Unreal Engine 4 shots that are unbelievably realistic

Skip the non-article and go straight to the original forum post link. More information and higher res images: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58385-Koola-s...

The problem with "realistic" graphics is that they only look that good in screenshots, and maybe a simple video. But now add a person in there. Then show them talking, walking on the sand and through the water. Is it still going to be realistic? Not likely. To the people who are saying we are getting over the uncanny valley, I think you are wrong. I think it only gets worse as the environments look more real but the physics and characters don't match. When everything looks fake it's easy for your brain to accept, when it looks real but doesn't behave like reality it gets weird.

This is all coming from someone who is still playing video games from several generations ago, so you can just ignore me if you want to.

Any of us reading this are old enough to see the progress of video games and the idea of "immersion" happening before our very eyes. We still have faint 8 bit memories and know this is all an illusion.

I really wonder what it's going to be like for people born in the next few years - entering a world where the games are as real as reality. It gives "Second Life" a whole new meaning.

Often the most impressive screenshots are the ones that look least impressive.

It's (comparatively) easy to have screenshots that look great if it's using a lot of assets with baked lighting. It's a testament to the designer's effort, but says very little about the engine.

Real-time ambient occlusion, radiosity, global illumination, refraction, etc... that's the kind of thing that is (technically) impressive in an engine, but so var very little of this (beautiful) Unreal/Unity/* demos actually deliver that. And that's a shame.

The craft deserves praise, but there's a distinction between asset creation praise (to the designer) and technical rendering praise (the engine).

For greater effect they should have added something more unreal to the images. Like a mech, an alien or the dopefish.

This is amazingly realistic.

I don't mean to take away from it needlessly or criticize gratuitously, but if you watch the video you can see the water turbulence is still unrealistic. I guess this is a very difficult problem for the unreal engineers to solve because the physics are hard.

So. Once the uncanny valley gets crossed, and we can successfully create synthetic images - and eventually videos - that purport to show something happening that never actually happened.... will pictures and videos no longer be valid evidence in court because they could be made synthetically in a video game engine?

Going further: could wars be started because of something someone made in a video game engine?

If I had a nickel for every pre-release game screenshot that looked realer than real ...

One reason these look so good is that they are making good use of depth of field. It isn't something typically used to this degree in games (it would be a hindrance to play with).

Beyond that, depth of field typically isn't carried through into reflections (you can focus your eyes on marble floor or you can focus on the reflection in the marble floor).

On the best looking beach shots, I don't know if the unreal engine blur the reflections to make the depth of field look better or (more likely) the artist saw the reflections as too sharp and softened them, which looks better because they would be affected by the depth of field.

Don't miss the one where the artist includes a avatar in there!

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

Is this live rendered, or is the lighting baked into the textures?

Wonder how long we will be stuck in a 99.X% era of realism. Our brains still picks up the small things and tips us off that something isn't right. Especially when things start to move about.

Not that it's not cool to be on this journey. Every one of these iteration towards realism gets me excited.

I haven't played any 3d video games in about 15 years. The video at the bottom of the page looked awesome, except for the edges of the water. I guess when they do Engine 5 they will finally change the name to 'Real Engine'.

More UE4 CGs from kooooola can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/99646627@N03/

I would like to see animations and the performance of the engine.

A question for those in-the-know about the state of VR: Could a home desktop render these scenes in high-enough resolution in RT for the upcoming headsets?

Nice, making realistic landscapes pictures is a feat, but through a human model in the mix and the "reality" is broken in half a second.

I have never seen very realistic fire in any games! Is there a substantial challenge in fire simulation vs say water?

I didn't find it in the article, but is this running real time and on what hardware?

So, is this the beginning of us coming up on the other side of the uncanny valley?

nice textures and lighting. Koola was killing it with the arch viz ue4 stuff too

Why don't any games look like this?

depth/focus is wrong and hurts my eyes, its like those pictures are forcing me to go cross-eye

So UE4 is capable of rending still images as good as a standard 3D image rendering program? That's nice but until these are rendered at game level FPS it's not very meaningful for games.