Poor Body Textures Outside of CAS

[minx]

Do you think the poor quality of skin texture is because of video card RAM?

Mine has 512MB of RAM, and the skin texture look bad in dark skin. There's an artifact on the skintone, something like skin disease, or import/exported multiple times from TS2 bodyshop.

Does anyone here has 1GB of video card RAM, do you still get artifact on the dark skintone?

I also download custom skintone and the quality is one step lower than EA original. I get artifact in bright skintone that I never get when using TS3 original skintone.

Like others have said, I think its just shadows. For whatever reason there is positively no difference between low and high shadow settings -- on high I still get the same pixelated, blocky edges. You can see an example of it on the shoulder of the sim in the screenshot I posted, as well as around her lips and nose. My video card has 2GB ram, so I doubt that has anything to do with it. Really sounds like a bug to me.. hopefully we can get a patch soon.

[OpiumGirl]

There is no separate option for adjusting shadows and light which has made me hesitant to use it.  Minx, you mention that there's no difference in quality. Do you mean if you turn the "lights and shadows" on the low setting?  I didn't notice much of a difference but,  I was expecting it to look worse so I turned it back up to high in the end.  Is it really not noticeable enough to bother with using high?

Another thing is that normal shadows look fine most of the time.  Shadows on the ground from objects are smooth and normal. That just makes it hard to believe it could be hardware related (RAM or otherwise).  Otherwise, it would probably go for all shadows and not just sim related ones.

[Chain_Reaction]

Turning up smooth edges smoothed out the shadows a bit for me but they were still blocky. I only went up to medium admittedly. Both shadows and smooth edges up just slowed the game to a crawl with my crappy card so back down both went.

[GnatGoSplat]

Shadows don't really get very blocky if you have smooth edges turned up to max.  However, it doesn't seem to help the lighting.

Here's a comparison of in-game lighting vs. pie menu face:


Indoor lighting is not too bad, but the outdoor lighting is way too harsh and at night, subtle color/shading is heavily darkened.

[minx]

Shadows don't really get very blocky if you have smooth edges turned up to max.  However, it doesn't seem to help the lighting.

Here's a comparison of in-game lighting vs. pie menu face:


Indoor lighting is not too bad, but the outdoor lighting is way too harsh and at night, subtle color/shading is heavily darkened.

Interesting. This might be a driver/video card issue then. I still have the blocky shadows with everything maxed. I'm running an ATI Radeon HD4870x2, latest drivers. I'll have to try it on my boyfriend's computer and see if theres a difference.

[OpiumGirl]

I'm curious, does anyone actually know what the difference between high quality and low quality lighting?  I mean, what is the difference in rendering that would cause one to be less taxing on the system than another?
The only thing I can think of is how the light reacts to objects and not the actual light and darkness.  So, if you looked around you at the room, it might not be too drastically different, but if you looked at a bunch of objects it may be quite noticeable.  Does anyone know if that's what it is, or if it's something else completely that makes the difference?

[awrevell]

I may well be wrong here (I am still learning how to program graphics).  However, if I understand correctly the reason low end systems display blocky shadows is the size of the area illuminated by each ray computation for the light.  The larger the area of effect for each computation the fewer computations needed for each frame and the blockier the shadow.  The smaller the area illuminated by each ray computation the more gpu cycles used each frame and the slower the system will run, however, the more realistic the shadow.   The system has to calculate each "ray" of light and what it collides with.  In low end systems the rays are larger to reduce the lag.  However, with the larger the ray the more likely it is that part of a ray will hit an object which the system then interprets as blocking the ray and the next object in line gets shadow instead of light, even though it should have been lit.  This is why object lighting on low end systems is sometimes wonky.