The graphics in the screen shots for Tera-online.cc look so crisp and amazing. How do they achieve this? Are they using some kind of 3rd party rendering software to view the armor models? Are there settings to achieve this level of detail in game or does one have to change settings in the graphics card itself?

Picture example

mine look close to that, get a good video card and crank settings

Get a good graphics card ~200 to 300 dollar range, Crank up settings to max in everything. :P

oh damn, nice. I have been thinking of getting a new card. Could you dudes post a screen of your graphics so I can see?

Here's my archer:

It's your graphics card, I just brought an Evga GTX460 a while back and it looks rediculously good.
esp with HDMII need a better monitor though.

What's funny is that when you turn the game down to it's lowest setting it looks like a polished N64 game. like the world just looks so fake and cartoonish but when you level up the graphics to the highest stats it's like a James Cameron film.

So yeah.

Lowest graphic stats = UWE BOLL
Highest graphic stats = James Cameron

The Unreal Engine scales very well, is what Like meant. :P

Little details are great too. For example, when my character breathes his chest and stomach move back and forth realistically.

Even better, my character currently has some leather armor coming half way up the right side of his cheek. When he turns his head left, it says. When he turns his head right, his chin bends the leather strip out of the way, instead of clips through it like you see so often with fancy pauldrons in video games.

Note: both these shots taken with graphics on high at a resolution of only 1366x768 (have a 720 lcd tv as my monitor)

http://localhostr.com/file/4YM3CSp/TERA_ScreenShot_20120429_114651.png

http://localhostr.com/file/kHAFyGu/TERA_ScreenShot_20120429_114800.png

These show the leather pauldron bending out of the way as the character turns his head.

They are rendering these in a modeling program not in the game.

I can get these visuals with my 7970, but since my monitor is 2560x1440 there's no way I'm going to take the performance hit of max AA on account of 'prettiness'.

Instead, I run everything max with 0 AA. It also helps that having a super high resolution reduces the overall need for AA in general (at least in newer games like Tera)...