Well, then the naysayers were right in saying FM2 was really just FM1.5. After all, the 360 is supposedly so much easier to program and get comparable examples on, right?
And this is the thing. I have pics from a game which is a full two generations leap over GT4, and yet, I prefer many of the GT4 pics. I prefer the GT4 car models. There aren't issues with them, such as the missing nose canard on the right side when you give the Ford GT in any Forza a nose aero upgrade.
Okay, this still doesn't answer what you quoted, which is a habit of your's. The pictures you used aren't two generations on from GT4. It's one. And even then, like I said, it is a more detailed in both polygons and texture quality. Which shouldn't be surprising considering it's on a new-gen system... but Standards in GT5 have so far just been shown as carry-over assets from GT4. Take pictures of the C5R in Photomode and it looks the same as the one shown in GT5 so far, with exception to the new lighting. It's still just as jaggy, the textures are just as blurry.
And you bring up a missing nose canard? Yeah, I suppose that's a problem. GT definitely doesn't have those kinds of issues when I'm modifying body parts... oh, wait.
I was getting a bit frustrated with FM2 when my photos weren't coming out as good as I wanted, and I hadn't spent as much time in GT4's Photo Mode. Some were great, but many... well, weren't. And I have some pretty homely FM2 images. Getting back into GT4's Photo Mode was quite a revelation after the fist fights I had with FM3's version, which is mostly better. But not completely. And this is the "modern" game.
I won't argue with the ease of use of GT4's Photomode. That is something I'm hoping isn't tampered with too much, and I pray PD isn't dumb enough to force us to use this new "walk around" feature in GT5. I want a free-moving camera, so I can move it as quickly as possible to where I need to take pictures.
Because the Premium cars in GT5 look more real than real sometimes.
...and? That's why plenty of us use Photoshop, to get GT4 images looking like something more realistic, less like a 6 year old game
.
Just browsing the galleries, that hasn't been my experience to the admittedly brief exposure. Mostly I saw wonderful examples of creative PS effects.
No specific examples, just a vague comment? There's a few out-there artistic experiments, but a lot of PS work is mostly to fix errors within GT4's engine.
I estimate more than a year for the whole project, but then I'm guessing as much as you are. And, I take it you aren't impressed with Rome or Madrid, or the Nurburgring complex? I certainly am.
I can finally link this post to the topic at hand!
Short answer: no, I'm not that impressed really.
Long answer: Are they city tracks, and Premium cars, utterly outstanding from a modeller's point of view? Absolutely. Would those city tracks be half as impressive with only a year's work? No. The time spent on assets does not correlate on a 1:1 scale with quality. It's the whole diminishing returns thing I keep mentioning. I don't like that the general message we've been getting from PD lately has been all about how much longer it takes them to design anything than any other company out there. This game shouldn't be a renderer's wetdream, things should be more balanced out. Instead of spending 6 months modelling one 500K model, spend 3 months and work with a lower count. We'd end up with a lot more cars all on one homogenous level of quality and features.
The fact that they felt it neccessary to model individual stitching on the back seats of cars instead of minimizing the amount of last-gen, outdated carry-over assets, makes me question exactly what the priorities are. Sure, PD has bragging rights over every other racing game out there with the quality of the Premium models, but they also have a huge target for (deserved) criticism over porting a 6 year old PS2 game's car lineup into the game.
And on a more personal level: city tracks are incredibly boring to me anyways. They take more time to model accurately with all their surroundings than a typical purpose-built race track, and are very rarely as fun to drive. So yeah, so far the only track that's really excited me is the combined Nurb complex.
Then you're going to have to throw out a lot of real world photographs with these.
...as any decent photographer would
.
...and being a product of PD? Those comparison picks show a sharper textured, higher quality model alright. It's just not from Gran Turismo. Once I get home from work I can even pick out which areas I'm talking about specifically. For the purpose of comparison in this thread, which I hope is still acceptable in here since the last two pages turned into a bunch of awful.
Yes, it's pretty obvious that the Standard cars don't match the quality of the Premiums. They're rougher, lower poly, they supposedly all have textures for headlights (you guys are wrong on that). But tell us that they shouldn't even be in GT5 and watch our claws come out. You can say I'm crazy for wanting to Photo Mode a single one of them. But I can hardly wait. I want to drive them. I want to race them. Side by side with Premiums even. And snapping pics all the way.
In my defense, I never said all cars have textured headlights. Some do (the first-gen Camaro, a lot of older cars actually), but yeah, it's easy enough to load up GT4 and find a fair chunk of cars with modeled headlights. Very primitively modelled compared to modern standards, though.
And I think I've said I'll be driving the Standards too. But how they have been presented to us by PD is what bothers me. Others can say that they knew all along all they want (the joys of hindsight), but the fact is, when those details on the Japanese site got leaked, nobody knew exactly what it could mean. Some people (correctly) guessed it meant recycled assets, but it was just a guess. And considering the delay after that, nobody seriously
expected the majority of the car lineup to be that.
Absolute rubbish.
Many interviews/articles that I have seen and read suggest it was whilst PD were developing GT5 that they realised they wouldn't have enough time to model 1000 premium cars.
Sorry but their are far too many experts on this thread. I always find that know it all's tend to know sod all!
...as soon as they realized they were taking 6 months to do a single car probably should've been the point they realized, no?
So yes, very, very early on they probably made the decision to recycle assets. Instead of perhaps planning on giving one uniform level of quality to all their models, the modellers went crazy with the details and cars have just taken far, far too long to model without us getting far less cars than GT4. Though apparently they made the right decision since so many people are more concerned with quantity...
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I still wouldn't mind seeing some specific comparisons about how GT5 Standards (
as we have seen them so far) are "comparable" to current-gen models from other games, or even more laughably, "better". I'm not one of the crazies saying they'll avoid the cars, because there are too many I enjoyed in GT4 that I'll want to drive again, but speaking strictly of their quality as car models, they are not in the same league as modern competitors.
Baby!!! 
