With Ryse being a launch title and as such inherently a tech showcase for the next generation, we decided early on to tackle this area and put a stronger focus on the authenticity and readability of materials, hoping that this would bring us closer to the aesthetics of CG movies. Instead of adding a lot of fancy rendering features, we opted to spend most of our efforts on the consistency of the shading and lighting models, trying to unify them under a more physically based framework.
@Pro_Estel