I just don’t get it - let’s spend so much money, development and hardware to render the most clean game possible, avoid aliasing and increase detail… And then let’s enable color distortion as if we were vieweing the game through a 1930’s cinema projector. Add in some film grain too! This saves me the effort of covering my monitor with dirt!
Make sure to make those options enabled by default on every game you release too!
I generally classify “style effects” into two categories.
Strictly inferior technology
These are things that had absolutely no upside to showing up in their media, they were entirely a relic of older and less perfected technology not being able to produce the picture we wanted yet.
There is no reason to have these unless you’re doing a flashback and want to intuitively imply how much older this scene is versus the other ones.
Stylistic technology
While 99% of the time as a photographer you’ll avoid these, there are situations where you intentionally utilize them to highlight something.
So in specific situations - as in, not enabled all the fucking time - they could be good in my video game, highlighting a specific very fast motion or a specific focus on a slice of depth. But instead, video games just turn them on or off, CEOs being too cheap to pay artists to go over the scenes one by one and utilize these effects to their full artistic potential.
A good example for well-used motion blur would be if you can find a speed powerup, and motion blur specifically enables on your character’s animations only when that is in use, and is completely absent otherwise. The sudden appearance of motion blur then highlights just how fast your character becomes with this powerup.
Depth of field is an incredibly important tool for photographers? Not sure why you think they try to avoid it 99% of the time (apart from the fact that you literally can’t avoid it, but I’m assuming you mean shallow DoF).
Eh yeah, I should have been more specific with that. It’s a natural element of any picture, but I meant that they “passive”, the uncontrolled, the non-intentional DoF, that’s to be avoided. DoF is a component of a good image, but intentionally so. But just like with motion blur, it’s usually applied “overall” in video games, not to highlight specific areas or elements of a scene.
Like motion blur, I can imagine plenty scenes where an intentionally placed and sparsely used DoF can really augment the impact of a scene. But one key component to that is that it has to be intentional, and we just don’t see that happen in video games sadly.
I hate motion blur so much. The only time I have ever seen it used properly is in Everspace 2, when you fly into a zone
Burnout Paradise for me.
They did a real good job on the NoS effect in the 2005 Need for Speed: Most Wanted, although it’s unrealistic but was cool as fuck.
There actually is a reason for both of those to be used in video game development
You really should do some research on practical applications of both of these features
And apparently do some research into how these are implemented.
Noise/Grain is used to add texture after using some sharp aliasing, it can subtly help blend things. Similarly aberration can help soften edges that get really sharp when rendering.
Irregardless of what they can practically be used for, they are implemented as simple features that users have the ability to control. Both features are just screen space shaders that take very little dev time and processing power. They are added as an extra little feature that’s simple not because the CEO is too cheap. It sounds like you are unhappy with a game you’ve played and seemingly blamed it on them adding a noise filter, so now any use of it is lazy.
Eh, grain doesn’t add a texture to anything. It’s a screen space effect that’s added to the image as a whole. And yeah sure it can mask sharp corners. And soft corners. And crisp textures. And soft textures. And small detail. That’s a given, considering it’s drawn right over them.
That’s like saying you could solve a wrong hue in a texture by enabling color blind mode by default. You could, but you’d probably - correctly - realize that you’re massively degrading the image quality for no good reason. Exactly what film grain and chromatic abberation do, mind you.
If that were always the case - and ideally they’d be off by default - then sure. Even better would be if they were used to highlight specific situations only, like when showing an old video ingame or looking through an old lens aparature or so.
No, I’m unhappy with any game that enables these all through. Doesn’t meant the games are overall bad. But they could be better, like if they didn’t have film grain or chromatic abberations. Simple.
Film grain is useful specifically in cases where you’re using lighting techniques that have to take a lot of expensive per-pixel samples. If you reduce the number of samples to save on performance, the value doesn’t converge and therefore you end up with random noise in your lighting output. Film grain is a compromise that adds random noise everywhere so that the noise in lighting is less noticeable, which looks even worse. Generally it’s combined with a sharpening filter that retains hard edges, but if overused it can definitely wash out texture detail.
Motion blur is useful in cases where you’re using temporal effects that gather screen-space data over several frames. These generally look great if the camera stays mostly still, but if the camera is moved a bunch you might end up with “ghosting” as the previous frames’ data is used for an incorrect camera position, and motion blur lets that data accumulate before the image is clear enough to spot issues.
Chromatic aberration is unlike those in that it’s not generally covering anything up, it is entirely an artistic effect. I think it can look pretty amazing if used subtly, but much like bloom it can very easily be overused and just get annoying instead. If you’re noticing the distinct RGB color banding at the edges it’s being used too much. But used right, it can give a lot of flair to bright lights, with a mild bit of hue shift at the edges.
I don’t like motion blur or film grain, I think they’re both crutches and look like piss, but to a dev team given limited resources to get a game out the door, they might be the crutch that makes the game shippable. Believe it or not, both of those effects look better than what they’re generally covering up. Games are all held together with duct tape and prayers under the hood.
I absolutely hate motion blur in games too. It’s usually way too strong and only gets in the way. Not to mention it tends to be a heavy-ish effect on lower-end hardware, and nobody optimizes shit for shit these days.