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Comment by Arubis | Hacker News Reader

This writeup is unsubtle in being a puff piece. The demoed tech is very impressive! Individual stills taken from the video are pretty convincing.

The motion version definitely still exhibits uncanny valley, though—lights that are too hard on flesh, tightness and sharpness where there should be softness. That I have to resort to hand-wavey descriptors is cool; they’re getting close! But crossing uncanny valley is HARD.

What this demo convinces me of is not that we’re there; we are not. Claiming that we are is disingenuous, and makes me distrust the claimant. But it makes apparent that we will get there. And that’s impressive.

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Speaking of motion, the motion of the characters is my biggest gripe. It feels like we are making tons of progress with lighting, textures, and faces, but characters still move with all the fluidity of a stick figure. Rotoscoping still beats the pants off CG here IMO.

I wonder if CG models the vertebrae yet? Tough to motion capture, but a huge part of why humans don't move like stick figures.

I think it's more a case that in this particular tech-demo the animation was a let down. Games have progressed greatly in animation with demos such as this [1] and [2] being good examples. I'll admit course however that animation is one of the larger difficulties when crossing the uncanny valley.

1. https://youtu.be/o-QLSjSSyVk?t=1297

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i78ds3bJFDE&t=2739s

There are some modern games with very impression animation, for example The Last of Us 2. That is a lot of work and the quality of animations varies a lot between games, even for AAA ones.

I’d argue the opposite - it’s been clear since the early aughts we’d get there. What’s impressive about this demo is specifically the leap it makes towards that. I wouldn’t have expected real-time graphics on consoles to be this close for another generation.

Careful, real time demos have been made before and have turned out to be anything but.

I d wait until it s in my hand and I touch the tv trying to open the window for Keanu before I get excited :D

Lots of people have played with those graphics in real time. There are some tricks behind it, like they put a whole games worth of asset weight into a tiny demo, but the demos they run are still fully playable.

It the demo video (play through) they say it was rendered in real time right at the beginning. Also down in the corner which console its being rendered on,shows up from time to time. so I’m assuming it’s not faked.

It looks quite good. Not reality but the cityscape is pretty close..

The fun part is the end where they show the some of the secret sauce of how it was rendered.

https://youtu.be/WU0gvPcc3jQ

Keep in mind that it’s running in real-time on a gaming console which is on the market for a year already. That makes it very impressive imo.

This is running on current generation consoles, imagine what the next generation will look like.

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