Lost Coast is out

[Spare-Flair]

You may be correct for the rest of the scene, but for the models? And why would you want it to look like a rendered fisherman? Isn't the point to make it NOT look like a rendered fisherman? Your comment about the painting is very vague.

Human skin has a little more oily sheen to it. It's a bit unfair using the fat guy from F.E.A.R. since he's a total charicature of a human being. The fisherman's skin just look too dry, out of place, like a texture pasted on to me that's far too grainy. A slight bit of blurring and a background that's slightly outside the field of focus would go a long way.

If you look at the HL2 pics, especially the scientist, don't they look more like matte paintings? I prefer the rendered look. It's hard to explain.

 

[Attean]

Human skin has a little more oily sheen to it. It's a bit unfair using the fat guy from F.E.A.R. since he's a total charicature of a human being. The fisherman's skin just look too dry, out of place, like a texture pasted on to me that's far too grainy. A slight bit of blurring and a background that's slightly outside the field of focus would go a long way.

If you look at the HL2 pics, especially the scientist, don't they look more like matte paintings? I prefer the rendered look. It's hard to explain.

Some things are hard to explain, other things are your opinion, which is not correct. Whether or not the environments were blurred correctly is not pertinent to modeling a good character or the texturing, charicature or not.

 

[Dr. X]

Human skin has a little more oily sheen to it. It's a bit unfair using the fat guy from F.E.A.R. since he's a total charicature of a human being. The fisherman's skin just look too dry, out of place, like a texture pasted on to me that's far too grainy. A slight bit of blurring and a background that's slightly outside the field of focus would go a long way.

If you look at the HL2 pics, especially the scientist, don't they look more like matte paintings? I prefer the rendered look. It's hard to explain.

Skin can't be dry? Not all people are oily and glisten in the sun. In fact, many people work specfically to not look like they because they think it's unattractive. And detail in a texture does not constitute "graininess." Maybe you have poor vision in real life because when I look at someone's face up close it's not all blury, I can see pores and stubble and whatnot.

 

[name]

I don't know if it is fair to compare the F.E.A.R./Doom3/Quake 4 character models to the Lost Coast fisherman because the fisherman is far more detailed than a standard HL2 model and uses many more polygons.

That being said, I think the models in the actual Half Life 2 game are still superior looking human characters. The other games' characters remind me of early computer animation where models were "too perfect" to look real (not enough details and imperfections). This perfection is good for inanimate objects or toys or whatever, but bad for rendering us imperfect humans. The skin on the F.E.A.R. characters is too uniformly smooth and lacking in contours around the mouth, eyes, nose, etc. The contours that are present on the F.E.A.R. characters are more jagged and obviously polygonal than the ones in HL2. The eyes, which are one of the most significant elements in pulling off a realistic looking character, are also much nicer in HL2. They are too simple in F.E.A.R. and the coloring is too bright. As has already been mentioned, the facial animation in HL2 is also excellent and is really one of the standards for this type of thing.

This has nothing to do with shiny rock textures and these opinions only apply to human characters, not the game world they reside in. If you "prefer" one game's overall look to the other, that is a different argument; if you want to see realism in human character design, HL2 is your choice. I think Valve has the obvious edge in terms of artistic talent. Attean's post with the comparison pics (one page back) really drives it home, even if he didn't go out of his way to make F.E.A.R. look good...

 

[Spare-Flair]

Anyway, none of it matters because last night, Lost Coast updated itself and now it doesn't run anymore. It keeps crashing after a few seconds of playing the game.

Damnit Valve, did you have to break my game with the update?

 

[tornadotsunamilife]

Anyway, none of it matters because last night, Lost Coast updated itself and now it doesn't run anymore. It keeps crashing after a few seconds of playing the game.

Damnit Valve, did you have to break my game with the update?

They have a knack of doing things like that...