Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Matrix Is Unreal

fxguide.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 237 posts

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#141

Post by kayoone »

Arubis wrote: post #26

This writeup is unsubtle in being a puff piece. The demoed tech is very impressive! Individual stills taken from the video are pretty convincing. The motion version definitely still exhibits uncanny valley, though—lights that are too hard on flesh, tightness and sharpness where there should be softness. That I have to resort to hand-wavey descriptors is cool; they’re getting close! But crossing uncanny valley is HARD…

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

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#142

Post by ip26 »

Arubis wrote: post #26

This writeup is unsubtle in being a puff piece. The demoed tech is very impressive! Individual stills taken from the video are pretty convincing. The motion version definitely still exhibits uncanny valley, though—lights that are too hard on flesh, tightness and sharpness where there should be softness. That I have to resort to hand-wavey descriptors is cool; they’re getting close! But crossing uncanny valley is HARD…

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

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

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#143

Post by sebow »

dougmwne wrote: post #70

The people trying to point out that this falls short of photorealism are missing the point. This is a tech demo aiming to show off the next generation leap unreal engine 5 is making. There’s lots to be impressed about here and this was made using a ton of procedural generation using a team of just about 70 people. Here’s a great deep dive into some of the new technologies that highlights the strengths and weaknesses…

I dont think neither year old console or a 3090 is any form of "consolation".

Also while i agree on principle with you, this is still a movie, and one of a trilogy that defined a significant part of culture i might add, so it's a risky move at best.

But yeah, besides facial quality(which i think are vastly underwhelming) the movie looks pretty nice, and the rest doesn't even matter when you consider most of movies/shows today are VFX.I remember seeing the first ever UE5 tech demo years ago(i think it predates ray-tracing if i'm not mistaken) and i was kind of surprised.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#144

Post by cyber_kinetist »

dougmwne wrote: post #104
pxc wrote: post #97

Does anyone else kinda feel like videogames look good enough at this point? This demo looks fantastic, but I don't think many visual improvements beyond it seem super exciting to me. I'll take them when they come, of course, and I'm sure that realistic 3D worlds in videogames will continue to look better and better as time goes on. But I dunno. I hope advances in videogame engines do more than just help the biggest A…

Yes, you got it exactly. This is the democratization of AAA graphics. This whole city was made with just a team of 70. (Red Dead Redemption 2 had a team of 1,600.) They relied heavily on Epic’s giant library of game assets that anyone can use. They used procedural generation to mix those assets in to create the map and random procedural generation of the pedestrians. The lighting and physics system are also Unreal En…

To be honest, a team of 70 isn't going to be enough if you're going to make an actual game as big as RDR2 rather than just a tech demo. I'm not convinced until a game studio actually makes a standalone game in UE5 and reports its workflow has become better.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#145

Post by georgemcbay »

mstade wrote: post #120
dash2 wrote: post #5

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 v…

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 w…

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.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#146

Post by shock-value »

leshow wrote: post #138
dougmwne wrote: post #70

The people trying to point out that this falls short of photorealism are missing the point. This is a tech demo aiming to show off the next generation leap unreal engine 5 is making. There’s lots to be impressed about here and this was made using a ton of procedural generation using a team of just about 70 people. Here’s a great deep dive into some of the new technologies that highlights the strengths and weaknesses…

Yeah it's really cool, the problem is it barely runs at 30fps and there is no way in hell it's going to run at 60fps on a console. I never had a ps4/xbone, skipped the last console cycle and stayed on PC then recently got a PS5 where every title has an option to play at 60fps. There is no way in hell the consoles are going to be able to push this fidelity at that frame rate. Let alone their promise of 120fps that has…

IMO 4k/60fps as a goal is overrated. 3k upscaled to 4k using a newer generation upscaler is not going to look much worse than native 4k, especially when viewed on a TV at a typical distance from one's couch. And 60fps, while crucial in some genres, is not altogether that important in others (particularly narrative-focused single-player titles, for which Unreal Engine is often used especially among non-major publishers).

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#147

Post by jjcm »

leshow wrote: post #138
dougmwne wrote: post #70

The people trying to point out that this falls short of photorealism are missing the point. This is a tech demo aiming to show off the next generation leap unreal engine 5 is making. There’s lots to be impressed about here and this was made using a ton of procedural generation using a team of just about 70 people. Here’s a great deep dive into some of the new technologies that highlights the strengths and weaknesses…

Yeah it's really cool, the problem is it barely runs at 30fps and there is no way in hell it's going to run at 60fps on a console. I never had a ps4/xbone, skipped the last console cycle and stayed on PC then recently got a PS5 where every title has an option to play at 60fps. There is no way in hell the consoles are going to be able to push this fidelity at that frame rate. Let alone their promise of 120fps that has…

We probably won't get consoles having games of this fidelity on current hardware, but at the very least this shows that this level of fidelity is coming. Next gen consoles and high end PCs will at the very least be able to achieve that. I find that exciting.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#148

Post by KronisLV »

> The technical demo also puts previously showcased UE5 features Nanite and Lumen on display. After the interactive chase sequence, users can roam the dense, open-world city environment using UE5’s virtualized micro polygon geometry system which provides a massive seven thousand buildings made of thousands of modular pieces, 45,073 parked cars (of which 38,146 are drivable), over 260 km of roads, 512 km of the sidewalk, 1,248 intersections, 27,848 lamp posts, and 12,422 manholes in a virtual world that is slightly larger than the real downtown LA. Additionally, as one drives or walks around the city, you can pass 35,000 metahumans going about their everyday business.

That is some amazing tech! It actually feels like Unreal Engine would be really well suited for other genres of games, not just the historically prevalent FPSes, such as creating RTS games or maybe even something like Cities: Skylines, in which being able to create large detailed urban environments could be amazing!

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#149

Post by mstade »

georgemcbay wrote: post #145
mstade wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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 t…

I saw none of this when running on PS5 and I navigated the city for quite a while too. Maybe I just got lucky, or maybe mileage varies across platforms, I dunno. Very impressive anyhow.

Re: The Matrix Is Unreal

#150

Post by numlock86 »

It's just a (playable) tech demo, alright. We'll have to wait 7 to 10 years until we get games close to this anyway. Remember the "Samaritan" UE3 tech demo? That thing is 11 years old by now [1] and the closest we have to that is probably CP2077 ... and only if you ignore the console ports, yuck.

[1] I am aware of the fact that "back in the day" they used three 580s in SLI or something crazy to run it, but that performance was already surpassed two years later by single card setups.

Post reply on HN