The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine • Hacker News Board

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#101

Post by et1337 » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

causi wrote: post #15

Am I alone in thinking most of this year's Unreal Engine demonstrations are just...not that great? Like, this is what graphics looked like on the Xbox One from nine years ago: https://halo.wiki.gallery/images/1/12/H5G-Waypoint-Swords_of...

There's no accounting for taste, but another reason why the Unreal advancements are a big deal is improved productivity for artists. The geometry in that Xbox One screenshot was painstakingly optimized by some poor overworked artist, whereas this guy just threw together a couple billion polygons and UE5 didn't even flinch.

edit: not to mention the lighting in the Xbox One screenshot was also pre-baked and probably manually tweaked, compared to real lighting updated in realtime in UE5.

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#102

Post by yamtaddle » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 8:39 PM UTC

jupp0r wrote: post #84

chabad360 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, unreal is surprisingly efficient on the graphics side of things, but it also wants 70-something GB just to install and that's before it starts setting up the graphics cache which adds another 40 GB iirc.

1TB SSDs are $90.

And thanks to inflation, while $90 used to be like six to eight bags of groceries not that long ago, now it's only two or three. So that's not like you can buy much else with that $90.

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#103

Post by rngname22 » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

astlouis44 wrote: post #85

smoldesu wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why hadn't it happened this year, or last? Having loosely followed this space, I think I might actually have some input! First off, you need a VR-ready environment. Not many companies are making these, so the only people equipped to roll this out is Valve, Meta, and possibly Unreal/Epic. Valve already did this alongside Half Life Alyx; they released certain map portions so you could freely walk around them with fri…

Thoughts on the web and the role that WASM, WebGPU, and WebXR have as a distribution channel for these immersive experiences?

The content pipelines aren't there, or visual fidelity.

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#104

Post by rngname22 » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:07 PM UTC

djmips wrote: post #4

50 FPS is too low. There's a reason that 90 FPS is the low bar for VR.

Nah. Not once you are experienced. Agreed as far as beginners.

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#105

Post by jbverschoor » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:20 PM UTC

Daub wrote: post #100

solardev wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, disk space was the limiting factor, not GPUs?

Yep. The install size of unreal is a known issue: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n7vwGnKSbmE&feature=youtu.be Our lab computors have 500gb of space. Each time a new profile is activated by a student, that eats up around 5 to 10 gig. In addition… Video editing eats up storage space like there is no tomorrow (the Cache requirements of Resolve are another issue). Nanite supports scene with very dance meshes (downloaded d…

A 2tb ssd is little over 100. There's no good reason this isn't upgraded

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#106

Post by jbverschoor » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:22 PM UTC

jupp0r wrote: post #84

chabad360 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, unreal is surprisingly efficient on the graphics side of things, but it also wants 70-something GB just to install and that's before it starts setting up the graphics cache which adds another 40 GB iirc.

1TB SSDs are $90.

And 2TB is like $120

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#107

Post by bscphil » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 9:33 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #57

luma wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I am an artist and I go to art school, I'm going to spend years studying the masters to learn their techniques and style. If I then produce an impressionist portrait on canvass, informed and influenced by the years of study of existing works.... am I violating copyright?

If you're creating new works inspired by copyrighted works, no that's not (or should not be) copyright infringement. If you're creating exact reproductions of copyrighted works (e.g. The Gates of Argonath from Peter Jackson's adaptation of Lord of the Rings), just in a different format (3d instead of 2d) then yeah, that probably is.

Right. Most of the conversations about IP on this site seem to rely on extremely abstract reasoning or idealist thinking about what constitutes "property" or what a "copy" is. My understanding is that judges are not so easily misled. If you are selling a "replica statue of two kings" online that is clearly intended to resemble the Gates of Argonath, you are setting yourself up for a lawsuit. It doesn't matter if you built it from your memory of the LOTR films, used an AI to generate a bunch of similar looking statues and picked the ones most similar to the films, or what have you. In practice any judge will see that you are attempting to make money off of the LOTR IP. (Note: not legal advice.)

Note that this doesn't mean that Stable Diffusion (and friends) are copyright infringing just because they're trained on copyrighted material. My brain doesn't infringe the LOTR copyright because of my memories of the films. If I turn my experience of fantasy epics into a new novel with a different storyline than LOTR, that's not copyright infringement. That's creativity. But those same memories can likewise be used to make works that are infringing. The question of infringement isn't in the creative act, it's in the artifact. I think it's plausible (though not certain of course) that IP questions will be settled for AIs in the same way: it's not infringement to train your AI on copyrighted material. It is infringement to use your AI to generate works that a reasonable person would conclude are intended to replicate or imitate copyrighted material.

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#108

Post by Daub » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

MisterTea wrote: post #98

Daub wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the shelf yes, but wow…. The requirements for Unreal are unreal. Recent versions handle real-time global illumination (Lumen) and dynamically render geometry to insane levels of detail (nanite). Both of these are groundbreaking achievements. But having had to install this in a bunch of university computers I can tell you that it comes at a cost. Interestingly, the most significant issue is the space these install…

> The requirements for Unreal are unreal. This has been true since 1998.

True. But the recent releases are a little better. We looked into using Unreal at school a few years ago but rejected it. This year was the first time we felt that our lab machines were equal to the task.

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#109

Post by worldsayshi » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 11:00 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #27

worldsayshi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wrong and easy reaction to this is to limit these services to not include copyrighted content. The more right and really really difficult solution would be to give the original copyright holders partial rights to the output. It really feels like the textile factory worker problem all over again. We can't let the big players be the benefactors every time.

> The more right and really really difficult solution would be to give the original copyright holders partial rights to the output. That is impossible (assigning credit to training images from the output is arbitrary, not deterministic) and wouldn't help anyone (imagine Spotify except it pays you even less). > It really feels like the textile factory worker problem all over again. We can't let the big players be the…

>Industrialization is better for society because it produces more customer surplus.

Also my point.

>Even Marx thought the Luddites were wrong.

Sure they are wrong in that they confuse what the problem is. If workers owned the factory they would be happy to automate the work. But their feeling of being left out has some validity because if they weren't the total value would improve.

The real issue is that the revenue brought back through automation doesn't benefit the worker. If it did, the automation would happen sooner because incentives would align better and the total value for society would thus likely improve faster.

Re: The Gates of Argonath in VR at 50 FPS on Unreal Engine

#110

Post by pwdisswordfish0 » Thu, Dec 15, 2022, 11:51 PM UTC

Loic wrote: post #82

Thinking about it, it could be a very good tool to help cure fear of heights (or vertigo, not sure about the right term in English).

I sometimes fear I shouldn’t play driving games too much, so that I don’t get desensitised against those intrusive thoughts I sometimes get on the road. I wonder how irrational that actually is, because it feels like pretty much the same thing as your idea. I mean it doesn’t seem far fetched that a very realistic VR driving simulation with subtly “easier” physics might make you a worse driver in reality. More closely related to the fear of heights, we also jump from greater heights in video games than we would in real life, and much more frequently. I practically never have a reason to jump down from anywhere, so I could imagine making some wrong estimations when, after years of doing it in VR, I’m somehow faced with a real-life situation.