The woman in the demo looked somewhat real; if this is real time and reproducible in games then it's a huge step forward.
Subsurface scattering is necessary for face / skin to work with light. You get good subsurface scattering in movies these days, but not really in video games yet. Its far too costly to make realistic skin renders.
Skin is partially transparent: you can see the veins, blood, and even muscles through people's skin. Blushing is simply the act of blood rushing to the face, its immediately visible and instantly causes a reddish hue to due the skin's transparency.
Simulating that outside of movie settings is going to take far more GPU power than what is available even in the next 5 years. We're still working on basic raytracing for video games, not even the advanced stuff yet.
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In effect, the "location" of where light is reflected on skin is "inside" the skin. Light penetrates into your skin and illuminates the stuff underneath. But traditional raytracing assumes that the reflection occurs on the "surface" of skin, resulting on a "waxy" look. The reflection is subtly in the wrong place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering
Without subsurface scattering, you get the "barbie doll" look, even in raytracing. "Barbie Doll" works fine for cartoons, but its always a killer for me personally when I'm playing video games.
EDIT: Example image with SSS (SubSurface Scattering): http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ahUMngIOPqU/T85dlEU9I7I/AAAAAAAAA5...
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Gems, Marble, etc. etc. are also partially translucent, and look awful in traditional video games. Subsurface Scattering makes these partially transparent rocks look more correct.
there's no telling what is actually real time and what is "baked".
Artistically, this demo is wonderful!
Technically, it's somewhere between "yawn" and game-changing, depending on how much of the lighting and animation is pre-baked. Are the deformations of her skin, clothing, the water, etc. being calculated in real time, or was all the hard stuff precalculated and baked in?
Reason why this matters is because the more dynamic this is, the closer we are to creating actual emergent/interactive experiences with this kind of technology, rather than just a way to render static cutscenes better.
But instead of resembling humans and therefore falling into the uncanny valley, they look like realistic lifesize action figures like the ones I played with as a kid. Like my childhood play scenes come to life.
(I'm not sure if the creators intentionally wanted the characters to look like action figures per se, but clearly they made the choice to go for a stylized rather than photorealistic look and I love what they achieved)
Dragonball FighterZ is nothing close to reality, but whatever they did to that game makes it look just like hand-drawn 2d anime.
Here is some random tournament footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XOBrRhgv0I
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Whatever Blue Sky did for the "Peanuts" 3d movie was utterly amazing too. It was the first major 3d movie I've seen that faithfully captured the comic style. Its not a video game, but its a similar "art-form translation" issue.
The Cyber Connect 2-developed games, mostly in the Naruto universe, have been making great progress along those lines for years. But DB FighterZ takes the cake.
One thing that's "special" about Capcom's recent SF games is that I find the art style unique!
FighterZ is an absolutely incredible technical artistic achievement, probably moreso than SF IV/V. I would call FighterZ the more impressive achievement.
On the other hand, FighterZ replicates an existing look, whereas SF IV/V veers into some new territory IMO so I give it credit there.
Agree, this is the first time ever, for a few seconds I have a question in my mind, was this really animated or some graphics overlay on actual human face. I think we are still far away, say at least another 10 years from technically possible replacing human actors. Not saying it will just the technicality of it.
But I do wish games be more cartoonish, or Animation, Cel Shading. The recent Naruto and Dragon Ball Z made those games as if they were OVA quality Animation. I am not sure if market wasn't buying it, or if those technique and level of quality are still hard / expensive to achieve.
Local TV stations with animation shows, much like local entertainment used to be, but animated instead of fully acted live.