Half Life 2 on Doom3 Engine !!

[enyx]

Yeah, the unreal engine is some sick stuff. Unfortuntely the only soft shadows in that game are blurred cubemaps...

I was really, really impressed - for about the 3 seconds that I thought the whole game was going to use some sort of trick to render soft shadows. But, alas... it's just going to be the few objects emitting light through cube maps...

Watch the video again where the narriator dude talks about it, and they have that moving light fixture... the shadows coming from that thing are nice, but the walls around it - Doom 3 like stencil shadows :/

I haven't checked out this Toxic stuff, but it sounds cool.

http://abdullahahmed.com/apple/wip/scenes/kitchen_textured07_02.jpg

Someone should made a de_rat_future

lol, yeah, for sure. It's for a short film I'm making that's supposed to land me a job... and that's a render of a kitchen that's a work-in-progress No doubt you can see gaming's influence on me

Update: chcked out the Toxic stuff.. it's cool and all, but it's just a rendering system... for high end 3d, like Maya and stuff It's not meant for real time use...

 

[Vinnie_NL]

Update: chcked out the Toxic stuff.. it's cool and all, but it's just a rendering system... for high end 3d, like Maya and stuff It's not meant for real time use...

Of course I knew that, but it's still cool because Maya and 3D Studio MAX aren't what you call affordable for most people, but Toxic is for free. But I think in ten years games can look like this too. But Unreal Engine 3 is planned too be available in two or three years, and that's why it has to use tricks like cubemaps. But I'm ok with that because it's still a lot more realistic than HL2 and Doom 3.

 

[ExiT]

We are kind of comparing apples and oranges here. Doom3's lighting was designed to make this exaggerated, shadowy movie effect, where Half-Life 2's lighting was designed for use with a broad spectrum of lighting situations and higher-rez textures.

So when you put HL2 textures into doom3 it looks good, but perhaps not as good as doom3's as (for design reasons, not engine capability!) HL2's textures are mainly high-res, one layer.

Note that the Source engine is fully capable of doing full specular and diffuse bump mapping, 2.0 shaders, etc.

 

[DonCab]

i have a 5700 ultra, 2.4ghz pentium and 512mg ram, with all the tweaks and stuff i managed to get doom 3 running over 30fps in 1024x768 with 4xAA and high settings. Doom 3 is happily rendering with version 2 pixel shaders whereas hl2 seems to deny that my card even supports them. (if i force them i get loads of artifacts). I am not happy, hl2 is much more fun to play but doesnt want to run with decent graphics.

 

[Dangher]

Oh, boy, I was waiting for this...

Oh boy... I got an account @ halflife2.net forums so I could view the pretty pictures. Atleast now I can do something else with it ;-) I'm a student in the last year of a 3 year traditional / computer animation program... but CG has been my life for far longer than that.

- Judging by your post it would not seem so...



First of all, as far as lighting goes... comparing HL2 to DOOM3 is like comparing apples and oranges (I hate to flog a tired cliche but it's true). HL2 uses pre-computed, reletively low-resolution lightmaps to generate the lighting on a texture.

- No probs here, 'cept the 'low resolution' remark...

It doesn't factor in anything like area lights, or how crisp the shadow should or shouldn't be.

- This is the problem of DOOM III, but we'll get back on that.

The bottom line is, it's only "soft" because of the fact that the resolution isn't all that cranked and the shadows are just generally blurred.

- Real world shadows DO HAVE SOFT EDGES, and the farther you get from the light source the softer and 'blurrier' they become, mr. CG and Animation.

But, the lights are also pre-computed to factor in some sort of rudimentry radiosity (lights bouncing, etc), nothing to ocrazy nor perticularly realistic. The lights are also ALL static, never changing. And if you bring up the flashlight, I'll castrate you. It's just a picture projected from the POV meant to "lighten" whatever it hits, based on it's alpha channel.

- The flashlight is based on Pixel Shading, you genious...

There are no shadows.

- So?


Doom 3's lighting scheme however revolves around computing the shadows in real time (with the exception of a few projected shadow maps, such as light shining down from above a layer of grating). Almost everything concerning light in Doom 3 is dynamic.

- Yep. It is. No question about that. Based on the SLOWEST and most UNREAL (he, he) looking algorithm of shadowing known to man - raytracing.

You can pretty much do anything in real time... change the color, the position, etc.

- What does color have to do with shadows?

And everything will update along with it... bumpmaps, diffuse brightness, specular highlights, etc. From an entirely technological standpoint, Doom 3's lighting architecture absolutely THROTTLES Half-Life's 2 archeic approach.

- Yes it does, but DOOM still looks under-par compared to Half-Life 2.


HOWEVER, that doesn't have to mean Doom 3 automatically looks better. As far as being physically accurate to the real world, they're both sitting at two ends of the spectrum. HL2 mimics real life lighting very well, it's all very shoddy and static, but looks great... if you're not searching for the faults. The same thing can be said for Doom 3, but I can tell you now.. 2, 3 years from now... lightmaps will never be seen again in a new game. Ever. Atleast I certainly hope not...

Doom 3 is a stepping stone towards a much more powerful and promising lighting system. It wouldn't take much to create soft shadows and accurately simulatie area lights. If you were to spawn 5 lights side by side (centimeters away) in Doom 3, you'd effectively get a cheap version of soft shadowing. But the funny thing is... this is EXACTLY how it's done in modern, pre-rendered CG with the likes of 3D Studio Max or Maya. Lights, emitting multiple ray-traced shadows within a specified area.


- Nope. This isn't. What version of Maya or Max are you using? 4? 4.5? Grow up...


And as far as Global Illumination or Radiosity is concerned... HAH! Don't even bring it up! We'll be sitting back for another 10 years before that stuff becomes real time. It took me 2 hours to render out a single 1280x760 image of a scene with 2, read TWO lights emitting photons and other garbage to simulate physically accurate illumination on my 3.4Ghz, 1 gig ram machine. It'll be a while before that render time is down to .05 seconds.


- This only means that you can't optimize geometry and materials - nothing more. Plus, if you don't mention the amount of polys and texture cache your argument is pointless...

By the way, this is the scene I was refering to.. a version lit with just ray-traced shadows... personally I prefered it to my Global Illumination experiment: http://abdullahahmed.com/apple/wip/scenes/kitchen_textured07_02.jpg

- As I said - unoptimized scene... 'nuff said... Oh, by the way, the shadows in there are NOT raytraced. Raytraced ones have sharp edges for your information...

Anyhoo I think both games look phenominal and I loved playing through both

- Me DOOM no like. BORING! Great graphics do not a great game make (plus the models in DOOM are VERY low poly).

By the by, my name is Stefan and I'll be lurking around here for a while so if there's something you wanna know, just ask

 

[nagual678]

Dangher, IMHO you managed to base your argumentation on opinions presented as facts and to not have a single point backing up any of your answers to enyx.also, the "grow up" and other similar stuff don't really help at all.
dissecting your post is useless. or it was a joke and it worked fairly well.