texture down into many little ones.

Something you might want to read about is id's technology called megatexture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaTexture where very large textures can be stored on the hard drive and only the relevant portions can be streamed in to memory to be used.

Doom4 could use textures as high resolution as 128,000x128,000 pixels using this technology.
 
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