I don't want to offend you, but I seriously doubt your words. Many people compress 4k images and make FHD out of them to improve the quality of renders. This primarily helps to get rid of noise that is clearly visible on a dark background.
Not offended, but I don't really understand what doubts do you have. I know that downscaling noisy 4K renders improves their quality and some of the game devs are rendering in 4K with low iteration count and then downscale resulting noisy images to FHD. "Compression" here is not the correct term, compression never improves quality. It's the downscaling with interpolation and denoise filters that helps to smooth out the noise.
But I was simply stating what Ocean has said himself. He has been rendering in 4K for several years and for the season 1 he downscaled 4K to FHD. Maybe he did it to denoise images initially, I don't really know. But with the new rendering rig he renders images in HQ 4K and is going to release the season 2 in original 4K. I'm not quoting him here word for word, but it's what he said and we have no reason to doubt that he will.
What exactly are you having doubts about here?
But the problem is that Ocean stopped working with light settings and all his renders became very dark.
This is definitely
not the case. On the contrary, he has made good progress creating this kind of low lighting ambience for many scenes
intentionally. This has been his
signature for this game from the very beginning if you haven't noticed it yet.
Originally this kind of architectural assets are filled with flood lights that creates little or no shadows to make every detail visible.
Would Ocean stop setting up scene lighting, this is what it would look like, as it looks in the works of many beginners.
Ocean, however, is creating artistic, photographic, cinematic scenes and quite a lot of them are dark with minimal and
carefully set lighting, helping the music to set the mood of these scenes.
As a photographer, I find his work mostly good and often excellent. Especially the lighting, selecting depth of focus and composition, the mood it creates as a whole.
This is
not some sloppy work. On the contrary, this is something that isn't easy to achieve and for photographers and 3D artists it takes time and effort to learn how to get this kind of results. Setting up this kind of lighting takes several test shots for a photographer and several test renders for a 3D artist with small changes in the scene lighting before you get what you want.
The
easiest would be to simply switch on the cam light and flood lights everywhere, the way most beginners tend to do. They do this because they don't know any better and it takes minimal effort.
Therefore, there was a lot of noise in his renders and the quality dropped significantly. This is clearly visible if you compare old and new chapters in season 1. This is also visible in his renders from the logs.
Did you actually open these season 2 sample images and zoomed in in an image viewer or are you talking about the parts of these images that are simply out of focus and therefore blurred?
What you can see there while zooming into pixels are some compression artifacts that F95 avif compressor or a jpg compressor somewhere else made there, but what I don't seem to be able to find there is
digital noise from noisy rendering.
You should know that unfortunately, we can not see any of the original 4K png renders on F95, since the site compresses everything to
low quality avif that cuts off shades of dark colors in dark areas (this is probably what you mentioned about the dark areas) and lowers the overall quality of images.
And artifacts that you can see in these images are likely created after downloading them from here, converting them to jpg and then uploading back to F95 again, re-compressing them into avif again and losing even more quality and likely creating some additional jpg compression artifacts.
The only way to post original renders here would be to zip them and post as attachments or host them somewhere else and link them. These images were not posted this way and we haven't seen them in original quality.
PS. Season 1 in-game renders are also heavily compressed jpg images, cutting FHD image sizes down to about 200 kilobytes. This is very low and visible everywhere in dark areas where instead of smooth gradients you can see blobs of different levels of dark colors. This is what any kind of lossy compression typically creates. Didn't see much, if any digital noise there, either. I just now checked them out again to be sure.
