Unreal Paris | Hacker News Reader

Unreal Paris

benoitdereau.com

272 pointsdavidst66 comments

Worth pointing out for HN that Epic should soon release a significant update to UE4 so you won't need to download UE source and emscripten (like you do now) and can just export to webGL, like you were packaging for Windows / Android / iOS etc. It's in QA right now. So soon you could wander around here instead of playing the video. Source is the UE YouTube channel on Thursdays.

If you're into creating stuff on a computer and feel like a break from programming, UE4 is great fun.

If you want to do archvis lighting like this, check out koola's scenes in the forums and the Berlin Apartment which is free in the marketplace.

Yes, you could walk around in it if you wanted to wait for 4gb of textures to download.

I'm happy they thought to make a youtube link.

Berlin Flat, which is comparable, is 600MB. And that's the full project, no mobile optimisation.

It's a shame they only uploaded it at 720p :(

And 60 fps.. that was almost painful to watch.

> painful to watch

How so?

Without any motion blur at all the jerkiness of panning in the video is tremendously apparent. If you're a gamer used to 60fps in this engine, this hurts the eyes in the same way listening to a symphony through laptop speakers hurts the ears.

UE4 is tons of fun indeed. Blueprints are surprisingly powerful.

Very cool. The one thing that stood out to me is the transition from screen-space to cubemap reflections. If I understand how these are typically implemented, screen-space reflections sample existing parts of the current frame. These are good for real-time reflections at shallow angles. Cubemap reflections are for the rest of the environment, when there is nothing "on screen" to sample from, and so you must resort to a pre-baked image of the environment to represent your reflection.

The baked reflections (THAT MIRROR!) upset me a lot more than they should have. I guess it's an uncanny valley effect.

Reflections aren't necessarily baked, it's equally likely that there's just no player model.

The joystick camera work distracts from an otherwise beautiful scene.

I think the purpose of the keyboard and mouse control is to underscore that it's "in-game", rather than a pre-rendered cutscene. That's what I got out of it, anyway.

Looks more like the camera was rotated with the keyboard, too, not the mouse.

They should totally add some jitter, uneven angles and speed transitions, and it will fool people.

exactly. It looks really well made (graphically), but the camera breaks it. If they fixed that, it really would fool people.

Agreed. How the camera stops and starts is what gives it away more than anything,

I was surprised that there was no depth-of-field effect. Everything is in focus all the time. Is that feature not available in UE4, or did they just skip it for this demo?

Skipped. He was trying to show detail, not fool people.

Definitely, a bit of hand-held camera motion can do wonders for realism, in the same way that an ultra-smooth camera can add an unreal feeling to a real scene. And modern 3D software suites often include excellent features for realistic camera motion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyoY4_iGFcM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNmmkqtiw-A

The camera and the crappy mirrors in the bathroom.

Now if only you could actually find that nice of an apartment in Paris (complete with a sensible bathroom layout) for under 10 million Euros.

The furniture looks more LA than Paris.

It's horrifying to me that such a beautiful piece of real-time rendering should be marred by herky-jerky camera movement. Please, people: life is too short to use gamepads to control first person games when you don't have to (i.e. on a desktop). Get a mouse+WASD going, crank up the mouse smoothing if it suits the mood of the piece (as it would here), and give us an elegant viewpoint to match the elegant environment.

Au contraire, I think the jerky movement was an excellent contrast to the beauty of the scene.

If the movement was too smooth, how could you tell between UE4 and some CGI applied to a video of a real appartment? I couldn't by just watching the video.

I was thinking it would be fun to capture real video while emulating the jerky camera of an FPS game.

I must say, that the sense of realism in that was really good! Allow me to just point out a few things that would help it get nearer to perfect! (This is good heart'ed feedback obviously!):

1. The bathroom door was somehow unnaturally bent backward, it really was the only thing that clicked instantly (even in 144p!) [Perhaps its just me :/ ]

2. Near the end of the video, the hallway was a bit too dark, global lights suddenly dimmed, the transition was unnatural (slightly ..), but it is not as noticeable as point no1.

3. From a artistic point of you, I would have preferred if the sofa in the second room (living room) would have had a slight shade of yellow (sun effect).. just a tiny bit to separate it from the bedroom scene. The reason I feel is perhaps because of nature of both rooms, Bedrooms have a blue sleepy appeal, living room are a bit cheerful, and since here the source of light was sun, it should have had that warm hue for the sense of realism to be even better. The other reason is perhaps because the set contains only 3-4 rooms plus lobby, that slight tone of diversity would have had a profound artistic uplift.

PS: Please take it as just feedback, and not as criticism. Dude! I can't even though half of that.. so salute to you and best of luck :)

Love from India ~

I've seen some beautiful UE4 screenshots and well-composed videos, but this was the first video I've seen of someone just walking through a scene with a controller, and it blew me away.

I love it. Ever since I saw a recreation of Fallingwater in the Half Life engine (1), I thought this would be the future of architectural design (or at least delivering design to clients). Is this becoming common now?

(1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqsk4WARk2I

As a guy who works in an Architectural office, I know people who are pushing for this, however in my office specifically we still have quite a few directors who still refuse to use Revit / Autocad and still design with pencil and paper, so there is very strong push-back.

I'm actually downloading UE4 as I type this, I'm going to have a play around with importing AutoCad maps and then demo to the Directors, in an effort to show them how visually impressive UE4 could be as opposed to dry meetings with clients showing them floor plans. It's quite a rare skill to be able to properly visualize projects in 3d from floor plans, and I've often seen clients going cross eyed in attempts to hold all the info in their head at once.

Nice work. The only thing that bugged me (a lot) was the range top: It looked like a flat image of a range, while everything else in the flat was textured to perfection.

Only other nitpick: How many copies of Photoshop magazine does that apartment dweller need to own? ;)

> Only other nitpick: How many copies of Photoshop magazine does that apartment dweller need to own? ;)

This is something you'll see in lots of virtual environments, there is only a limited number of objects of a certain class so you'll see lots of repetition. Personally, I blame the teapot.

Most of the substances are convincing, though the drapes around the last windowed room are weak and the reflective pot in the far corner of the room immediately prior is unnatural as you transition between them. At this point, I feel the unnatural motion is a greater stumbling block to believability than the vision, even despite the virtual eyeball type light/dark adjustments we see at the end when swinging between the final bright room at right and the darker doorway.

That's precious. What graphics card do you need to render that in real time?

Here's the "Berlin flat" mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AMY7I_eHjk (Great video, annoying voice-over.)

Another apartment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTt7AGIpV2I

None of these have a refrigerator, for some reason.

You don't need a refrigerator when your apartment is so darn cool.

In modern euro style kitchens the fridge is always built in to hide it. On the last link you can see the vertical door of the fridge. It is probably not US size.

So I am just starting to learn Unity. Should I switch to UE4 instead? I'm a single developer and I don't really need the fancy graphics so although this looks really impressive I'm not sure UE4 will really help me out if that's its biggest advantage. I'm making much more minimalistic 3D games.

I can recommend it. Downside is that you don't get C#. Upside is that you do get the engine source that you may freely modify, C++ and the surprisingly easy and powerful Blueprint.

If you insist on a scripting language I've heard there's adequate third party LUA integration now too.

It's so cheap, you can't afford not to at least give it a whirl to make up your mind yourself.

I have worked on large games in both. UE4 is a lot more powerful,but it certainly is a lot more complex too. If you want to start on a nice, functional indie game, go with Unity. I would recommend doing that purely because of the Unity Assets store - when you are building your own game and don't have money to hire an artist, the selection on that store is absolutely fantastic.

Blueprint system from UE4 is actually very similar to what's used on huge commercial games, the scripting is top-notch and overall UE4 is definitely a batter tool than Unity. But like I've said above, it's much more complex and I wouldn't recommend it for starters.

This made the rounds this AM on the Oculus reddit sub.

The demo is currently 404'ing if you try to download, developer posted that he's bug-fixing and updating tomorrow. (1) but of course a redditor posted a mirror (2)

And if you want to be truly stunned and still have an Oculus DK1 check out his first demo: https://share.oculus.com/app/redframe-environment-demo

Even with the DK1 screen door it's damn near photorealistic.

(1) http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147851

(2) https://mega.co.nz/#!nIJSmT6K!BRKQBDb0uB9V9Xbtz13c_3QZjokq_3...

Last I looked into this 6 months ago, there were a few things keeping me away from Unreal Engine and keeping me on Unity. I need to be able to deploy to the web and have the client execute there. And I definitely need to deploy to iOS and Android. Last I checked, the workflow for deploying to web was very wonky, not something to stake a business on for things that must deploy in summer 2015. And similarly, deploying to iOS and Android yielded really battery hungry apps that didn't feel best of breed. Are things better now?

Isn't Unity's publish to web feature timebombed with Chrome?

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/28/the-future-of-web-publis...

Not really. Android apps are still HUGE (~60MB for an empty project). I'm waiting for them to optimize for mobile before getting into it. About the HTML5 build, I read that they were waiting for a fix on Emscripten itself.

Here's a walk-through of the scene using an Oculus DK2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVL9yKwx_aY

Almost brought a tear to my eye. Only 20 years ago we were playing Super Mario Bros on the NES. It almost scares me that we really could be living in a virtual reality.

While a lot of people were still playing Super Mario Bros on the NES in 1995, the game was released in 1985 (30 years ago) and the console itself (or the Famicom, in Japan) was released in 1983.

To add to what famitsu said, 20 years ago was the waning years of the SNES and the early days of the PlayStation. Graphics may not have been photorealistic, but the beauty of e.g. Final Fantasy VI, or the early 3D of e.g. WipE'out", was several steps above Super Mario Bros.

Getting 404 on http://www.benoitdereau.com/UnrealParis_v1.1.rar

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8957361

Couldn't sit through the whole thing because of the weird camera movement. I assume they're trying to simulate an in-game style movement but it doesn't feel like a human operating the camera. Other than that, very impressive!

I thought the whole point was that it was an "in-game style" real-time rendering of somebody using keyboard/mouse to walk around inside the virtual environment. That's what makes it impressive and noteworthy.

Am I wrong about that? If it's a pre-rendered animation, it's certainly not state-of-the-art.

It's not pre-rendered, there is even a download option, though it doesn't work at the moment. Fortunately someone uploaded it to mega[1]

[1] https://mega.co.nz/#!nIJSmT6K!BRKQBDb0uB9V9Xbtz13c_3QZjokq_3...

The other big missing thing is movement. All the textures look so real, you'd expect to see the curtains rustle in the wind, the bedsheets wrinkle when touched, etc. But that's a whole other level of difficulty.

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Here is another Unreal Architecture "Loft complete project" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=admsmCmaL3Y

How long until this quality can be rendered inside a browser? It would be a game changer for real-estate sites.

Obviously a great job. Paris would have traffic noise instead of chirping birds. No coat rack by the front door.

Looks very realistic, and there is a bit of the "uncanny valey" at 1:40

WHOEVER IS FILMING HAS NO REFLECTION! This is amazing work though.

note that the appartment is very simplistic. flat surfaces, untextured walls etc. its pretty yes - but its a very specific kind of scene. UE4 outdoors or on more complex scenes still looks good - but not nearly as realistic. (albeit thats partially a horse power issue, too)

no shower?

This is all good, but when are games going to get AIs more advanced than just attacking you on sight and otherwise just standing around serving up pre-made speeches? While I think view distances can certainly get better, last console gen was otherwise adequate in the graphics department.

This is of course an impressive achievement, but I just view it as a curiosity.

Agreed. Interesting games were never about fancy or realistic graphics. Also, I'd bet all the fancy lighting and such in this scene is all pre-baked so the scene is totally static. Not the best state for interesting gameplay.

Though this sort of thing would be awesome for virtual tours of proposed buildings or faraway places and so on.

This is not a game. It is a virtual tour of a faraway (from me) place.

"Where'd everybody go? I'm out! Someone call for backup!"

Guess a comedic sample of the dialog by bad AI wasn't welcome? Or was that not how it came across?

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