8 ms·

Next-Gen Lighting Is Pushing the Limits of Realism

162 points by RaSoJo 12y ago

adrusi 12y ago
Lighting does a lot to improve a scene, but unfortunately I'm almost certain that it's pre-rendered lighting, which isn't all that interesting since any dynamic objects present ruin the effect.
- ZaneA 12y ago
  Not that this is any sort of proof but if you watch the last few videos you can definitely see the shading change on the tree leaves that move around in the wind.
  - berkut 12y ago
    Trees are static though - they only deform - they don't transform around the scene itself.
- akavel 12y ago
  Not sure if that answers your doubts (as I'm totally not into rendering), but from the forum thread[1], about one of the videos apparently (not sure which, or all?): > is that video was rendered real time? > Yep (well, the lightmaps are pre rendered but it take like 10 min. In engine, it runs at 50-60fps on a gtx670) [1] https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz-Lighting&p=121658&viewfull=1#post121658 https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz...
kristiandupont 12y ago
Interesting choice with the Mies Van Der Rohe Pavilion, because as stunning as it is in real life, it's simple geometry actually makes for a bit of a boring tech demo. Still looks very impressive though.
- RaSoJo 12y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. I was under the assumption that the locale was the artist's own. Would be interesting to see a tackle at animating the pavilion at night: http://cdn3.vtourist.com/4/3600745-Barcelona_Pavilion_of_Mies_van_der_Rohe_Barcelona.jpg http://cdn3.vtourist.com/4/3600745-Barcelona_Pavilion_of_Mie... Wondering what the complications would be...
- ibuildthings 12y ago
  I this is a bit of legacy ( like the Stanford Bunny ). One of the seminal work of lighting was Photon mapping by Henrik Jensen , and he used Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's structure as an example ( http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/animations/jensen-the_light_of_mies_small.mpg http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/animations/jensen-the_light... ). Keep in mind this was done 14 years ago! It was a genuine wow moment for me back then!
berkut 12y ago
Should be "Next-Gen Game Lighting". This is just Physically-based shading basically, which has been done for the past 4/5 years in VFX. Essentially it's energy-conserving materials with the correct fresnel effect based on the surface's IOR which takes things to the next level (for games at least). Doing this properly for layered surfaces (e.g. diffuse wood layer with a clearcoat varnish layer) gives very nice looking results. Some complex materials can have up to 3 spectral BSDF lobes for reflection, which can only really be done with pathtracing. For VFX, people are starting to push into spectral rendering now, and trying to optimise things like volumetric rendering for things like SSS which are needed for ultimate realism.
- RDeckard 12y ago
  What?
- unwind 12y ago
  OK, I'll don the Captain Jargon outfit and give that a go: - VFX is just "visual effects", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_effects. - Fresnel might be a reference to "Fresnel refraction", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction. - IOR is of course "index of refraction", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index. - BSDF references "bi-directional scattering distribution functions", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_scattering_distribution_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_scattering_distri.... - Path tracing is a Monte Carlo method of rendering images with global illumination, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing. - SSS means "sub-surface scattering", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering.
  - berkut 12y ago
    +1 - sorry, I do this stuff all day, so am used to the slang :) Fresnel also effects just reflection as well - it's the reason you don't often (depending on the material) see much of a reflection head-on on a shiny surface, but do at a glancing angle (glass or car paint for example).
adam-a 12y ago
It's worth noting that these scenes take around 10 minutes to render a frame, so it's still a long way from real time. Detailed in the thread - https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz-Lighting&p=118443&viewfull=1#post118443 https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz... Very pretty though still!
- akavel 12y ago
  Hm, from another post[1]: > is that video was rendered real time? > Yep (well, the lightmaps are pre rendered but it take like 10 min. In engine, it runs at 50-60fps on a gtx670) So, if I understand correctly, that's 10 minutes for some "lightmaps prerendering", but then "real time scenes rendering"? But I'm totally not into rendering, so sorry if that's what you meant, and if that's something obvious I'm just missing. [1]: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz-Lighting&p=121658&viewfull=1#post121658 https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz...
  - ShinyCyril 12y ago
    To add to that, the prerendering is done as part of the preparation of assets - if someone were to download and run this project then the assets are ready to go!
  - adam-a 12y ago
    Ah, I missed that, I thought he meant 10 seconds each frame when running.
  - zamalek 12y ago
    You are 100% correct. Saying that it isn't realtime due to the baking is like saying Linux isn't fast because it takes a day to compile. Baking = compilation of game assets Lightmap = object file for lighting
- chanon 12y ago
  I think he said only the lightmaps were pre-rendered and that took 10mins. The actual scene runs real-time at 50-60 fps on his gtx670. (Prerendering lightmaps is typical for games for scenes with static lighting.)
danmaz74 12y ago
This is incredible. It's only a pity that many straight lines are just too straight.
- coldtea 12y ago
  You see many crooked lines in real life architecture when the wall/surface is supposed to be straigt?
  - danmaz74 12y ago
    In real life architecture the wall/surface is never perfectly straight. This is one of the most common signs that give away 3d renderings.
    - coldtea 12y ago
      >the wall/surface is never perfectly straight Where you got the idea that a wall is not perfectly straight? You mean some marginal differences in curvature that the human eye cannot distinguish from a straight line anyway? That would be trivial to mimic in a 3D renderging anyway, literaly just a modelling command away. I'll have to agree with TFA that it's the lighting and textures that give away 3D renderings.
      - danmaz74 12y ago
        In my experience the human eye can spot the lack of that kind of imperfections very well. Not quantify them - just notice that something is wrong. Regarding walls (and edges in general) not being perfectly straight, apart from what I learned from my engineering studies, I've done my fair share of home repairs :)
azinman2 12y ago
Drool... Very impressive especially in a video game engine? I wish I knew more about the 3d world and could do stuff like this....
- adventured 12y ago
  If you're interested in it, you can work directly with the Unreal4 Engine at an extremely low cost ($19 per month for access to everything, source code, tools etc). I ran a gaming startup in the days of Quake. It has really never been easier or cheaper to acquire access to incredible tools, learning material, and technology to get into the 3D space (whether for gaming or whatever). Easy enough to at least download the Unreal 4 engine and begin messing around with it, to see exactly how deep your curiosity goes. You'd find out quickly if it's something you're really interested in. Every time I see the Unreal 4 engine on display it tempts me to get back into it all (I'd go toward VR now).
huuu 12y ago
Ofcourse the images look very nice but I'm not very impressed. A lot of artists create photo realistic images. For example the Ikea catalogue[1] has a lot of CG images. These are just pre-rendered textures and light maps combined with real time lighting and reflections in Unreal Engine 4. But I agree that UE4 does a very very good job at realistic real time lighting! Also take a look at the blog of Paul Mader: http://paulmader.blogspot.nl/ http://paulmader.blogspot.nl/ [1] http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/building_3d_with_ikea http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpe...
- 3rd3 12y ago
  What about the changing angle of light incidence in this fast-forward scene? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOkJ1-vnh-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOkJ1-vnh-s It somehow looks like it would be dynamic diffuse indirect lighting. Wouldn’t that need to be pre-rendered for each position of the sun then? Or it’s just really good use of shadow maps, ambient occlusion and screen-space specular reflection: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/PostProcessEffects/ScreenSpaceReflection/index.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Po... Edit: This particular scene uses light propagation volumes, in the other scenes it’s UE’s pre-computed (hence static) Lightmass GI, as parent comment said. https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightPropagationVolumes/index.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Li... https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/Lightmass/index.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Li...
  - deleted 12y ago
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    - deleted 12y ago
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  - huuu 12y ago
    What UE4 can do is very impressive. But when it comes to real time photo realism I think path tracing is even more impressive. For example this Brigade 3.0 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y
sirmarksalot 12y ago
If I were an architect, I would be using this to pitch to clients. I know virtual fly-throughs are a thing, but the existing demos I've seen just don't give the same sense of presence as this does.
- GrantS 12y ago
  Indeed, architects have definitely been using the Unreal Engine for quite awhile, even before it started looking this good. Here's an article from 2007: http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-12-21/unreal-architecturebusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-12-21/unreal-archit...
  - talmand 12y ago
    I once worked for a company creating pool designs and entire backyards for pool and landscaping companies in UnrealEngine 2.5.
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
That's nice. How many game or film studios will be driven bankrupt by the yet-again increased cost of content production? But yes, Blood Soaked Shoot-em-Up 93x-treme is going to look very realistic. It will be almost as if I was really invading Iraq!
- rsanders 12y ago
  Look on the bright side; it's good news for the people with the content-creation skills. It isn't as though the ever-increasing complexity of software has had a negative effect on the industry.
- ejr 12y ago
  I see another avenue for this. "Reality simulation" - not virtual reality - will, I think, be something to explore. Especially with something like Oculus down the line, there would be a market for it. Why surround yourself with your humdrum home when you can live in a much better one with better surroundings. Watch TV virtually. Read a book virtually or even take a nap on your virtual sofa in front of a magnificent view while on your "real" bed surrounded by boring walls you don't see.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    That's just... ew. No. That's just wrong. The average person's living conditions shouldn't be so poor in the first place that he feels the need to step into an Oculus to get a nice sofa.
    - ejr 12y ago
      Living conditions don't need to be poor. Think of it as a hyper-realistic Second Life. There's a reason Sims are popular too.
      - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
        I'm pretty sure that on an absolute scale, Second Life and The Sims are not actually very popular at all.
halfcat 12y ago
This reminds me of playing with POV-Ray years ago. I was so amazed what could be done on a low powered PC, granted it took a long time to render, but still was still somehow magical, like the first time you realize you can program a computer. POV-Ray is free and can create some cool realistic looking images[1]. This one is my favorite[2]. [1]http://hof.povray.org http://hof.povray.org [2]http://hof.povray.org/images/ChristmasBaubles.jpg http://hof.povray.org/images/ChristmasBaubles.jpg
doorhammer 12y ago
Something of an aside: I'm most stoked about this kind of thing because of the oculus rift. Even just playing through HL2 with my DK2 is an amazing experience. What I'm really interested in with things like the Rift is foveated rendering, in order to get much higher quality graphics out of less computing power. Basically, using high precision fast eye-tracking to only render the portion of the screen your looking directly at, since your eye can't resolve detail to any great degree outside of a fairly small area in the center of where you're looking. Foveated imaging in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging MS Research paper on foveated rendering: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/foveated_final15.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/foveated_final15.p... MS trial on foveated rendering: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/userstudy07.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/userstudy07.pdf
- intruder 12y ago
  For foveation to go undetected, ideally the central region should update within 5 ms. That's unreachable even with top hardware right now. The MS paper achieved some nice results using a 120 Hz screen and a very fast tracker, but the rift is far from that. It's interesting, but comes with all kind of issues aside from delay (periphery degradation strategy). I've been trying to adapt shadow mappin to foveation and latency is killing it. Especially since shadows are high contrast information, quality popping and self shadow flicks are so distracting.
  - doorhammer 12y ago
    Yeah. I'm not involved in any kind of dev work with that sort of thing, so you'd probably know better than I would, but it definitely seems like it's a problem that's very much in the research phase. I can imagine the popping would be that much more painful in a VR environment. Game stutters that my brain largely tunes out on a normal monitor become world rocking cataclysmic events in the rift.
  - angersock 12y ago
    So, do path-based rendering (which gets the nice, slow pop-in of noise, right?) and bias the sampling to favor the current point of focus. You naturally end up with fewer samples in places that don't matter, and faster fill-in where they do.
mischanix 12y ago
"Next-gen" is a bit misleading of a description: the GPU (GTX 670) that this scene is rendered in real-time on has about 30% more power than the GPU in the PS4, although it was released 2 years ago. The CPU used to bake the lightmaps has more than twice the power of the PS4's CPU.
- sp332 12y ago
  It's not next-gen hardware, it's next-gen lighting. It doesn't matter how powerful your GPU is if no one has written a good lighting algorithm for it.
- Narishma 12y ago
  It doesn't matter how much time the CPU takes to bake the lightmaps since it's done offline.
imaginenore 12y ago
These videos reminded me of the architectural renders of "The Third & The Seventh" by Alex Roman http://vimeo.com/7809605 http://vimeo.com/7809605
- spitfire 12y ago
  Both feature the Barcelona pavilion. It was the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_Pavilion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_Pavilion
- 1ris 12y ago
  Thats very impressive. I wonder what is rendered and what is actually filmed.
  - Zecc 12y ago
    There is a compositing breakdown: http://vimeo.com/8200251 http://vimeo.com/8200251 You'll probably find there is a lot more rendered than you expected.
hyperion2010 12y ago
The one thing that is still hard is doing the radiosity. The way that I spot CG stuff that can be rendered real time is that there simply are not enough rad bounces and objects without direct lighting in the scene end up being too dark. Baking lightmaps takes a long time, and realtime radiosity methods are still CPU bound.
- tripzilch 12y ago
  Sooner or later you will be making this statement about a piece of actual RL video footage that just happens to have a bad exposure/gamma/colour balance :)

162 points by RaSoJo 12y ago

Lighting does a lot to improve a scene, but unfortunately I'm almost certain that it's pre-rendered lighting, which isn't all that interesting since any dynamic objects present ruin the effect.

ZaneA 12y ago
Not that this is any sort of proof but if you watch the last few videos you can definitely see the shading change on the tree leaves that move around in the wind.
- berkut 12y ago
  Trees are static though - they only deform - they don't transform around the scene itself.
akavel 12y ago
Not sure if that answers your doubts (as I'm totally not into rendering), but from the forum thread[1], about one of the videos apparently (not sure which, or all?): > is that video was rendered real time? > Yep (well, the lightmaps are pre rendered but it take like 10 min. In engine, it runs at 50-60fps on a gtx670) [1] https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz-Lighting&p=121658&viewfull=1#post121658 https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz...

kristiandupont 12y ago

Interesting choice with the Mies Van Der Rohe Pavilion, because as stunning as it is in real life, it's simple geometry actually makes for a bit of a boring tech demo. Still looks very impressive though.

RaSoJo 12y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. I was under the assumption that the locale was the artist's own. Would be interesting to see a tackle at animating the pavilion at night: http://cdn3.vtourist.com/4/3600745-Barcelona_Pavilion_of_Mies_van_der_Rohe_Barcelona.jpg http://cdn3.vtourist.com/4/3600745-Barcelona_Pavilion_of_Mie... Wondering what the complications would be...
ibuildthings 12y ago
I this is a bit of legacy ( like the Stanford Bunny ). One of the seminal work of lighting was Photon mapping by Henrik Jensen , and he used Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's structure as an example ( http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/animations/jensen-the_light_of_mies_small.mpg http://graphics.ucsd.edu/~henrik/animations/jensen-the_light... ). Keep in mind this was done 14 years ago! It was a genuine wow moment for me back then!

berkut 12y ago

Should be "Next-Gen Game Lighting". This is just Physically-based shading basically, which has been done for the past 4/5 years in VFX. Essentially it's energy-conserving materials with the correct fresnel effect based on the surface's IOR which takes things to the next level (for games at least). Doing this properly for layered surfaces (e.g. diffuse wood layer with a clearcoat varnish layer) gives very nice looking results. Some complex materials can have up to 3 spectral BSDF lobes for reflection, which can only really be done with pathtracing. For VFX, people are starting to push into spectral rendering now, and trying to optimise things like volumetric rendering for things like SSS which are needed for ultimate realism.

RDeckard 12y ago
What?
unwind 12y ago
OK, I'll don the Captain Jargon outfit and give that a go: - VFX is just "visual effects", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_effects http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_effects. - Fresnel might be a reference to "Fresnel refraction", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_diffraction. - IOR is of course "index of refraction", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refractive_index. - BSDF references "bi-directional scattering distribution functions", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_scattering_distribution_function http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_scattering_distri.... - Path tracing is a Monte Carlo method of rendering images with global illumination, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing. - SSS means "sub-surface scattering", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_scattering.
- berkut 12y ago
  +1 - sorry, I do this stuff all day, so am used to the slang :) Fresnel also effects just reflection as well - it's the reason you don't often (depending on the material) see much of a reflection head-on on a shiny surface, but do at a glancing angle (glass or car paint for example).

adam-a 12y ago

It's worth noting that these scenes take around 10 minutes to render a frame, so it's still a long way from real time. Detailed in the thread - https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz-Lighting&p=118443&viewfull=1#post118443 https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz... Very pretty though still!

akavel 12y ago
Hm, from another post[1]: > is that video was rendered real time? > Yep (well, the lightmaps are pre rendered but it take like 10 min. In engine, it runs at 50-60fps on a gtx670) So, if I understand correctly, that's 10 minutes for some "lightmaps prerendering", but then "real time scenes rendering"? But I'm totally not into rendering, so sorry if that's what you meant, and if that's something obvious I'm just missing. [1]: https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz-Lighting&p=121658&viewfull=1#post121658 https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?28163-ArchViz...
- ShinyCyril 12y ago
  To add to that, the prerendering is done as part of the preparation of assets - if someone were to download and run this project then the assets are ready to go!
- adam-a 12y ago
  Ah, I missed that, I thought he meant 10 seconds each frame when running.
- zamalek 12y ago
  You are 100% correct. Saying that it isn't realtime due to the baking is like saying Linux isn't fast because it takes a day to compile. Baking = compilation of game assets Lightmap = object file for lighting
chanon 12y ago
I think he said only the lightmaps were pre-rendered and that took 10mins. The actual scene runs real-time at 50-60 fps on his gtx670. (Prerendering lightmaps is typical for games for scenes with static lighting.)

danmaz74 12y ago

This is incredible. It's only a pity that many straight lines are just too straight.

coldtea 12y ago
You see many crooked lines in real life architecture when the wall/surface is supposed to be straigt?
- danmaz74 12y ago
  In real life architecture the wall/surface is never perfectly straight. This is one of the most common signs that give away 3d renderings.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >the wall/surface is never perfectly straight Where you got the idea that a wall is not perfectly straight? You mean some marginal differences in curvature that the human eye cannot distinguish from a straight line anyway? That would be trivial to mimic in a 3D renderging anyway, literaly just a modelling command away. I'll have to agree with TFA that it's the lighting and textures that give away 3D renderings.
    - danmaz74 12y ago
      In my experience the human eye can spot the lack of that kind of imperfections very well. Not quantify them - just notice that something is wrong. Regarding walls (and edges in general) not being perfectly straight, apart from what I learned from my engineering studies, I've done my fair share of home repairs :)

azinman2 12y ago

Drool... Very impressive especially in a video game engine? I wish I knew more about the 3d world and could do stuff like this....

adventured 12y ago
If you're interested in it, you can work directly with the Unreal4 Engine at an extremely low cost ($19 per month for access to everything, source code, tools etc). I ran a gaming startup in the days of Quake. It has really never been easier or cheaper to acquire access to incredible tools, learning material, and technology to get into the 3D space (whether for gaming or whatever). Easy enough to at least download the Unreal 4 engine and begin messing around with it, to see exactly how deep your curiosity goes. You'd find out quickly if it's something you're really interested in. Every time I see the Unreal 4 engine on display it tempts me to get back into it all (I'd go toward VR now).

huuu 12y ago

Ofcourse the images look very nice but I'm not very impressed. A lot of artists create photo realistic images. For example the Ikea catalogue[1] has a lot of CG images. These are just pre-rendered textures and light maps combined with real time lighting and reflections in Unreal Engine 4. But I agree that UE4 does a very very good job at realistic real time lighting! Also take a look at the blog of Paul Mader: http://paulmader.blogspot.nl/ http://paulmader.blogspot.nl/ [1] http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/building_3d_with_ikea http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpe...

3rd3 12y ago
What about the changing angle of light incidence in this fast-forward scene? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOkJ1-vnh-s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOkJ1-vnh-s It somehow looks like it would be dynamic diffuse indirect lighting. Wouldn’t that need to be pre-rendered for each position of the sun then? Or it’s just really good use of shadow maps, ambient occlusion and screen-space specular reflection: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/PostProcessEffects/ScreenSpaceReflection/index.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Po... Edit: This particular scene uses light propagation volumes, in the other scenes it’s UE’s pre-computed (hence static) Lightmass GI, as parent comment said. https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/LightPropagationVolumes/index.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Li... https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/Lightmass/index.html https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Li...
- deleted 12y ago
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  - deleted 12y ago
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- huuu 12y ago
  What UE4 can do is very impressive. But when it comes to real time photo realism I think path tracing is even more impressive. For example this Brigade 3.0 demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpT6MkCeP7Y

sirmarksalot 12y ago

If I were an architect, I would be using this to pitch to clients. I know virtual fly-throughs are a thing, but the existing demos I've seen just don't give the same sense of presence as this does.

GrantS 12y ago
Indeed, architects have definitely been using the Unreal Engine for quite awhile, even before it started looking this good. Here's an article from 2007: http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-12-21/unreal-architecturebusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2007-12-21/unreal-archit...
- talmand 12y ago
  I once worked for a company creating pool designs and entire backyards for pool and landscaping companies in UnrealEngine 2.5.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

That's nice. How many game or film studios will be driven bankrupt by the yet-again increased cost of content production? But yes, Blood Soaked Shoot-em-Up 93x-treme is going to look very realistic. It will be almost as if I was really invading Iraq!

rsanders 12y ago
Look on the bright side; it's good news for the people with the content-creation skills. It isn't as though the ever-increasing complexity of software has had a negative effect on the industry.
ejr 12y ago
I see another avenue for this. "Reality simulation" - not virtual reality - will, I think, be something to explore. Especially with something like Oculus down the line, there would be a market for it. Why surround yourself with your humdrum home when you can live in a much better one with better surroundings. Watch TV virtually. Read a book virtually or even take a nap on your virtual sofa in front of a magnificent view while on your "real" bed surrounded by boring walls you don't see.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  That's just... ew. No. That's just wrong. The average person's living conditions shouldn't be so poor in the first place that he feels the need to step into an Oculus to get a nice sofa.
  - ejr 12y ago
    Living conditions don't need to be poor. Think of it as a hyper-realistic Second Life. There's a reason Sims are popular too.
    - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
      I'm pretty sure that on an absolute scale, Second Life and The Sims are not actually very popular at all.

halfcat 12y ago

This reminds me of playing with POV-Ray years ago. I was so amazed what could be done on a low powered PC, granted it took a long time to render, but still was still somehow magical, like the first time you realize you can program a computer. POV-Ray is free and can create some cool realistic looking images[1]. This one is my favorite[2]. [1]http://hof.povray.org http://hof.povray.org [2]http://hof.povray.org/images/ChristmasBaubles.jpg http://hof.povray.org/images/ChristmasBaubles.jpg

doorhammer 12y ago

Something of an aside: I'm most stoked about this kind of thing because of the oculus rift. Even just playing through HL2 with my DK2 is an amazing experience. What I'm really interested in with things like the Rift is foveated rendering, in order to get much higher quality graphics out of less computing power. Basically, using high precision fast eye-tracking to only render the portion of the screen your looking directly at, since your eye can't resolve detail to any great degree outside of a fairly small area in the center of where you're looking. Foveated imaging in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foveated_imaging MS Research paper on foveated rendering: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/foveated_final15.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/foveated_final15.p... MS trial on foveated rendering: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/userstudy07.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176610/userstudy07.pdf

intruder 12y ago
For foveation to go undetected, ideally the central region should update within 5 ms. That's unreachable even with top hardware right now. The MS paper achieved some nice results using a 120 Hz screen and a very fast tracker, but the rift is far from that. It's interesting, but comes with all kind of issues aside from delay (periphery degradation strategy). I've been trying to adapt shadow mappin to foveation and latency is killing it. Especially since shadows are high contrast information, quality popping and self shadow flicks are so distracting.
- doorhammer 12y ago
  Yeah. I'm not involved in any kind of dev work with that sort of thing, so you'd probably know better than I would, but it definitely seems like it's a problem that's very much in the research phase. I can imagine the popping would be that much more painful in a VR environment. Game stutters that my brain largely tunes out on a normal monitor become world rocking cataclysmic events in the rift.
- angersock 12y ago
  So, do path-based rendering (which gets the nice, slow pop-in of noise, right?) and bias the sampling to favor the current point of focus. You naturally end up with fewer samples in places that don't matter, and faster fill-in where they do.

mischanix 12y ago

"Next-gen" is a bit misleading of a description: the GPU (GTX 670) that this scene is rendered in real-time on has about 30% more power than the GPU in the PS4, although it was released 2 years ago. The CPU used to bake the lightmaps has more than twice the power of the PS4's CPU.

sp332 12y ago
It's not next-gen hardware, it's next-gen lighting. It doesn't matter how powerful your GPU is if no one has written a good lighting algorithm for it.
Narishma 12y ago
It doesn't matter how much time the CPU takes to bake the lightmaps since it's done offline.

imaginenore 12y ago

These videos reminded me of the architectural renders of "The Third & The Seventh" by Alex Roman http://vimeo.com/7809605 http://vimeo.com/7809605

spitfire 12y ago
Both feature the Barcelona pavilion. It was the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_Pavilion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_Pavilion
1ris 12y ago
Thats very impressive. I wonder what is rendered and what is actually filmed.
- Zecc 12y ago
  There is a compositing breakdown: http://vimeo.com/8200251 http://vimeo.com/8200251 You'll probably find there is a lot more rendered than you expected.

hyperion2010 12y ago

The one thing that is still hard is doing the radiosity. The way that I spot CG stuff that can be rendered real time is that there simply are not enough rad bounces and objects without direct lighting in the scene end up being too dark. Baking lightmaps takes a long time, and realtime radiosity methods are still CPU bound.

tripzilch 12y ago
Sooner or later you will be making this statement about a piece of actual RL video footage that just happens to have a bad exposure/gamma/colour balance :)