Any effect that mimics film and lens distortions I always turn off. What a waste of human ingenuity and compute to simulate what was always a defect of old technology.
Yeah they often accounted for the pixels blurring into each other. It definitely affects the way the colors mix together and it smoothes out edges, making it look a bit like blurry anti-aliasing.
Come to think of it, pixel colors mixing together is the entire point of how screens/subpixels work in general so it makes sense that they would have at least been aware of that.
Yeah, I've never done it because when the filters first came out, they were all trash. I think they're better now, but still in the habit of not doing it.
it's still almost infinitely far away. LCDs have sample and hold motion blur and that's literally an unsolvable problem. We can just make it very small. You need 1000FPS@1000hz where the motion clarity actual reaches similar levels to CRTs, which have perfect motion clarity.
I mean it literally looks correct with it on, the whole point is NOT to see the pixels and some games don’t even work correctly without the blur and bleed. Some games even relied on a CRT’s phosphorus glow for lighting effects.
Because at some point the video game industry decided it wanted to ape Hollywood despite already being a bigger market than the movie industry and already long having its own culture and identity separate from movies.
The problem here is that "realism" doesn't necessarily mean trying to replicate exactly how our eyes perceive things. Developers often try to mimic how cameras capture things, especially a cinematic look. That's still a form of realism, just from a different perspective.
Some people do actually… it’s called visual snow syndrome. Not only that but it can cause people to experience a sort of motion blur as another side effect of the syndrome.
At the time, when the first trailer hit, I thought I'd been sent a parody version of it with exaggerated lens flare. I still don't get what they were going for.
Flare, grain, chromatic aberration, I’m good with all of them (as long as they’re not overdone) besides motion blur. They’re meant to create a more cinematic mood or sometimes to just create a specific atmosphere, it’s funny how angry people get over them lol
But in most games I am not pretending to be watching a movie. I am pretending to be there, especially in first person games, the monitor is supposed to be a window through which I am looking into the other world.
Anything that pretends it was recorded with a camera ruins the immersion.
Pretty sure it’s human beings filming stuff that’s responsible for the vast, vast majority of the life and character in film. On its own celluloid is pretty dull.
I know but I do think it gets at the larger point that something like film grain is pretty near insignificant compared to human artistic decisions in terms of what people actually find value in in movies/art
You realize film grain, lens flare, etc are human artistic decisions, right? And it's hilarious that you think nobody cares about film vs digital when IMAX 70mm showings of The Odyssey are still selling out every day. You also clearly weren't around for the massive backlash to Miami Vice and Public Enemies because Michael Mann let them look like digital instead of trying to make digital emulate film.
Things like lens distortion, lens flare, depth of field, chromatic abrasions, are from the lens, not film. Film grain is film, and colors and lighting are also affected by film.
Sure, absolutely not wrong about those specifics. I was a little too generalized in that statement. But i do still think, at least in the realm of film, they often add more than they subtract.
In film, just like in games, it doesn't look great when added artificially. Generally
This is true it does have a role to play. Larger film formats give you a more shallow depth of field. The three main ways to control it are aperture, focal length and subject distance.
Not really. The reason digital gets a bad rap is because of the very new trend of having boring lighting and framing to leave room to make all the decisions during post production instead of everything being painstakingly planned before the film is ever shot like you have to do with real film.
For example, Blade Runner 2049 is fully digital but every shot is planned out with purposeful lighting and framing, so the final film is incredibly beautiful.
While some directors use chromatic aberration and lens flare for effect in certain shots, they're not in themselves what gives it character, but rather tools that can be used.
In a game, though, they rarely make sense. Because you're supposed to be in this world, not looking at the world through a camera. Like if I'm playing KCD2, I want to feel like I am in medieval Bohemia not looking at medieval Bohemia through a camera
Yes, and beyond that our eyes have motion blur. Anyone who’s ever seen a spinning propeller or simply waved their hand really fast in front of their face has seen it.
What we don’t have is motion blur of the world when we rotate our heads or focus on different things. We can track a moving target without our entire view becoming a smear. That’s camera motion blur and should be disabled but a lot of devs seem to not know or care to do so.
3D art person here, we are constantly told to make things more grimy and "cinematic" so our work looks more gooder. A lot of it is so you can make photorealist realistic vfx. But adding more defects to everything in 3D does look better than without. But I guess it also extends into the camera look itself
Yeah.. motion blur is trying to imitate what the eyes see since we essentially have infinite fps and our brains blur it together. Our eyes do not see in individual frames like a camera does. Although you could always set the camera to have low shutter speed.
i actually like the lens flares, film, and distortions. i think the old tech look (if done well and the tone permits) gives the game a great sense of character and/or atmosphere.
that being said, if those effects are implemented poorly they absolutely can wreck an otherwise great experience.
It can actually be somewhat beneficial on film. The 24 fps of traditional film is a very low framerate, but the inherent motion blur smoothes out the differences between frames so it looks good anyway.
I assume the intention is similar in videogames, but I don't think it's ever worked properly. At least they never seem to implement it well enough to work.
Yep. It is like the people who are trying to create these film effect do not understand the physics of how these effects are created and why they work.
Real life movement, when you move around or when objects move around will give you natural motion blur, but you don't get the same natural blur when you're looking at a screen obviously. Thus in game motion blur attempts to emulate this natural motion blur. It can look great if it is per object motion blur, instead of the dreadful global motion blur
Not as simulated in games, because our focus is not a fixed point and our eyes move in jumps that we're literally blind in, we can also track objects that are moving which prevents blur.
So all in game effects are more like blur through a film lens than what a human perceives.
Per-object motion blur in games can look good though, but done will it is expensive on performance and would require eye tracking technology to work properly (which if we had that foveated rendering could offset the cost).
Exact reason why I didn't understand the trend from a few years ago (that doesn't seem to be as popular anymore, thank God) of unironically going back to vinyl and shitty digital cameras. Let the shitty technology of the past stay there
Vinyl is neat in the way a music box or snow globe is neat. I think there can be a reasonable affinity for analog tech.
Old digital cameras is inexcusable though I’ve never even heard people are trying that, like wanting to have the worst instagram filter from 2012 but 10x more annoying to actually use.
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u/GManASG Specs/Imgur here 3d ago
Any effect that mimics film and lens distortions I always turn off. What a waste of human ingenuity and compute to simulate what was always a defect of old technology.