Adam
unity3d.com
unity3d.com
I still found the motion capture and the crisp rendering quite impressive, though.
For videogames/vr to break the photorealistic barrier, there needs to be some order of magnitude reduction in art development costs for these experiences to be affordable. Not all videogames can be star wars battlefront, where probably $150M ($330M overall cost to develop and market [1]) was spent making the best damn textures videogames have ever seen, but produced a simple, limited game.
Photorealism is a dead end for videogames unless art costs come down.
[1] http://fortune.com/2015/12/30/star-wars-video-game-sales/
http://blog.leapmotion.com/vr-transform-world-3d-animation/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a_M9VsZ6Lk
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-05/08/animating-in-...
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/4412zk/til_s...
Both the topic: 'more spent on marketing than production' and the first post 'numbers can't be trusted because of creative accounting practices'. I wouldn't be surprised if this applied to the game studios, too.
Anyway, you're essentially stating two things. One is that art students have been able to produce this level of quality for their show-reels for ages. If students can do it, it can't be all that expensive. So why did we not see it in games before, but only show-reels? Not because these students or studios couldn't translate a show-reel to an interactive show-reel (i.e., a game). Rather more likely, because there's no market for it because nobody has the money for the hardware to run these things real-time. Now we're seeing this thing render on real-time on consumer hardware that might in 5 years be affordable to mainstream audiences.
Seems to me the biggest barrier was there's no market because there's no cheap hardware that can run high-quality in real-time. Of course cost of art is a factor, a big one, but I don't think it's been the primary limiting factor.
Lastly, the cost of art at any given quality level has come down in a big way. It's offset by increasing demands. But try to buy some assets of 2011 type quality, it's cheap, while 5 years ago you'd have had to hire a big team to deliver that. Once you approach realism, the amount of improvements to quality diminish and you get a build up of cheap assets (textures, template models etc) that can be tweaked and used and bought cheaply. Assets from 5-10 years ago are like cheap commodities already, tomorrow's assets are expensive, but at some point there's a limit to quality improvements and just like every other industry (e.g. smartphones in 2016) you see commoditisation and the cost come down.
Right now, the vast majority of games have characters with fixed walk cycles that are used no matter the terrain. Realistic CG needs to have a walk cycle that captures the subtle changes in gait that corresponds to a given surface. I know people have been doing research on adaptive walk cycle, but afaik it has yet to hit production games.
For generating art, there is hope, as procedurally generated games look fantastic (No Man's Sky), but have yet to expand beyond sci-fi games, or into games with story and specific art styles.
Maybe reusing assets is the way forward, but I'm skeptical. Reusing the visuals just means more army guys fighting in sandy deserts crouching behind crates. Maybe the Storm Trooper models for battlefront really are as good as they get. But even then, I think aesthetically realism can lead to a dead end. The most visually impressive game I've played, other than Star Wars Battlefront is The Witness, which is simple in the CG sense, but has some really tremendous visual aesthetic moments that are something I've never seen done in a game. For me, the stylized look and the artistic/game opportunities that enabled were far more exciting than Battlefront's perfect rocks.
One point to note - LOTR Two Towers was released in 2002. 14 years ago.
Yeah, I feel old too.
What are you talking about? The video says "rendered in REAL TIME" so obviously this is working on an XBox with full motion control.
Realistic visuals needs realistic walk cycle. But since realistic walking isn't a perfect stable cycle (it is disturbed by head/hand motions, surface variations, etc), there can be no realistic walk cycle because real walking isn't a cycle. AFAIK current videogame animation all involves walk cycles. Realism at this level of detail needs some new form of animation, not the love and care of a person that is so present in this demo.
I wouldn't describe the usage as trivial, but it's in line with other toolsets that deal with different issues.
That's not really true at all. It comes down to man-hours and how much time it takes the artist to do the work. A student isn't incurring that cost when they do work for themselves, but a company would be.
Have you seen modern texturing pipelines? It's most certainly not the same process as 10 years ago. Have a look at this procedural wood flooring generator, built in Substance Designer's node-based texture workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc5Pdcbjr0U
Same for animation. Doing it by hand won't get you the quality of results that you need for photorealism, so we're bringing in new processes that require a bunch of equipment, a bunch of time, and probably multiple crew members. Used to be you'd make a walk cycle by hand, now it's mocap. With the same old processes, there's no way Star Wars: Battlefront would have been able to make its content in the volume it needed, even with a large art budget.
Now that we know how to create these assets on at least a somewhat feasible budget (compared to armies of artists manually doing 8K textures in Photoshop), the next step will be taking this high-end work intensive stuff and bringing it down to the point where we can crank out similar quality results with lower time investment. It'll take a couple more years, but there's definitely a demand for it.
Releasing today: Substance Painter 2 https://youtu.be/1pIoA34MVBA?t=26 (warning - annoying soundtrack)
A couple of really cool things about the Substance texturing approach:
Feed it a 3D model and generate maps of its inside corners and outside edges, which can be used to mask layers for dirt accumulation and edge wear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTYia53801k
Squish multiple simple generators/effects together to make really interesting shapes: http://bradfolio.com/art/substance/substance-red-rock-cliff-...
No reference handy, but you can expose parameters like "How much rust" or "color of scattered accent bricks" and make the textures be configurable in-engine. Really streamlines the process if the person building out a level in the game can adjust those sorts of features without going back to the texture artist every time.
There are a lot of neat examples in here: http://polycount.com/discussion/155851/weekly-substance-chal...
EDIT: Here's a cool one http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2384431/#Comment_238... You can feed it an arbitrary mask to control the color pattern. Note how it's not just painting the color over the bricks, it actually makes brick seams following the edges. And if I had to guess, the dirt/sand accumulation is exposed as a configurable parameter.
What's most interesting to me, though, is the Unity logo at the end, which I assume must be showing off engine capabilities as well. It makes heavy use of sub-surface scattering, which is of critical importance to lifelike skin and faces.
I mean, anyone can come up with some convoluted ideas that explain why the above does make sense... like the robot breaths because there's an organic brain in there that needs oxygen, they moan because it's still a human brain and the machine is sending his brain an overload of sensory data that is hard to deal with, the robot stumbles because his brain is new to interfacing with its machine parts etc. But I personally didn't like it and kinda roll my eyes when they go overboard with the anthropomorphism. Still it was hella cool, hope the full version will explain away my doubts neatly :)
To be clear though, I think your opinion on this is every bit as valid as mine, I just really enjoy discussing film.
And I suppose it's worth pointing out that creating all the tooling to put this together is just as impressive as a lot of the more obvious aspects. It's a giant content creation pipeline coming together. I expect these demos from Epic, not Unity. They're stepping up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN3PsU_iA80&t=37m50s
It's a standalone PC project using DX11.
Cloth and cables physics simulation is pre-baked, lighting is dynamic.
Curiously I can still see the proper thumbnails when hovering timeline at the original timestamp.
Very similar tubes removal process :)
I don’t know whether Unity is innately bad, or whether frameworks in general just tend to enable bad code.
Would love to hear more from people who know more; right now I associate Unity with people starting out in games rather than a platform people continue to use after they hone their skills.
In most other respects, it's an acceptable game engine. It's been used for a ton of big professional games you've probably played without even being aware:
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-...
I don't see this as a bad thing, either. The tradeoff, from the hobbyist's point of view, is that if you decide to use Unreal Engine, for example, your cost of learning the tech is so high you're unlikely to ever finish your game.
Source: I'm a (professional) game developer and we've used Unity for multiple projects.
There are plenty of awesome games done in Unity which you probably didn't realize they were done with Unity.
...on what hardware?
Still impressive though...
Processor: Octacore Intel Core i7 6th Generation GPU: Nvidia GeForce Titan X (3x SLI)
Was the commenter making it up.
Someone should ask though given another poster's comment below about the GDC demo of the editor where they were using a GTX 980.
"The Adam demo runs in 1440p at 30fps on a GTX 980, by the way :) See it running real-time at the Unity booth at GDC!"
https://twitter.com/robertcupisz/status/710160351568986112
So it's very likely that the YouTube video was rendered with far better hardware.
"I was using GTX 980, which runs it at 1440 in the editor with perf to spare"
The YouTube chrome is hidden, but the video must be in 4K; it looked like native resolution on my Retina MacBook Pro.
They’re also doing a (whitewashed) live-action version of some amalgamation of the movie and TV show, so might as well watch the original (1.0) movie and anime, before Hollywood ruins them for you.
But anyway I don't want to be overly critical, after all this is probably just an internal demo, they thought would be cool to share with the public.
Edit: Apparently they don't really have the web player anymore. Still confusing. Was actually hoping that for once I'd be proved wrong about WebGL / encriptem.
for current state of the art realistic characters and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRqMbHgBIyY
for current state of the art real-time architectural viz.
Instead of a typical movie rendering which can take a long time for just a single frame. Like toy story "Our original toy story frames were averaging four hours, which is 240 minutes" - https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-render-...
A tweet above says it was on a GTX 980 in 1440
nvm i scrolled down lol
As opposed to a recording of a 1 minute video that took a few hours to render on industry hardware.
They ran it on a pretty beefy consumer PC that would cost thousands of dollars, definitely not feasible for ordinary gamers. Point is, it ran real-time on consumer hardware. It's sort of a showcase for what might become mainstream in the future, and what is already possible if you're the type of consumer who buys graphics cards that cost $1k for gaming.
Surely not
mparlane explained it nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294300
PS: Hi Paul, hope all is well :-)
Very well thanks. Doing any conferences this year?
Why does he try to take off the "mask"? How can he identify that it's not a part of his "body"?
He's still in bit of a shock of waking up not in his own body. I guess pulling was instinctive reaction upon seeing it and finding a (painless) hole in the side of his face.
What's that with the downvotes? A robot doesn't need oxygen to fuel chemical reactions.
This is still polygonal rendering but by real time they mean that it was rendered 1:1 live on a cpu.
Most games trailers actually render at some fraction of real time (12:1) (and often up-res everything) to a series of files which are turned into the actual trailer.
Also this is running on a pretty beastly machine. So realtime for them might be 12:1 time ratio on your machine at the same quality. Or much lower res and real time.
There's this, there was an Apache Unity thing that was a Java implementation. There's an Ubuntu thing. Who knows how many others.