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| Re: My technical disection of the Reach trailer | |
| Posted By: kapowaz <halo.bungie.org@kapowaz.net> | Date: 12/18/09 4:36 a.m. |
In Response To: My technical disection of the Reach trailer (FyreWulff) An interesting and thoughtful analysis, although I don't agree with your conclusions regarding anti-aliasing. Let's look at the frame you chose up close:
The first area you highlight is a line on the helmet itself, just above the thumb. Looking up close, there really isn't any obvious aliasing here:
It's unclear to me whether the other area you point to — on the visor — is referring to the join between the visor and the jaw, or another line on the visor itself, but let's look at both in turn:
This being the line joining the two. I see no obvious lack of anti-aliasing here, since there's clearly a variety of colours along the line and surrounding pixels. A complete lack of anti-aliasing would present itself far more prominently. As for the line on the visor itself:
As far as I can tell, this is merely a bump-mapping artifact (and bizarrely enough, more evidence that this is a real in-engine scene, rather than a target render, albeit one possibly not actually rendered in realtime); if the source normal map was sufficiently low-res, then the individual pixels in that map might become obvious when the object with the map applied is rendered sufficiently large. It's somewhat akin to the problem of texture elements being seen up close back before texture filtering techniques were common. I'm not convinced that there's anything particularly new in this trailer regarding anti-aliasing or depth of field effects; Halo 3 had depth of field effects too, but they always had tell-tale signs of how they were constructed, in that the boundaries between objects with/without depth of field blurring would be hard, and you can see this in the Reach trailer too:
I think what you're mistaking the use of DOF techniques for elsewhere is actually a full-screen glow effect; the objects in question are still in focus, it's just that their edge colours have a halo (ha) around them. It's not a particularly new effect either — World of Warcraft has implemented this since 2004. It's similiar to a soft-focus effect which is achieved in photography by simply rubbing Vaseline on a lens filter. As regards your other conclusions, I agree that it appears they're now using a 3D skybox to present far-off geometry, which is a welcome change from the previously 100% matt technique. Half-Life 2 used this to great effect (notably the Combine Citadel was almost always in a separate 3D skybox), so it gives them a whole new arsenal for large-scale dioramas. Exciting stuff!
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