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A first look at Unreal Engine 5

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Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#511

Post by hnick »

artsyca wrote: post #184
flipgimble wrote: post #145

Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass w…

Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges

I told my wife it wasn't possible for her website since I didn't want to do it with images to coddle IE, which was apparently the state of the art at the time. She still brings it up 10 years later!

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#512

Post by theptip »

mkl wrote: post #508
centimeter wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mandalorian filmed a lot of scenes with UE4 doing real-time rendering onto large LED screens like in that demo. Looked pretty good! Probably more fun and easier for the actors too.

That was done for lighting. The lower quality real time imagery was replaced with offline rendered versions in post-production. "The final animated VFX would be added in later; the screens were merely to provide interactive lighting to match the animations." -- https://ascmag.com/articles/the-mandalorian , discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22378679

> That was done for lighting.

I don't think that's correct, the ILM team presented this technology in a video:

https://youtu.be/gUnxzVOs3rk?t=104

(paraphrased) "it was designed to both light the actors and be a background that we can photograph, so that we end up with real-time live pixels in-camera"

Also from the article you linked:

> If the content was created in advance of the shoot, then photographing actors, props and set pieces in front of this wall could create final in-camera visual effects — or “near” finals, with only technical fixes required, and with complete creative confidence in the composition and look of the shots.

I'm not an expert in film terminology but it does not sound by any stretch that this was primarily about lighting.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#513

Post by [deleted] »

flipgimble wrote: post #145

Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass w…

[deleted]

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#514

Post by artsyca »

Keloran wrote: post #509
artsyca wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude I spent a large portion of my early career as a web developer making rounded corners on divs using all sorts of kludges

You want kludgy, try my madness https://github.com/Keloran/oldjs/blob/master/roundit.js

Is this code adding successive divs to simulate rounded corners? Looks incredible -- invariably someone would need animation on these too would this work?

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#515

Post by mentos »

airstrike wrote: post #221
robmerki wrote: post #24

I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has truly created a way to show full quality assets at runtime without manual LOD / optimization, then this is going to be a huge process improvement for game development. Same goes for this lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became that much easier. They also bought Quixel,…

I'm mostly concerned about the storage and bandwidth issues associated with this level of detail. Are we going to download 500GB games on our Playstation 5s?

Maybe we'll go back to the days of cartridges. Imagine getting a 1TB SSD that you push into your PS5

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#516

Post by wolco »

tanilama wrote: post #457
gfxgirl wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI though, It's not open source. Open source has a meaning and Unreal doesn't fit that meaning. https://www.google.com/search?q=open+soruce+definition

It is open source in the sense the source code is available for you to see. But probably not on the usage part.

It is not open source in any sense.

You can see it so that part is shared but if you try to use it you fall under a very different licease. If you try to modify and sell you can't. Modify and use you must pay. Use you must pay.

Bait open source might be a better term.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#517

Post by ketzo »

No one seems to be talking about the announcement at the end of the page:

> Friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leaderboards, and accounts: we built these services for Fortnite, we launched them across seven major platforms - PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. Now we’re opening up Epic Online Services to all developers FOR FREE in a simple multiplatform SDK!

> Mix and match these services together with your own account services, platform accounts, or Epic Games accounts, which reach the world’s largest cross-platform social graph with over 350 million players and their 2.2 billion friend connections across half a billion devices.

Free SDK for online game services? That's an insane boon to any small studio / solo development of a multiplayer game.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#518

Post by mkl »

theptip wrote: post #512
mkl wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was done for lighting. The lower quality real time imagery was replaced with offline rendered versions in post-production. "The final animated VFX would be added in later; the screens were merely to provide interactive lighting to match the animations." -- https://ascmag.com/articles/the-mandalorian , discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22378679

> That was done for lighting. I don't think that's correct, the ILM team presented this technology in a video: https://youtu.be/gUnxzVOs3rk?t=104 (paraphrased) "it was designed to both light the actors and be a background that we can photograph, so that we end up with real-time live pixels in-camera" Also from the article you linked: > If the content was created in advance of the shoot, then photographing actors, pro…

I hadn't seen that video. I wonder how much was just left as the background screens (out of focus backgrounds in closeup shots seem likely). It does make it clear that the ceiling screens were mostly just for lighting, as they don't photograph well from the low angles.

It was for was shot composition as well; the cinematographer could see how it would end up while shooting. The screens updated to match the camera position in real time (e.g. to show the rest of a spaceship whose door was a physical prop).

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#519

Post by seanwilson »

random_ind_dude wrote: post #443
seanwilson wrote: post #119

What's going on behind the scenes to explain the jump in graphics quality? Hardware? Algorithmic? Does this involve some breakthrough somewhere or is this incremental?

The graphics look good because of two things: Quixel and global illumination. Quixel is Swedish company that Epic acquired in 2019. Quixel does high-resolution scans of actual physical objects(photogrammetry) and makes them available as textures in Unreal Engine. The sheer rock faces that you see in the demo are Quixel megascans of actual rocks. The other thing that makes the graphics look impressive is global illumi…

What makes this stuff possible now though? New global illumination algorithms? Better scanning techniques? Or mostly better hardware?

I don't know how it compares to other games to be honest. If it's a big jump though, I'd be interested to know what's being done different and why it's being done now.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#520

Post by ponyous »

Apofis wrote: post #250
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you still need to do some of that just for file size and data transfer, if nothing else? In the demo they said it had hundreds of billions of triangles. Google tells me you can get down to 18 bytes or so per triangle, but even if we assume a lower bound of just three bytes per triangle (amortized storage of 1 vertex per triangle of an x,y,z point), we're talking about on the order of terabytes to just store tha…

This would be awesome tech if everyone had gigabit fiber. You could just stream all the assets during loading time or if possible during gameplay. On second thought, 125MB per second probably wouldn't be fast enough. A 30 second load time would only result in 3750mb of assets at best. 4k on a Google Stadia doesn't sound bad if the latency is good.

Somebody on reddit calculated that those Zbrush character models in demo are roughly 125MB in size.
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