ICStats said:
You'll have to excuse the graphics programmer in me that notices these things. I watched this scene in the trailer video. You can tell the reflection maps on metal Mario and on vehicles are static even while they drive around this track which should have many lights reflecting from the ground and the scenery. It looks like it's using static cube maps. So how does that stack as Gen 8 technology? In Gen 5 games used static environment maps. It makes things look shiny and like they reflect the sky, but they do not update to reflect other cars, trees, or other scenery dynamically.
In Gen 6 games could do more detailed enviroment maps. The original Xbox had native cube maps. A basic cubemap effect looks like this:
Poor man's reflection would still use a static cube map, but many games rendered enviroment maps in real time, so you could see buildings, trees, lights reflect as you pass them. This is much more intensive as it requires rendering up to 6 views of the world. Since this is an expensive operation, a game might produce a single cube map shared between all cars on screen for example, so the reflections are not very accurate but make a good effect.
In Gen 7 the basic formula of using cube maps did not change, but resolutions increased, and shader complexity increased to produce more realistic metalic paint and other materials.
In Gen 8 games like Killzone Shadowfall utilize multiple cube maps simultaneously, and screen-space raytracing effects. This allows reflections to really look connected to their source all over the screen.
And then in MK8 we are... back to doing static cube maps, somewhere around poor mans Gen 6 reflections. Hmmm. |
useless trivia for you, in GT4 each track had several cubemaps based around the track itself that the engine would pop in and out of depending on where the car was located on the track, it was carefully timed and positioned to give minimal jump when switching maps on the back and front window but the side windows sometimes showed off the effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW67x0Sh00M
Video uploader mistakes this for realtime reflections even though it wasnt really, but it does show the jump between cube maps - in addition to these track based cube maps a secondary overlay cubemap was used to reflect track side lights, this was actually psuedo realtime using shaders, but not as accurate as actual realtime reflections, the secondary reflections were used over the entire car.
