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Meh, these guys are still stuck in the uncanny valley. Objects are often absolutely beautiful and realistic, but interactions between objects are ridiculous. S

by dash2 5y ago

Meh, these guys are still stuck in the uncanny valley. Objects are often absolutely beautiful and realistic, but interactions between objects are ridiculous. Some of this is probably just "not enough processing power", but it is also due to where the rendering bumps up against the primitive controls. For example, you have a very realistic human. But then the human walks against an object, and she does this standard video game 0 mph duck-walk. Part of the problem here is that real humans don't bash into walls. So how do you realistically represent that, when in fact it's just Johnny pressing forward on his controller?

gentleman11 5y ago
A lot of newer, fancier cg in movies and games is deep in the uncanny valley for me. I can’t watch/play for more than 15 minutes without realizing I’m in a game that doesn’t look right, it’s distracting. I suppose the tech can’t get across the valley without first passing through it
- nix23 5y ago
  No they are just getting cheaper with their CGI...not better, i would bet that if someone would invest the money and time as they did in the 90-00 we would be absolutely astonished.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - gmadsen 5y ago
    what? Avatar is the most money ever spent making a film in history..
- forrestthewoods 5y ago
  > A lot of newer, fancier cg in movies and games is deep in the uncanny valley for me. There's a lot of uncanny CGI in modern movies. There's also a lot of CGI that is so perfectly realistic you have no idea it isn't real. This is usually more environmental and less characters. If the tech gets past the uncanny valley then you'll never know. This is basically true by definition. :)
  - dwighttk 5y ago
    > If the tech gets past the uncanny valley then you'll never know. This is basically true by definition. No they’ll tell me (And I’ll probably not agree, but if I do they’re still going to tell me, trust me they haven’t stopped telling me)
Aeolos 5y ago
Neural networks may be the solution to character-world interactions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlndIQHtiFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlndIQHtiFw
muti 5y ago
Interactions can be really hard to get right, see doors [1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEWsLdLmcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEWsLdLmcc
- pugworthy 5y ago
  I quite like door interactions in VR - specifically Half-Life: Alyx
Pulcinella 5y ago
Yeah having actually played it you run into this immediately. NPC cars will deform in a crash, but a street lamp will bring your car to an immediate stop. That’s far from an unsolvable problem though, and this is a graphical tech demo, not a full game with the associated staff, budget, time, etc. The Demon’s Souls remake (which I think actually looks nicer) has tons of destructible boxes, tables, stone work, etc (the original had much of this as well). I’m more interested high graphical fidelity being used in these smaller, authored spaces than in massive, often empty open worlds.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  Open worlds are disappointing me for that reason; they quickly collapse into an empty one. Filling up a small map with “real” content by hand is hard, doing it on a huge scale is impossible.
ec109685 5y ago
Yeah, they look to much like mannequins in the YouTube trailer video.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
agumonkey 5y ago
To be fair, old~ Keanu Reeves made my brain hurt .. because I was lost and not sure if there was a shift between model and live footage at some point. Only the gait gave it a too unnatural aspect.
bick_nyers 5y ago
There's not a whole lot of good physics libraries to run on GPUs just yet, and lots of the physics you would want can absolutely eat up 16-64 cores of a CPU to get a somewhat decent frame rate with high realism. Similar to ray-tracing, where you get great realism, but it is just an absolute resource hog. The number of vertices in soft-body physics animations come to mind. The real world has curves and deformations, and hair, with millions of strands, that each need tens or hundreds of physics-enabled vertices to look ultra realistic. Walking through a city, you might have 100 NPCs on the screen at once, who all have hair. You simply need so much freaking compute power to pull this stuff off, I can't wait to see what it looks like in 10-20 years.
- FractalParadigm 5y ago
  > Walking through a city, you might have 100 NPCs on the screen at once, who all have hair. This is why I'm most excited for high-core counts leading to game development that allows these kinds of things to run in their own hardware threads. Imagine a world where each of those 100 NPCs has hair simulated on one thread, clothing simulated in another, world interaction on another, even AI generation on its own thread. It's crazy just looking 10-20 years back and seeing where we are today. Compare this tech demo to Skyrim (2011) or GTA III (2001) and it's just incredible that we're looking at photorealistic, ray-traced, real-time "gameplay" like this on a home video game console. Or just compare GPU specs, the GeForce3 (2001), GTX 580 (2011), and RTX 3090 (2021) all have texture fill rates of 1.92, 49.41, and 556.0 GTexel/s respectively, with similar increases in raw floating-point performance. The future is exciting.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    The speedup is slowing down though.
    - TuringTest 5y ago
      But imagine if all these calculations for multiple objects were made on a server, in a shared persistent world that could then be projected onto particular views for each final user connected to the system. Oh, wait...
Stevvo 5y ago
Movement is usually more in service to game design goals than realism but it's a solved problem with many different approaches from Mirror's Edge to Death Stranding
ardit33 5y ago
The city feel is perfect though. It is just the interactions/movements of some of the characters. Also the acceleration of people and cars feels still too artificial. It is not the looks, but the physics that are still full on the uncanny valley. I think as graphics get more and more realistic looks wise, game designers need to slow down the game, and make it feel more real. One of my favorite car chases is from the movie Ronin. It feels extremely real, like you are there, as they didn't use any outlandish effects, but kept it grounded on how a real car chase would feel. https://youtu.be/2m-ofGDLNlM?t=61 https://youtu.be/2m-ofGDLNlM?t=61 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_UqwsYoGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_UqwsYoGY
- sosborn 5y ago
  Spot on about the physics. For me, the thing that really gives it away in the white room is Keanu's hair. The way it moves it just off. Super impressive demo though.
  - e12e 5y ago
    Also body language. Especially Keanu's right hand/arm.
- l33tman 5y ago
  To be fair, the Ronin car chases (and a lot of similar) exploit camera angles and FOVs to make a slow moving car feel fast. So they are not as realistic as you think either..
rightbyte 5y ago
> Part of the problem here is that real humans don't bash into walls. So how do you realistically represent that, when in fact it's just Johnny pressing forward on his controller? You could animate that as hugging the wall, leaning against it or something, instead of a 0mph walk.
- edflsafoiewq 5y ago
  Isn't that what Super Mario 64 does? At acute angles you hug the wall and shuffle along it, and at right angles, you push against the wall.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    Hah, nice catch! Ye he does. If I remember correctly, he also like falls over if you run into a wall, or was it jump into it? It is hard to stress how good and impressing that game was at the time.
dTal 5y ago
> Part of the problem here is that real humans don't bash into walls. So how do you realistically represent that, when in fact it's just Johnny pressing forward on his controller? That doesn't seem like much of a theoretical obstacle to me. The primitive controls only signal intent - you don't have to animate the human shuffling against the wall, you can just not move. The controller should be like whispering into the avatar's ear, not QWOP. Or if you do want to grant the player lower-level physical control, you can have the human actually collide realistically with the wall. After all, people do bash into walls, just not commonly. You can even make them bump their head, and take damage.
l33tman 5y ago
I'm a game dev and I spent a lot of time trying to merge the physics system with the player character (PC) control. You basically have the options of letting the player controls try to physically manipulate the PC by inserting forces, or skipping physics entirely for the PC and implement something separate ad hoc. I spent a lot of time on both and read a lot about the issue, and most end up skipping physics on the PC, because it just feels worse controlling it realistically. This might be because we're used to that though. Anyway after all, you're making a game and games have to be fun to play.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  I used to be a game dev, and the goal always was to create an illusion; physics and whatnot was actually used primarily in order to save the effort, and I, too, thought that quality suffered and things would come out less fun that way.
flohofwoe 5y ago
I think it's mostly about where the team puts their attention and how to make the best use of the finite production time and budget. Such demos (or games in general) are like fractals, an infinite amount of people can spend an infinite amount of time getting every little detail right and still not cover everything. E.g. the goal was probably to show off the new Nanite and Lumen rendering features, and probably MetaHuman for the main character faces and facial animations. At some point you have to say "ok, we focus on this stuff, and accept compromises for other things". If the team's goal would have been to create the best crowd simulation or environment interaction ever, they would probably have achieved this, but at the cost of other things.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
The model for Keanu looks spot on. Carrie Anne Moss, who on-camera looks stunning for her age....looks like she aged at least twenty years and her head was stretched, almost like they got the aspect ratio settings wrong. She's almost unrecognizable. When they're in the car and the camera pans back to "IO" in the back seat, I felt like I was watching Who Framed Neo Rabbit.
egypturnash 5y ago
I feel like you could probably realistically represent "people don't just walk into walls" by having invisible walls around everything, at a sensible offset, and do some other tweaking - if I guide a character down a corridor at a weird angle, they should just sort of casually turn to mostly align with the direction of the corridor. There are probably many, many special cases that need to be exceptions to this and figuring out the Right Thing to do in each of them may be an insanely complex task. I seem to recall the game "Bound", where you guided a low-poly ballerina through fairly abstract levels, had a really nice solution to "people don't bash into walls": if you tried to guide your character into a wall, she'd just start doing some stretches against it, which feels pretty accurate given how I tend to behave when I'm attending dance classes regularly. :) Other characters might do different things; a mopey teen might slouch against the wall, a gun-haver might press against it and peer to the side, looking for cover, etc. Obvious reasons not to do this start with "oh great, one more thing to add to the character state machine and debug" and "oh great, a few more animations to fit into the budget". Maybe also "it stops feeling like you're controlling the character". Someone whose day job is video games probably has at least a dozen more reasons, possibly even stories from when they tried it and abandoned it.
- omgketchup 5y ago
  https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?t=674 https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?t=674 It's definitely possible to "not bash into walls" You don't always need to have bespoke animations- sometimes keyframes and realistic constraints can get you there. I think Unity is working on a framework for natural human animation.
  - dognotdog 5y ago
    > https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?t=674 https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?t=674 David Rosen pulled off quite a few little masterpieces -- his gamedev competition entries always had fantastically unique aspects. I cannot believe "Black Shades" was almost 20 years ago! (I have no affiliation, but I am glad to see https://www.wolfire.com/games https://www.wolfire.com/games is still alive and kicking!) Lugaru and later Overgrowth have been the outcomes of what can only be called a decades long obsession with getting the player controls just right, allowing very natural and responsive control and movement, through creating emergent behaviors from first principles, resulting in a rich and natural interaction with the environment (and other characters, see the fighting mojo), in contrast to the many, many AAA titles that just constantly break the immersion through unnatural, jarring behaviors and frustrating limitations.
tejohnso 5y ago
> the human walks against an object, and she does this standard video game 0 mph duck-walk Is that really part of what uncanny valley represents now? I feel like we're moving the goal posts. Fifteen years ago the characters really could be uncanny and disturbing. I don't get that anymore. I feel like it's very close to real, but not real. However, it's in no way off-putting or weirdly creepy.
- gmadsen 5y ago
  uncanny valley naturally changes goal posts. It has for the past 60 years
  - nitrogen 5y ago
    Our perceptions are like an adversarial network -- we are always getting better at spotting the simulation, so simulations have to keep improving to try to fool our perceptions.
- 3np 5y ago
  I get the uncanney-valley feel just from the face stills. Watching the demo, I find it very impressive. Still in the valley, they key word being "still" - I think they managed to get past the bottom and are now climbing up.
  - jtbayly 5y ago
    Me too. And my wife just walked past and saw one of them and asked “What is that?!?” We’re still deep in the uncanny valley for live video game content.
- mftb 5y ago
  I agree with you. I think they have made significant progress on the valley, and I personally feel, it's not something that moves. The uncanny valley was a particular place the technologies came to, where people specifically, were reminiscent of a talking mannequin, with the dead eyes of a shark. I feel like a lot of that is gone, but when watching the fully-rendered car chase, the overall impression was simply of a really good game, so progress, but still not reality.
i_like_apis 5y ago
Watching the demo I thought the biggest part of the uncanny valley aspect of the characters was the lack of spine flexion. Every character walks like they're having lumbar spine spasms. Aside from the motion though they look incredible.
thefourthchime 5y ago
A lot of the older Keanu isn't CG, it's filmed. They switch to the CG versions later. This confused me a lot as well, as I was totally blown away with the first Keanu I saw. "Even now people are confused, having watched the footage several times. “The first time you see the older Keanu that was a video shoot that we (Epic) filmed of him,” Pete explains. “After they come back after Morpheus that was all the CG versions. It was color corrected to match and look the same.” There is also one point where we see footage in the mirror this was real film footage that was comped in UE5. The first shot of Morpheus is also not CG, but then becomes CG when the young Thomas Anderson (Neo) appears. Even the desk scene at the beginning when Anderson is asleep was a real-time recreation of a scene from the original film."
- hnbad 5y ago
  I think the most impressive feat of the demo is making people think some of the filmed parts were "obvious CG".
throw_m239339 5y ago
> Meh, these guys are still stuck in the uncanny valley. Still impressive technically and visually. Let's not forget that these things are running in realtime, they aren't a video. the whole "uncanny valley" thing is exaggerated. in the next 5 years you won't be able to tell the difference. In fact, you're brain will be constantly asking itself whether what you see is real or a 3D model. And I bet it did if you played the demo. That's a serious leap forward. Now most videogames will still featured heavily stylized/cartoonish models, because some people are afraid of models being too realistic.
- Merowinga 5y ago
  Alone watching this video was surprisingly weird. When watching it I realized what you just wrote. This is really impressive.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  >In fact, you're brain will be constantly asking itself whether what you see is real or a 3D model. I get this in movies. Sometimes I even get this in scenes where they're using real actors and not CGI. Harsh lighting with make up can make humans look somewhat fake to me. One of the Mission Impossible movies gave me this effect.
treeman79 5y ago
Boston robot people seem to have thatfigured out
majani 5y ago
The problem in animations is quick responsiveness vs slow realism. If someone made a game with super realistic animations, it would probably be a niche exploration type game like what Team Ico used to do.
quitit 5y ago
As you say the uncanny valley really shows through when the physics doesn't look right. For me the worst uncanny valley offenders were the agents, e.g the ones that leap forward through the air but their suit doesn't so much as flutter. The slow motion effect seems to be used here to cover for the lack of animation. In terms of effects the fire and explosion effects had obvious clipping as objects pass through them where a realistic, but more taxing, effect would utilise particles. At this stage I feel like the engine is very good and sure processing power is still a factor, but I feel like the biggest factor is cost/time. Small details that make something look natural are sure to go when there is budget or deadline.
cloudking 5y ago
Why is the original Jurassic Park (1993) still some of the best CGI to date?
- macinjosh 5y ago
  Maybe because no one has ever seen living dinosaurs? Just a guess.
- croddin 5y ago
  Jurassic Park used a lot of animatronics. Some shots you might think are cgi (and probably would be in most modern movies) might not be. Edit: here is a short video about the full size animatronic T. rex. https://youtu.be/fFTsYGgdR9k https://youtu.be/fFTsYGgdR9k
- skhr0680 5y ago
  It’s used thoughtfully with an awareness of the limitations of special effects. The actual movie is good and exciting so there is no attempt to use CG as a bandaid on otherwise dull action sequences, “fix it in post”.
- genewitch 5y ago
  This is a unix system. I know this!
  - croon 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)
vhiremath4 5y ago
Agreed on the uncanny valley. That said, it seems like some research coming out about AI-generated movement looks promising. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t33jvL7ftd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t33jvL7ftd4
vlunkr 5y ago
> But then the human walks against an object, and she does this standard video game 0 mph duck-walk Who cares? It's a video game, that's how they work. I'd rather have developers work on making things fun than trying to make a creepy realistic Keanu not walk into walls
mstade 5y ago
I don't get the complaints. Sure, plenty of work to go before the avatars look completely natural, but can't we take a moment to appreciate that you can drive a car down the highway at 100+ mph with zero pop in, real time ray traced reflections and global illumination in a scene lit only by the sun, sky and emissive textures? With hundreds of cars and pedestrians moving about? On commodity hardware no less? This is what blew my mind the most with this demo, and I think will enable some crazy cool evolution in open world gaming.
- edgineer 5y ago
  About pop in, at 3:10 in Real Civil Engineer's video you can see a car pop in directly in the line of fire. It's a shame to point out tiny flaws like this but they are nonzero. https://youtube.com/watch?v=aDD4nSlh2BM&t=185 https://youtube.com/watch?v=aDD4nSlh2BM&t=185
  - mstade 5y ago
    This is probably individual and mileage varies by platform, planet alignment and what not, but I never noticed anything like this when playing the demo. Doesn't mean there wasn't any pop-in of course – well, certainly none as egregious as the linked video at least, pretty sure I would've noticed that – but I don't recall any whatsoever, either in the action sequence or subsequent city exploration.
    - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
      It might’ve been because your attention were fully utilized. Like in that video where you had to count how many times people passed the ball, but failed to notice a gorilla walked through the scene.
- georgemcbay 5y ago
  I've run the demo on my Xbox Series X. Let me first state that its amazing overall, very impressive. Having said that, it exhibits pretty noticeable pop-in, also quite a few instances of what looks like garden variety z-fighting of textures/shaders in some places. In a way these actually jump out at you a bit more in this demo than they do in less photorealistic rendered environments probably for reasons similar to the uncanny valley phenomenon being discussed throughout this thread.
globular-toast 5y ago
I thought you were going to make a different point about interactions. On pretty much any CGI I've seen, contact with skin doesn't look real. It could be skin on skin, or skin against a surface like a wall. It always looks like two objects not really touching each other. A lot of CGI (like Pixar etc.) seem to prefer hairy animals or solid robots, presumably for this reason. It seems easy to get hair to look OK, maybe because there's enough noise in the interaction to distract us. But skin just never looks real.

by dash2 5y ago

gentleman11 5y ago

A lot of newer, fancier cg in movies and games is deep in the uncanny valley for me. I can’t watch/play for more than 15 minutes without realizing I’m in a game that doesn’t look right, it’s distracting. I suppose the tech can’t get across the valley without first passing through it

nix23 5y ago
No they are just getting cheaper with their CGI...not better, i would bet that if someone would invest the money and time as they did in the 90-00 we would be absolutely astonished.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gmadsen 5y ago
  what? Avatar is the most money ever spent making a film in history..
forrestthewoods 5y ago
> A lot of newer, fancier cg in movies and games is deep in the uncanny valley for me. There's a lot of uncanny CGI in modern movies. There's also a lot of CGI that is so perfectly realistic you have no idea it isn't real. This is usually more environmental and less characters. If the tech gets past the uncanny valley then you'll never know. This is basically true by definition. :)
- dwighttk 5y ago
  > If the tech gets past the uncanny valley then you'll never know. This is basically true by definition. No they’ll tell me (And I’ll probably not agree, but if I do they’re still going to tell me, trust me they haven’t stopped telling me)

Aeolos 5y ago

Neural networks may be the solution to character-world interactions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlndIQHtiFw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlndIQHtiFw

muti 5y ago

Interactions can be really hard to get right, see doors [1] 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEWsLdLmcc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYEWsLdLmcc

pugworthy 5y ago
I quite like door interactions in VR - specifically Half-Life: Alyx

Pulcinella 5y ago

Yeah having actually played it you run into this immediately. NPC cars will deform in a crash, but a street lamp will bring your car to an immediate stop. That’s far from an unsolvable problem though, and this is a graphical tech demo, not a full game with the associated staff, budget, time, etc. The Demon’s Souls remake (which I think actually looks nicer) has tons of destructible boxes, tables, stone work, etc (the original had much of this as well). I’m more interested high graphical fidelity being used in these smaller, authored spaces than in massive, often empty open worlds.

faeyanpiraat 5y ago
Open worlds are disappointing me for that reason; they quickly collapse into an empty one. Filling up a small map with “real” content by hand is hard, doing it on a huge scale is impossible.

ec109685 5y ago

Yeah, they look to much like mannequins in the YouTube trailer video.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

agumonkey 5y ago

To be fair, old~ Keanu Reeves made my brain hurt .. because I was lost and not sure if there was a shift between model and live footage at some point. Only the gait gave it a too unnatural aspect.

bick_nyers 5y ago

There's not a whole lot of good physics libraries to run on GPUs just yet, and lots of the physics you would want can absolutely eat up 16-64 cores of a CPU to get a somewhat decent frame rate with high realism. Similar to ray-tracing, where you get great realism, but it is just an absolute resource hog. The number of vertices in soft-body physics animations come to mind. The real world has curves and deformations, and hair, with millions of strands, that each need tens or hundreds of physics-enabled vertices to look ultra realistic. Walking through a city, you might have 100 NPCs on the screen at once, who all have hair. You simply need so much freaking compute power to pull this stuff off, I can't wait to see what it looks like in 10-20 years.

FractalParadigm 5y ago
> Walking through a city, you might have 100 NPCs on the screen at once, who all have hair. This is why I'm most excited for high-core counts leading to game development that allows these kinds of things to run in their own hardware threads. Imagine a world where each of those 100 NPCs has hair simulated on one thread, clothing simulated in another, world interaction on another, even AI generation on its own thread. It's crazy just looking 10-20 years back and seeing where we are today. Compare this tech demo to Skyrim (2011) or GTA III (2001) and it's just incredible that we're looking at photorealistic, ray-traced, real-time "gameplay" like this on a home video game console. Or just compare GPU specs, the GeForce3 (2001), GTX 580 (2011), and RTX 3090 (2021) all have texture fill rates of 1.92, 49.41, and 556.0 GTexel/s respectively, with similar increases in raw floating-point performance. The future is exciting.
- faeyanpiraat 5y ago
  The speedup is slowing down though.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    But imagine if all these calculations for multiple objects were made on a server, in a shared persistent world that could then be projected onto particular views for each final user connected to the system. Oh, wait...

Stevvo 5y ago

Movement is usually more in service to game design goals than realism but it's a solved problem with many different approaches from Mirror's Edge to Death Stranding

ardit33 5y ago

The city feel is perfect though. It is just the interactions/movements of some of the characters. Also the acceleration of people and cars feels still too artificial. It is not the looks, but the physics that are still full on the uncanny valley. I think as graphics get more and more realistic looks wise, game designers need to slow down the game, and make it feel more real. One of my favorite car chases is from the movie Ronin. It feels extremely real, like you are there, as they didn't use any outlandish effects, but kept it grounded on how a real car chase would feel. https://youtu.be/2m-ofGDLNlM?t=61 https://youtu.be/2m-ofGDLNlM?t=61 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_UqwsYoGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0_UqwsYoGY

sosborn 5y ago
Spot on about the physics. For me, the thing that really gives it away in the white room is Keanu's hair. The way it moves it just off. Super impressive demo though.
- e12e 5y ago
  Also body language. Especially Keanu's right hand/arm.
l33tman 5y ago
To be fair, the Ronin car chases (and a lot of similar) exploit camera angles and FOVs to make a slow moving car feel fast. So they are not as realistic as you think either..

rightbyte 5y ago

> Part of the problem here is that real humans don't bash into walls. So how do you realistically represent that, when in fact it's just Johnny pressing forward on his controller? You could animate that as hugging the wall, leaning against it or something, instead of a 0mph walk.

edflsafoiewq 5y ago
Isn't that what Super Mario 64 does? At acute angles you hug the wall and shuffle along it, and at right angles, you push against the wall.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Hah, nice catch! Ye he does. If I remember correctly, he also like falls over if you run into a wall, or was it jump into it? It is hard to stress how good and impressing that game was at the time.

dTal 5y ago

> Part of the problem here is that real humans don't bash into walls. So how do you realistically represent that, when in fact it's just Johnny pressing forward on his controller? That doesn't seem like much of a theoretical obstacle to me. The primitive controls only signal intent - you don't have to animate the human shuffling against the wall, you can just not move. The controller should be like whispering into the avatar's ear, not QWOP. Or if you do want to grant the player lower-level physical control, you can have the human actually collide realistically with the wall. After all, people do bash into walls, just not commonly. You can even make them bump their head, and take damage.

l33tman 5y ago

I'm a game dev and I spent a lot of time trying to merge the physics system with the player character (PC) control. You basically have the options of letting the player controls try to physically manipulate the PC by inserting forces, or skipping physics entirely for the PC and implement something separate ad hoc. I spent a lot of time on both and read a lot about the issue, and most end up skipping physics on the PC, because it just feels worse controlling it realistically. This might be because we're used to that though. Anyway after all, you're making a game and games have to be fun to play.

Koshkin 5y ago
I used to be a game dev, and the goal always was to create an illusion; physics and whatnot was actually used primarily in order to save the effort, and I, too, thought that quality suffered and things would come out less fun that way.

flohofwoe 5y ago

I think it's mostly about where the team puts their attention and how to make the best use of the finite production time and budget. Such demos (or games in general) are like fractals, an infinite amount of people can spend an infinite amount of time getting every little detail right and still not cover everything. E.g. the goal was probably to show off the new Nanite and Lumen rendering features, and probably MetaHuman for the main character faces and facial animations. At some point you have to say "ok, we focus on this stuff, and accept compromises for other things". If the team's goal would have been to create the best crowd simulation or environment interaction ever, they would probably have achieved this, but at the cost of other things.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

The model for Keanu looks spot on. Carrie Anne Moss, who on-camera looks stunning for her age....looks like she aged at least twenty years and her head was stretched, almost like they got the aspect ratio settings wrong. She's almost unrecognizable. When they're in the car and the camera pans back to "IO" in the back seat, I felt like I was watching Who Framed Neo Rabbit.

egypturnash 5y ago

I feel like you could probably realistically represent "people don't just walk into walls" by having invisible walls around everything, at a sensible offset, and do some other tweaking - if I guide a character down a corridor at a weird angle, they should just sort of casually turn to mostly align with the direction of the corridor. There are probably many, many special cases that need to be exceptions to this and figuring out the Right Thing to do in each of them may be an insanely complex task. I seem to recall the game "Bound", where you guided a low-poly ballerina through fairly abstract levels, had a really nice solution to "people don't bash into walls": if you tried to guide your character into a wall, she'd just start doing some stretches against it, which feels pretty accurate given how I tend to behave when I'm attending dance classes regularly. :) Other characters might do different things; a mopey teen might slouch against the wall, a gun-haver might press against it and peer to the side, looking for cover, etc. Obvious reasons not to do this start with "oh great, one more thing to add to the character state machine and debug" and "oh great, a few more animations to fit into the budget". Maybe also "it stops feeling like you're controlling the character". Someone whose day job is video games probably has at least a dozen more reasons, possibly even stories from when they tried it and abandoned it.

omgketchup 5y ago
https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?t=674 https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?t=674 It's definitely possible to "not bash into walls" You don't always need to have bespoke animations- sometimes keyframes and realistic constraints can get you there. I think Unity is working on a framework for natural human animation.
- dognotdog 5y ago
  > https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?t=674 https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?t=674 David Rosen pulled off quite a few little masterpieces -- his gamedev competition entries always had fantastically unique aspects. I cannot believe "Black Shades" was almost 20 years ago! (I have no affiliation, but I am glad to see https://www.wolfire.com/games https://www.wolfire.com/games is still alive and kicking!) Lugaru and later Overgrowth have been the outcomes of what can only be called a decades long obsession with getting the player controls just right, allowing very natural and responsive control and movement, through creating emergent behaviors from first principles, resulting in a rich and natural interaction with the environment (and other characters, see the fighting mojo), in contrast to the many, many AAA titles that just constantly break the immersion through unnatural, jarring behaviors and frustrating limitations.

tejohnso 5y ago

> the human walks against an object, and she does this standard video game 0 mph duck-walk Is that really part of what uncanny valley represents now? I feel like we're moving the goal posts. Fifteen years ago the characters really could be uncanny and disturbing. I don't get that anymore. I feel like it's very close to real, but not real. However, it's in no way off-putting or weirdly creepy.

gmadsen 5y ago
uncanny valley naturally changes goal posts. It has for the past 60 years
- nitrogen 5y ago
  Our perceptions are like an adversarial network -- we are always getting better at spotting the simulation, so simulations have to keep improving to try to fool our perceptions.
3np 5y ago
I get the uncanney-valley feel just from the face stills. Watching the demo, I find it very impressive. Still in the valley, they key word being "still" - I think they managed to get past the bottom and are now climbing up.
- jtbayly 5y ago
  Me too. And my wife just walked past and saw one of them and asked “What is that?!?” We’re still deep in the uncanny valley for live video game content.
mftb 5y ago
I agree with you. I think they have made significant progress on the valley, and I personally feel, it's not something that moves. The uncanny valley was a particular place the technologies came to, where people specifically, were reminiscent of a talking mannequin, with the dead eyes of a shark. I feel like a lot of that is gone, but when watching the fully-rendered car chase, the overall impression was simply of a really good game, so progress, but still not reality.

i_like_apis 5y ago

Watching the demo I thought the biggest part of the uncanny valley aspect of the characters was the lack of spine flexion. Every character walks like they're having lumbar spine spasms. Aside from the motion though they look incredible.

thefourthchime 5y ago

A lot of the older Keanu isn't CG, it's filmed. They switch to the CG versions later. This confused me a lot as well, as I was totally blown away with the first Keanu I saw. "Even now people are confused, having watched the footage several times. “The first time you see the older Keanu that was a video shoot that we (Epic) filmed of him,” Pete explains. “After they come back after Morpheus that was all the CG versions. It was color corrected to match and look the same.” There is also one point where we see footage in the mirror this was real film footage that was comped in UE5. The first shot of Morpheus is also not CG, but then becomes CG when the young Thomas Anderson (Neo) appears. Even the desk scene at the beginning when Anderson is asleep was a real-time recreation of a scene from the original film."

hnbad 5y ago
I think the most impressive feat of the demo is making people think some of the filmed parts were "obvious CG".

throw_m239339 5y ago

> Meh, these guys are still stuck in the uncanny valley. Still impressive technically and visually. Let's not forget that these things are running in realtime, they aren't a video. the whole "uncanny valley" thing is exaggerated. in the next 5 years you won't be able to tell the difference. In fact, you're brain will be constantly asking itself whether what you see is real or a 3D model. And I bet it did if you played the demo. That's a serious leap forward. Now most videogames will still featured heavily stylized/cartoonish models, because some people are afraid of models being too realistic.

Merowinga 5y ago
Alone watching this video was surprisingly weird. When watching it I realized what you just wrote. This is really impressive.
Aerroon 5y ago
>In fact, you're brain will be constantly asking itself whether what you see is real or a 3D model. I get this in movies. Sometimes I even get this in scenes where they're using real actors and not CGI. Harsh lighting with make up can make humans look somewhat fake to me. One of the Mission Impossible movies gave me this effect.

treeman79 5y ago

Boston robot people seem to have thatfigured out

majani 5y ago

The problem in animations is quick responsiveness vs slow realism. If someone made a game with super realistic animations, it would probably be a niche exploration type game like what Team Ico used to do.

quitit 5y ago

As you say the uncanny valley really shows through when the physics doesn't look right. For me the worst uncanny valley offenders were the agents, e.g the ones that leap forward through the air but their suit doesn't so much as flutter. The slow motion effect seems to be used here to cover for the lack of animation. In terms of effects the fire and explosion effects had obvious clipping as objects pass through them where a realistic, but more taxing, effect would utilise particles. At this stage I feel like the engine is very good and sure processing power is still a factor, but I feel like the biggest factor is cost/time. Small details that make something look natural are sure to go when there is budget or deadline.

cloudking 5y ago

Why is the original Jurassic Park (1993) still some of the best CGI to date?

macinjosh 5y ago
Maybe because no one has ever seen living dinosaurs? Just a guess.
croddin 5y ago
Jurassic Park used a lot of animatronics. Some shots you might think are cgi (and probably would be in most modern movies) might not be. Edit: here is a short video about the full size animatronic T. rex. https://youtu.be/fFTsYGgdR9k https://youtu.be/fFTsYGgdR9k
skhr0680 5y ago
It’s used thoughtfully with an awareness of the limitations of special effects. The actual movie is good and exciting so there is no attempt to use CG as a bandaid on otherwise dull action sequences, “fix it in post”.
genewitch 5y ago
This is a unix system. I know this!
- croon 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn_(file_manager)

vhiremath4 5y ago

Agreed on the uncanny valley. That said, it seems like some research coming out about AI-generated movement looks promising. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t33jvL7ftd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t33jvL7ftd4

vlunkr 5y ago

> But then the human walks against an object, and she does this standard video game 0 mph duck-walk Who cares? It's a video game, that's how they work. I'd rather have developers work on making things fun than trying to make a creepy realistic Keanu not walk into walls

mstade 5y ago

I don't get the complaints. Sure, plenty of work to go before the avatars look completely natural, but can't we take a moment to appreciate that you can drive a car down the highway at 100+ mph with zero pop in, real time ray traced reflections and global illumination in a scene lit only by the sun, sky and emissive textures? With hundreds of cars and pedestrians moving about? On commodity hardware no less? This is what blew my mind the most with this demo, and I think will enable some crazy cool evolution in open world gaming.

edgineer 5y ago
About pop in, at 3:10 in Real Civil Engineer's video you can see a car pop in directly in the line of fire. It's a shame to point out tiny flaws like this but they are nonzero. https://youtube.com/watch?v=aDD4nSlh2BM&t=185 https://youtube.com/watch?v=aDD4nSlh2BM&t=185
- mstade 5y ago
  This is probably individual and mileage varies by platform, planet alignment and what not, but I never noticed anything like this when playing the demo. Doesn't mean there wasn't any pop-in of course – well, certainly none as egregious as the linked video at least, pretty sure I would've noticed that – but I don't recall any whatsoever, either in the action sequence or subsequent city exploration.
  - faeyanpiraat 5y ago
    It might’ve been because your attention were fully utilized. Like in that video where you had to count how many times people passed the ball, but failed to notice a gorilla walked through the scene.
georgemcbay 5y ago
I've run the demo on my Xbox Series X. Let me first state that its amazing overall, very impressive. Having said that, it exhibits pretty noticeable pop-in, also quite a few instances of what looks like garden variety z-fighting of textures/shaders in some places. In a way these actually jump out at you a bit more in this demo than they do in less photorealistic rendered environments probably for reasons similar to the uncanny valley phenomenon being discussed throughout this thread.

globular-toast 5y ago

I thought you were going to make a different point about interactions. On pretty much any CGI I've seen, contact with skin doesn't look real. It could be skin on skin, or skin against a surface like a wall. It always looks like two objects not really touching each other. A lot of CGI (like Pixar etc.) seem to prefer hairy animals or solid robots, presumably for this reason. It seems easy to get hair to look OK, maybe because there's enough noise in the interaction to distract us. But skin just never looks real.