A really bood read but I'm sleepy... so I will use the GAF quotes.
The mountain we're driving up is two kilometres high. In the distance, a patchy landscape of tea plantations and scrublands stretches out toward the horizon. Above us, bulbous clouds crawl by, scattering vast grey blankets of shadow. |
Everything is then lit via a true 24-hour day/night system, rather than a baked in sequence of pre-set lighting changes. "We've developed our own capture technique so the lighting in shadow, the lighting in direct sunlight and the way the car highlights fall off over distance – they all maintain proper energy conservation values," says Perkins. "We had to redesign our entire materials system – how we actually collect the information; it's much closer to the process you'd have on a film set for compositing CG elements into a live action image." |
"None of the direct light or shade is faked anymore," says Perkins. "It's at the point where you can see things like dynamic lens flare when you look at the sun and you can see a bit of chromatic aberration because we're mimicking slightly cheaper film lenses to capture deliberate imperfections that will make the game more lifelike." |
Car models too surpass anything Evolution has done before. While Motorstorm vehicles maxed out at around 23,000 polys each, DriveClub models are hitting 250,000, with interiors alone requiring around 60,000. Everything is authentic, from the fully functional speed and rev dials on the dashboard to the materials on the seats. Principle vehicle artist Neil Massam tells me that manufacturers are now having to rethink their approval procedures for racing games because the level of detail is so high. |
Kirkland is intrigued but reckons there's plenty of time to find that stuff. "You already have a lot of CPU power at your disposal," he says. "I think with many of the first generation PS4 titles, developers probably won't need to worry about it – they'll be able to get a lot out of parallelism across the CPU cores – but for teams who are a bit more ambitious, who want to do interesting things, it's just waiting there. We're doing some of that in DriveClub and I'm sure other guys will go further – and the platform guys will expose more of that functionality through the lifespan of the machine, unlocking more potential." |
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2013/aug/07/ps4-driveclub-future-game-visuals