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

21–30 of 69 posts

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

#21

Post by Arwill »

gambiting wrote: post #12
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…

>> 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. That's how it's used though? It only runs real time for preview, but the final product is very much not rendered in real time at all. Obviously it's a very flexible tool that works with what you need and what you can afford - Disney runs it on their compute…

The problem is the way surface lighting/scattering is calculated, which does not match what traditional offline renders do.

My issue with UE is the opposite, the engine went too far into cinema production, and making it a performant game engine requires code refactoring. At which point an open-source engine might be a better choice. Its a mix of two (three) worlds, and not the best choice for one specific use.

For what is actually hard to do, like character animation, UE is a good choice. The lighting can be replaced more easily than the animation system.

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

#22

Post by Xenoamorphous »

> Nowadays, movie fans seem much less impressed by CGI in films. There's a general distaste for a perceived overuse of CGI in favor of practical effects, and there are a lot of complaints that recent CGI is less-convincing and more fake-looking than it used to be, even in the biggest budget films.

Funny it says this right after mentioning Jurassic Park. I, an avid JP fan that was blown away by the movie (and the book) when I was a dino-obsessed teenager, always thought that it was the non-CGI dinos the ones that didn't look that realistic (even if the "puppets" were fantastically done, it was more about the movement/animation). Although we have to keep in mind they used those mostly for close up shots where CGI would've looked even worse.

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

#23

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

hasperdi wrote: post #11
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…

On the other hand, it depends on what kind of movie you're making and who the target group is. Say you're making children's videos like Cocomelon or Bluey in 3D, you don't need all these nice things. At the end, movies are about the stories, not just pretty graphics.

> At the end, movies are about the stories, not just pretty graphics.

The great people at Pixar and DreamWorks would be a bit offended. Over the past three or so decades they have pushed every aspect of rendering to its very limits: from water, hair, atmospheric effects, reflections, subsurface scattering, and more. Watching a modern Pixar film is a visual feast. Sure, the stories are also good, but the graphics are mind-bendingly good.

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

#24

Post by julik »

This is the next evolution of the "My film does not use CGI" sneering. Sure, doing proper pre-rendered VFX with photo-realism is great and also people doing it love it. But can it be done on the budgets/fixed bids/turnarounds when the producer comes with "...and all of that will be a full virtual set and it should be streaming next Monday morning", for peanuts?..

If it's Gore saying it - maybe he should talk to his producers then, and ask them whether they actually have budgeted the "proper" VFX talent/timelines for the show. He has creative control - the people doing the work do not.

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

#25

Post by RicoElectrico »

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…

The LED screen thing is so absurd that for a long time I assumed they just replace the content in post somehow and its purpose is merely to aid in lighting and for actors to orient better in the scene.

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

#27

Post by __alexs »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #25
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…

The LED screen thing is so absurd that for a long time I assumed they just replace the content in post somehow and its purpose is merely to aid in lighting and for actors to orient better in the scene.

I guess current pipelines depends a lot on chroma key for the matte so isolating the actors cheaply might be hard with such complex backgrounds? Seems like it might not be long until we can automate that in such a controlled environment though.

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

#28

Post by taneq »

RicoElectrico wrote: post #25
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…

The LED screen thing is so absurd that for a long time I assumed they just replace the content in post somehow and its purpose is merely to aid in lighting and for actors to orient better in the scene.

I don’t see why it’s so absurd, with how cheap display tech has become recently. Ambitious, maybe, but it seemed to work pretty well in The Mandolorian.

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

#30

Post by __alexs »

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…

They definitely do use the video directly from the Volume a lot of the time. It's not just immersion or fancy lighting for the actors.
Post reply on HN