Beyond addresses this adeptly, giving a new level of nuance to the performances we see. Even on the games that have pushed back the barriers of character animation (for example, Uncharted and LA Noire), the eyes of the actors just haven't looked "right". Over and above that, perhaps the most outstanding achievement of the technology is the way that light reflects and glints in the eyes of the characters.
Beyond takes things to the next level: skin looks flexible, natural, translucent to a certain extent - moist, even. Despite some great work on skin shaders in titles like the Mass Effect games, there's always been a sense that the characters are dry, cold, unnatural stone-like figures.
A lot of important work is being done on bringing offline photo-realistic skin rendering techniques into real-time, but what we see in Beyond is the best practical realisation we've yet encountered.
As with all the images on this page, clicking on the thumbnails gives you the full image.Īway from the construction and animation of the characters, it's the lighting that truly makes the characters in Beyond literally shine. Quantic Dream promised to take performance capture to the next level after LA Noire and it's difficult to argue that the results are anything other than superb. Realisation of the characters in Beyond is exceptional: skin shaders, materials, lighting and animation is second-to-none. "Perhaps the most impressive thing about Beyond: Two Souls is how consistent every element of the presentation is: just about every effect is finished to an exceptionally high standard." Technological limits are evident, however: you'll note that all of the characters shown in the trailer have short hair realistic rendering of longer strands would simply be too much to handle with this level of fidelity. The character's beard has an authentic texture and substance to it to the point where you can almost pick out each individual strand of hair, with no discernible aliasing. It's not just about the poly count close-ups of the police lieutenant show exceptionally well-rendered hair - something that may not sound particularly important but is actually hugely challenging for any lifelike human rendering. Certainly in facial terms, the quality of the modelling is untouchable. Moving onto the definition of the characters themselves, we're seeing a new level of rich detail in the models. What Quantic Dream has achieved with its actors is simply sensational the firm has managed to move the quality of the performance capture seen in games like Uncharted to the next level of fidelity and has made good on its earlier promises of matching the facial mocap quality of LA Noire with more natural body animation. Two central pillars define the experience revealed thus far: characters and lighting. Everything has a profoundly natural look, virtually nothing sticks out or jars as overly artificial.
What impresses the most isn't just that the rendering technology is so impressive, it's that there's a uniformly high level of consistency in almost all aspects of the presentation. Taking him at his word, this represents a phenomenal technical achievement. Quantic Dream's David Cage assures us that everything we - and you - have seen with Beyond thus far is all real-time, running on PlayStation 3 hardware. Sony is inviting a higher level of scrutiny and it has confidence that Beyond: Two Souls will not fall short. Every pixel, every shader, every filter - it's all there in a pristine, precision format - and like Patrick Stewart in Extras, we can see everything.
When Sony delivers a video game trailer in Apple's ProRes intermediate format, it's great news for Digital Foundry, because we're seeing the game's visuals running in a virtually lossless state a quality level pretty much on par with the code running locally. Four gigabytes for 5.5 minutes of footage.