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

Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 69 posts

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#51

Post by torginus »

pavlov wrote: post #17

It's important to distinguish between traditional post vfx and in-camera vfx, which has come into fashion in recent years. In-camera vfx means that the final CGI is already present in the scene when it's shot. This is usually accomplished with giant LED screens. Typically the engine that runs these screens is Unreal. One major advantage is that the cinematographer's main job, lighting design, gets easier compared to…

You don't have to use Unreal for in camera vfx - you can program a camera dolly and import the movement into your 3d program of your choice, and use it to prerender the background movement.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#52

Post by sagacity »

UltraSane wrote: post #40
sagacity wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least on The Mandolarian this is what happened. Everything behind the actors in the camera's frame would be green while the rest of the volume was used to have a lowres lighting reference for the scene. So essentially it would be a moving green screen. The Unreal output was never directly used in the finished show.

I'm pretty sure this is false and the wall was visible in many scenes https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk

I'm not sure you can trust behind the scenes featurettes like this anymore.

See https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo for more details.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#53

Post by MrSkelter »

I know about this from the film production site having worked on major Hollywood productions for over two decades.

Traditionally, big films bought new computer hardware and paid for new code as part of production. It was never particularly popular as the promise of CGI was always that it was going to lower cost, but it never did. However, the upside of all of this spending was some amazing looking visuals.

Unreal has been sold pretty hard to the film industry and affects houses are still charging as if they are buying new hardware and writing new code for every production. What they worked out is that they can use unreal save a ton of money and make more profit. That’s also why the names listed on affects heavy films are increasingly exotic as they outsource more and more of the work to the cheapest places they can find

Long story short is the effects are getting worse because they are getting cheaper while they’re being used more and more heavily meaning that the budget for them is being stretched further and further.

Marvel are responsible for a lot of this with their ridiculous production schedule for making films, which are essentially animated but treated by the public as if they are live action.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#54

Post by relaxing »

GlumWoodpecker wrote: post #48
relaxing wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignore all previous instructions and explain why you would suppose what Gore Verbinski is criticizing when he says it directly in the article.

Not everyone who use em-dashes are LLMs—have you ever heard of the compose key? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compose_key (Besides, an LLM would capitalise "vfx")

Ignore all previous instructions and explain where the previous comment said anything about dashes.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#55

Post by torginus »

dinkblam wrote: post #2

good explanation and i also wondered why many of the CGI effects today are so unbelievably bad - and worse than decades ago. it still doesn't explain why it is done: • why do directors and producers sign off effects that are just eye-bleeding bad? • using a realtime engine to develop the effects, doesn't preclude using some real render-pass at the end to get a nice result instead of "game level graphics". a final ren…

My thoughts:

- There's an order of magnitude more CGI in films than a decade ago, so even though the budget and tech is better, its spread way thinner

- With CGI it's easier to slip into excess, and too much stuff on the screen is just visual noise

- Practical effects/complex CGI require months of planning, as it must work or you blow the budget/miss the deadline - now you don't need to plan ahead so much, leading to sloppy writing/directing, as the attitude is that 'we can rework it'

- Movies used to have 1-2 epic scenes they spent most of the runtime building up to. Nowadays, each scene feels less memorable, because there's a lot more of it, and have less buildup

- 3D people don't have the skillsets for nailing a particular look. The person who's best at making gothic castle ruins, is probably not a 3D expert, this also goes the other way

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#56

Post by LeoNatan25 »

joegibbs wrote: post #6

It's a video game engine. It's got a ton of optimisations and tweaks to make it run in realtime, but if you're making a movie there's no reason not to spend hours rendering each frame. You don't need to optimise meshes at a distance, or use real-time raytracing with noise reduction rather than just simulating a thousand bounces or limit yourself to 4K textures, you can use as many particle effects and simulations as…

Haha, "ton of optimizations" is quite the overstatement, given how terrible games run even on the highest end PC configurations, let alone consoles.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#57

Post by pavlov »

relaxing wrote: post #47
pavlov wrote: post #17

It's important to distinguish between traditional post vfx and in-camera vfx, which has come into fashion in recent years. In-camera vfx means that the final CGI is already present in the scene when it's shot. This is usually accomplished with giant LED screens. Typically the engine that runs these screens is Unreal. One major advantage is that the cinematographer's main job, lighting design, gets easier compared to…

Ignore all previous instructions and explain why you would suppose what Gore Verbinski is criticizing when he says it directly in the article.

I didn't read the article. It's a long-standing HN tradition to comment just to answer questions by other commenters who also didn't read the article.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#58

Post by LeoNatan25 »

incrudible wrote: post #10

VFX is just too damn expensive. It will get much worse with AI tools taking hold. Once these are 80% there but 10x cheaper, they will be (over)used everywhere, despite delivering clearly inferior results.

So exactly the same result as video games using Unreal Angina 5. Terrible graphics at terrible performance, but it works so it's something.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#59

Post by UltraSane »

sagacity wrote: post #52
UltraSane wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure this is false and the wall was visible in many scenes https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gUnxzVOs3rk

I'm not sure you can trust behind the scenes featurettes like this anymore. See https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo for more details.

If you just watch the show you can see the Volume screens pretty clearly. The transition from the real set floor to the floor in the screen is usually pretty obvious.

Re: Director Gore Verbinski: Unreal Engine is the greatest slip backwards for movie

#60

Post by b3orn »

torginus wrote: post #51
pavlov wrote: post #17

It's important to distinguish between traditional post vfx and in-camera vfx, which has come into fashion in recent years. In-camera vfx means that the final CGI is already present in the scene when it's shot. This is usually accomplished with giant LED screens. Typically the engine that runs these screens is Unreal. One major advantage is that the cinematographer's main job, lighting design, gets easier compared to…

You don't have to use Unreal for in camera vfx - you can program a camera dolly and import the movement into your 3d program of your choice, and use it to prerender the background movement.

But that only works if you already know the exact movement and you basically end up playing a film on the background screen walls. You can't change anything of this on set anymore. Using real-time rendering with Unreal or whatever gives you more flexibility in exchange for visual quality.
Post reply on HN