Which means something went wrong or removed for unknown purpose. Or you're really think AAA Gamedev company would forget about a simple thing as shadows ?
I think people expect too much shadows in normal daylight scenes, cause games often used those strong shadows / dont have real skylighting. However, you turn on a lamp in an already well-ilumniated area, the resulting shadow is actually quite weak, diffuse and almost invisible in real life.
In the scene specifically, you can see soft shadows below the car to the left. You also see some shadows on the car itself, likely from the overpass. Or illumination/shadow on the guy next to the pillar, and the pillar itself. I think this is just a scene that has diffuse sky illumination as the main light source, and the fire is not casting enough extra light in daylight to cause extra shadows like at night/in dark areas (there are light reflections on both the puddles, the chair, the cars and on the floor itself).
The shadows are far better visible in poorly illuminated areas (e.g. during before the deep dive, watch Bridgets shadow(s) while she moves around 0:22-0:28) and when there is a single strong pinpoint directional light-source (4:17 car in sunset, 4.19+ strong headlight of bike, 4:41 strong direct sun obfuscated by building elements).
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What I think is that an "AAA Gamedev" would not release an unfinished gameplay demo that clearly lacks such basic graphics elements like freakin SHADOWS.
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Nope. There is literally zero difference between the brightness of the part of the floor that's exposed to the fire's light and the part that has the light obscured by the chair. The ground is evenly-lit in its entirety.
The only things somewhat resembling shadows are the basic circular shadowmaps used for big objects like cars and what not. But that is not a shadow, it's a basic model that is there at all times, whether there is light or not.
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This type of weak 2005-era lighting should simply be non-existent in a game that (supposedly) features ray-tracing. Like, what the hell, CDPR?
You don't know what is on their mind. And again, something could have gone wrong.
People who attended E3 stated that this 15 minute video is a big ugly mess comparing to original 50 min gameplay.
https://www.gamersyde.com/video_cyberpunk_2077_deep_dive_video-44116_en.html
The Gamersyde vid does look better than the Youtube one, but same problems are still present.
The Gamersyde vid does look better than the Youtube one, but same problems are still present.
Light sources don't really cast shadows if the area is already hit by other sources. Only if an area is normally dark will the directional light source cast any discernable shadow. If you have enough global illumination from daylight / different light sources, you just get different illumination tone from the fire, but won't magically paint black lines on the floor...
Bugs and glitches are obviously still present, however watching Gamersyde version made me drop a few of my concerns about graphics quality. I believe they can iron technical things out by release, I'm more worried about design decisions behind HUD etc. but that's another discussion/thread.
I've seen YouTube ads for the game that use bits of the Deep Dive video but have better visual quality than the video itself. Which is why I'm not concerned about that particular aspect.
The area of the chair is actually outside the fire-illuminated ground asphalt region: the asphalt illumination (by color tone, not extra light) is strong till the end of the road line. Only highly reflective areas (=puddles, reflective car part) have strong fire reflactions outside that area (again change of tone, since global illumination is already there).
I have annotated the pic a bit. See the daylight reflections on the cars, and also on the chair itself. Yellow arrows for daylight. The scene is already in daylight illumination, so where would the shadows come from?
Click on image to get full resolution:
For comparison, real gasoline fire in diffuse daylight
Fire is a very weak light source compared to daylight, see this real car in partial shadow? The fire does almost nothing to lighten that shadow...
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That doesn't really change this fact:
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Lmao, exactly my point, yeah. Even stronger one. [...] Literally?
I wonder what kirell will have to say to this.
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And the thing that worries me the most is that there's only 7 months till the game's release. They should already have a nearly finished product, not work on the freaking graphics and shadows.
A year ago, after E3 2018, they did say the game was in reasonably early development.
Early development 1.5 year before the release? 2.5 years after (Witcher 3's release) starting to work on the project for real? Seriously?
[No labeling of others. -- SigilFey]
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I remember this being a big negative of Watch_Dogs when it launched. The game ended up having practically zero shadow casting lights, which was a stark downgrade from the "gameplay" trailers. The Deep Dive video showcased a lot of more advanced ray tracing lighting techniques like diffuse and emissive lights, so it's probably down to certain light rendering pipelines not being implemented yet which also explains the poor/absent lighting around flames
Not only around flames. Seems like there's generally a lack of dynamic lighting/shadows. 7 months before the release, after 3.5 years of hard work, in a demonstrative material.
That fire shot is really interesting. I can't even really work out the proper source of the fire lol the soft shadowing under the car looks like ambient occlusion to me. A post process effect.
The fire is clearly a source of light, but not a source of shadows. Notice how the light of the fire permeates through multiple barriers. It's a distinct orange color, so it's easy to identify. There are many areas where orange light should not exist, but it does.
Should fire be a source of dynamic shadows? Perhaps on high end hardware it already is, this shot could have been taken on current generation consoles. Perhaps raytracing will brute force a lot of this stuff.
Still it does make you wonder what's going on. That motorcycle shot is terrible. Rockstar also removed dynamic headlights in GTAV.
The fire is clearly a source of light, but not a source of shadows. Notice how the light of the fire permeates through multiple barriers. It's a distinct orange color, so it's easy to identify. There are many areas where orange light should not exist, but it does.
Should fire be a source of dynamic shadows? Perhaps on high end hardware it already is, this shot could have been taken on current generation consoles. Perhaps raytracing will brute force a lot of this stuff.
Still it does make you wonder what's going on. That motorcycle shot is terrible. Rockstar also removed dynamic headlights in GTAV.
No problem. The global lightning in 2008 is horrible, they seem to use one light source for the car (instead of two), and you would not get such a shadow while in broad daylight, certainly not on this surface. Its more fitting for a man on a dark stage, illuminated by a single spotlight.
I think you might be so used to old computer graphics with pinpoint light sources, you started to expect those stark shadows even in normal diffuse light as well.
Experiment: If you have a light globe - e.g. white glass or paper surrounding the lamp, stand directly in front of it and project onto a structured surface.
Pic:
Light source: Light globe with 806 lumen lamp, from behind me. Left: Shadow for hand 15 cm from cabinet. Right: Shadow for hand 30 cm from cabinet (starts to disappear). Head is 60 cm only away from both diffuse light source and cabinet - and doesn't cast a visible shadow. This is without daylight or other diffuse light sources to further dillute the shadow, btw.
Doesn't mean the illumination of Cyberpunk 2077 is 100% lifelike and correct, maybe the weights for different light sources are favoring global diffuse skylight too much. But still far closer to reality than what the quoted poster appears to think is a better shadow.
Lol, so first off, that view was under a bridge. Not much daylight to be had there.
Secondly, there's much stronger light coming from the motorcycle headlights, and there's literally zero shadows in front of the guy. What gives?
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Also this. Lol...
I would recommend to get to a highway and look below to see whether you are suddenly in complete darkness...^^
Which is why i said the weights for diffuse skylight might be too strong. But not actually sure about that, considering how weak shadows are in diffuse daylight.
Cannot see much details in your shadow pic comparison. Seems mostly single source direct sunlight, so they seem ok. Except the jungle one. Looks cool, but seems unrealistic under the lightning conditions. If you want a direct sunlight, no other lightsource with low diffuse from Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, see attachement.
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I kind of want to unify the debate here. The argument is NOT about direct illumination vs indirect illumination. There is no point debating what the shadows should look like, when there are none. Clearly the fire is a light source, multiple different materials in the scene are illuminated. Clearly the fire is NOT a source of shadow, there is not even the subtlest hint of any occlusion. It looks wrong.
It's not appropriate to talk about how the fire would look if simulated accurately, because this game is not doing that. This engine has limits, everything else is a point light with predictable shadowing, so that is what we expect from the fire. The fire is clearly not a complex light source in this scene. Neither are the headlights.
The only thing you could debate is that it's actually more realistic to not make the fire a shadow caster, because engine limitations would result in something even less realistic than no shadows. However, you cannot make that argument for the headlights, that is just terrible.
The only thing you could debate is that it's actually more realistic to not make the fire a shadow caster, because engine limitations would result in something even less realistic than no shadows. However, you cannot make that argument for the headlights, that is just terrible.