HL2 models in the real world

From my understanding, someone has extracted the game files and using 3ds max to work and Vray to render. The models and textures are suppose to be originals from the game (with some file importing)

http://www.facepunchstudios.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21286&page=1&pp=20

How I wish games could look like this.

I don’t think any of us would dare go outside for a day after playing a game that looked like that…

Only problem right now is that realtime HDR lighting is really limited :

  • only correct when light comes from “far away” (sky, mountains, distant buildings etc)
  • only correct at one single place, for a single object.
    (in hl2 when you moved to a different cubemap the transition was harsh and ugly).

So in a game you would have to forget about dynamic lighting, strong shadows, and multiple objects near each other…

Still very nice in offline render !

There’s also a demo of the HDR features but this is DX9 and MS so I just can look at the pics.

link of the demo:
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/%7Emasa/rthdribl/index.html#Download

Originally posted by ZbuffeR:
[b]Only problem right now is that realtime HDR lighting is really limited :

  • only correct when light comes from “far away” (sky, mountains, distant buildings etc)
  • only correct at one single place, for a single object.
    (in hl2 when you moved to a different cubemap the transition was harsh and ugly).

So in a game you would have to forget about dynamic lighting, strong shadows, and multiple objects near each other…

Still very nice in offline render ![/b]
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t HDR just about working with a wider range of numbers. Then there is exposure control.
But the heart of those screenshots is probably a good radiosity renderer. It captures the fine lighting coming from the environment. It’s important to simulate the light bouncing from surface to surface. That gives a good ambient lighting to the models.

The artist says that he spent lots of time to adjust the lighting, from the brightest region to darkest, but that’s only to make the models fit into the environment. It’s tedious work but very convincing CGI!

my personal opinion is the HDR is of minor importance in those screenshots as V-man saiz “It’s important to simulate the light bouncing from surface to surface” that IMO is where 95% of the image quality comes from

zed is right, there’s confusion over terminology.

HDR is high dynamic range, it allows unclamped illumination and exposure compensation etc.

These renderings while possibly using that (it’s not actually clear if his light probes are truly HDR) also use light probes and a kind of full environmental illumination integration, that’s the major factor here.

For the possibility of HDR (or light probes) in multiple places using this kind of technique look at HL2s specular environmant maps, they seemed to approximate light probes for the specular term across areas by capturing multiple probes, and although it was only for their lighting specular term the probes were at least not limited to a single point approximation. And ofcourse nothing says you couldn’t render an HDR cubemap on the fly. Doing the per pixel lighting integration with occlusion is the hard part.

Hehe, I wanted to post quickly then of course everybody picked up that HDR was not precise enough to describe the technique :stuck_out_tongue:

Originally posted by dorbie:
these renderings while possibly using that (it’s not actually clear if his light probes are truly HDR) also use light probes and a kind of full environmental illumination integration, that’s the major factor here.
He says that he uses several shots of the probe at different exposures, so that would mean real HDR.

Don’t underestimate the usefulness of HDR in these cases : without it, the cube map would still be ok for specular, but not for diffuse lighting.

About the realtime “rthdribl” program, it does seem to use the HDR env cubemap not only for the specular but for the diffuse part too, look at the white sphere :
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/%7Emasa/rthdribl/Image/03.jpg

Of course it is much easier on a sphere than on more complex topology, but would still look good without needing expensive occlusion/global illumination.

OK fair enough it is HDR, but it’s a bit more than that too :slight_smile: