Modern rendering engine have lots of control over the surface materials and how light interacts with it. The "plastic look" is fully intentional, the Batman games always had this crazy over top specularity going on, probably to emphasize the costume details and muscles of the characters. It's mostly art direction and alot of games use that style these days for whatever reason.

So would an HD Crimson Shroud be the game that finally has true photorealistic graphics?

Looking at the videos, it just seems like an art direction decision.

The artists could have followed a different art direction if they wanted to, used different shaders and different rendering techniques.

His suit does seem like it is made from rubber rather than, what, gray/black textured leather? In the fight scene around 50 seconds in the clip, the girl's clothes seem to have a highly reflective plastic for the belts and bands, a reflective synthetic material for the waist, and a less reflective cloth for the arms and bodicework. More reflective than I would expect in clothing, but not unreasonable for an art direction.

Same with the vehicles, there is obviously a difference between the black shiny metal and the other surfaces, they just decided to go with more of a plastic or rubber reflective and texture. I don't see anything that offends my from the comic-book origins, just an art choice.

Take the Epic Citizen demo -- probably the first tech demo to actually simulate more than two-three bounces of light in a complex scene, and it required three flagship GPUs to render at playable frame-rates. I don't know what their lighting model is, or whether its physically-based and consistently so, but it shows both how far we've come, and at the same time, how far we really have to go.

I'm assuming you mean Samaritan (

). This is just Unreal 3 and all of the graphical features demonstrated have been available in UDK for over two years. It does not simulate bounced light any more than lightmass did (2009); the lighting is still largely baked lightmaps with some dynamic lights. The lighting model is also not physically based; it's the standard phong-diffuse-specular-normals we see in most games.

It also did not run at what I'd call interactive framerates at the time.

I myself wondered wtf was wrong with FarCry 3 speculars

Like, seriously, thats supposed to be a very dark cave.

Looks like it doesn't take attenuation of that light source into account - which strikes me as a really weird thing to do?

Like, seriously, thats supposed to be a very dark cave.

Looks like you either have adjusted your brightness/contrast/gamma settings up, or like you need to adjust them down.

I mean, even your minimap background is showing up as about 5% gray rather than black.

Like, seriously, thats supposed to be a very dark cave.

Looks like you either have adjusted your brightness/contrast/gamma settings up, or like you need to adjust them down.

I mean, even your minimap background is showing up as about 5% gray rather than black.

Its not mine, but when I played there were certain surfaces that were like that. Cave rocks and ruins. Everything else looked fine.

The most photoreal engine currently imo is Quantic Dreams next gen engine see:

Thought it's missing some of the newer wiz bang features like real fluid dynamics ( as seen by the Panta Rhei engine from Capcom ).

but I'm sure its just matter of time until they add it.

-ddn

I have the impression that this realism thing is an uncanny valley. The more realism we have (and the more work is taken from our imagination), the more disturbing the imprecision of the virtual reality gets.

The other impression I have is that no matter how advanced technology becomes, the more work artists have to do in order to achieve realism, because that uncanny valley thing. The above post showed something that is pretty photoreal, but the motions and animations are somehow unrealistic.

This almost but disturbingly not realistic look was one reason I stopped gaming. The other was the aforementioned shiny-dark design, like American rap videoclips have. CoD2 was "realistic enough" for me.