The new Trailer for CryENGINE 3 shows off lens flare, plant and cloth simulation, and unique looking toads!
Sometimes I wonder what audience do trailers for video games have in mind. First there was the trailer showing off explosions and photorealistic faces in a shooter coming out later this year; and another trailer that uses live-action scenes to somehow advertise the game. The trailer here kind of doesn’t focus on the new Crysis 3 game, but on the engine that makes it so pretty: CryENGINE 3.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWvgETOo5ek&w=560&h=315]
The engine is definitely pretty, though some terms used might be hard to figure out for the average gamer.
To get technical, I’ll have to explain some features that are shown off in CryENGINE 3. I’m not an expert on this but I’ll explain it the best way possible. First off the “pixel accurate displacement mapping” indicates that pixels are properly displaced over a given object. So there is no longer any ‘blurring’ effect when you see an object up-close. “Tesselated” for the vegetation and the toad mean that these objects are covered in pieces that are identically shaped. Take a look at the leaf again and you’ll notice that one side is frayed and has a hole from a caterpillar snack, while the other side looks preserved. “Procedural HDR flares and shapes” mean that there is now procedurally generated dynamic ranges of light and dark areas in an image. In the scene with the soldier standing against the light from behind, you can see that his body is shaded dark while the objects to the side or the light coming from the wall don’t mess with the dark theme of the image. The CryENGINE 3 also shows off how clothing and vegetation adjust to objects colliding with them, such as the wind of a helicopter passing through cloth and vegetation.
I’ll admit that the trailer for CryENGINE 3 looks good, but only slightly for me. I had to watch it a few times in order to figure out what the “pixel accurate displacement mapping” looked like, and I still don’t know if I got it right. Plus, while that is a well rendered toad at the end, I don’t think the CryENGINE 3 is going to be used anytime soon to make a sequel to Frogger.
Hmm, you could stress that the tree could have sufficed without any displacement and just more polygons, as displacement uses a whole lot more processing power on the GPU than a few more 100 polys would.
The toad was just a joke I think.
It all looked good though. The infinite particle effects and use of area lights especially.
Tesselation is a new way of improving smoothness as the camera gets closer.
The GPU adds extra smoothness by adding more polygons to the surface, keeping it looking rounder, etc.
In the past, stuff like leaves would have just been a texture map with a opacity map on a flat plane. Now, we are getting to the point where leaves, etc can be geometry with the use of instances, and the like.
1st post: I guess you could say that the tree with pixel mapping displacement showed more polygons. I did not that some of the branches near the stem seem more pronounced than when the pixel mapping displacement was off.
As for the toad: I kind of figured, but they wanted to show it off anyways.
2nd Post: The impression I got from the leaf was that they each have a unique texture being applied to them when looked up close. But if we’re showing off the technology that we can make more polygons visible when we look at plants – in a shooter game, of all places, and not a gardening game – then I guess that’s cool?