If there’s a camera-mounted light, its specular contribution would appear in the original image as well. And it’s not rim lighting either since it lits the character from behind/laterally.

That's barely any control. What I mean is things like smoothness, albedo color, intensity/color of rim lighting, specular highlight placement, etc. The demos so far seem to arbitrarily change those (lower temp lighting, different eye/lip albedo, additional highlights, etc)

True, the Starfield one looks best compared to the original. It doesn’t take much for Starfield characters to look better, though… :D

Well if you love mac and cheese, it may be unfathomable to you that I don’t. That’s ok. We all perceive things differently. I’m not worried about the technology, I’m worried that most games will end up having mac and cheese on them since I don’t like it- if that makes sense.

In other words, this seems to trade control for perceptual “realism”. I don’t want perfect results, but let me determine if I want her eyes to have a glint or not, and where it shoud be.

My point is that we already know how to do perfect specular highlights, and *very* good direct lighting. We can precisely control placement, color and intensity. So a system that overrides that without offering at least a similar level of control feels like a downgrade to me.

Why do their tunics look like plastic coats with dlss on? Why the overblown lighting and the extreme contrast? Don’t know man, it just looks wrong to me.

You’re missing the point: you can precisely control tesselation and displacement - exactly how much, where, and how. That’s where the “art” resides. People are (rightfully, imho) concerned about how controllable this thing is.

That's kind of a half-truth: I can radically alter the look of an asset using eg. deferred decals without modifying the asset itself. However, adding wrinkles is not just "lighting". At the very least, it's modifying surface properties (roughness, normals, etc).

In any case, Imho this shouldn't add specular highlight where there were none before. They're not like subsurface scattering or area light shadows that are expensive to even approximate, they're cheap and we've had a closed form solution for decades. No need to vibe-place them.

That would be specular occlusion, which is different from ambient (more directional, ambient light tends to be isotropic). But yeah, I get what you mean.

Don't know man. Part of my job involves writing shaders and lighting systems, and this looks quite off to me. It could boil down to subjective/personal preference of course, so let's agree to disagree. I just hope we get something more than an on/off switch.

The eye shader does have specular, the image you posted clearly shows it. AO only affects ambient lighting (as the name implies), not specular. A cloudy ambient sky would not yield a sharp specular highlight, but specular reflections.

Could also be that her origional eye shading model is just diffuse and no specular, but that would be weird since specular highlights from light sources are pretty much free.

No, I meant this one. The key light in this scene is placed on the right side. The specular in her eye suggests there's a light right in front of her and slightly above her head, but that's not there in the original.

Overall light temperature also drastically changes: everything’s noticeably colder with DLSS on. Local constrast is also way too high, like in fake HDR photos. I’m not sure if all of that will be controllable, but it really should imho.

Look at Grace’s eyes in the RE example: there’s a specular hightlight from the key light there that doesn’t exist in the original image, which is mostly backlit. It’s not like we can’t have specular lobes in our lighting models currently, so why add specular where there was none?

Yes, it’s *miles* better than the originals they showed. It no longer looks like they cranked local contrast sharpening to 200%.

Silhouette is not the same thing as shape. The volume of her facial features is completely different: more pronounced cheekbones, fuller lips, more prominent brows, thicker jaw, slighly thinner nasal bridge.

We are aware of what they say it does. The problem for me is that it doesn’t seem to do that. Shadows are added/removed, light sources have their color/position changed, etc. It simply doesn’t blend right, results look wrong to me. Plausible, but wrong.