The premise is, is that this is from a realtime game engine. I say this is either running of a super computer or it’s all a bunch of BS.
What are your thoughts?
Video:
Seriously? Nobody cares about this?
The engine was supposedly rendering in real time and displayed with Directx11 on a high-end PC. There were reports from E3 of people interacting with the scene in real time (not real game-play; just moving cameras, shaking the guy’s beard, etc).
It is being discussed over at Blendernation.
Well, quite simply, i was astounded at seeing the realistic appearance…however, i’m skeptical of it’s validity.
Must have been a custom PC; maybe 4 gig graphics card or better.
Sure, did you see the new UDK 4 / Unreal 4 Engine elements demo?
It’s a visually “busy” but relatively uncomplicated demo … complete with flaws like a rifle floating in mid-air disconnected from the hands. And when they say, “real-time demo,” there’s no question that it’s a figure of speech. The animation could easily have been done in real time with high end hardware (the rather pasty skin-tones on some of the lead characters is a giveaway of this), but the movie itself was conventionally edited, either before or after the fact. The lead character movements are certainly mocap; the monsters are procedural or hand-animation, not particularly well done.
Like every other game-oriented scene, this short contains a lot of “busy action,” flying particles, jerky hand-camera moves, and darkness. Lots of skeletons are buried under it. There are so many things flying in front of your eyes that it’s (designed to be) visually overwhelming. The crescendo of the music track of course never stops peaking. All of the difficult transitions are “covered” either by flashing-particles, a focus pull, camera shake, darkness, or some combination of the above. We don’t see her actually getting on the dragon: the transition is blurred. There are hundreds of hedges like this one throughout the sequence. Each setup does everything it can to pull your eye to exactly-one part of the scene, because the rest of the parts are either static or somehow simplified. Fairly common game technique, but not cinematic, as this short would like to be regarded.
And, well, the upshot of the whole thing is that the guns never run out of ammunition and the buxom young girl never gets shot. The magical prop is literally straight out of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984). We’ve seen it before. So often, frankly, that it’s pastiche. I don’t see anything technically remarkable about this particular short. It doesn’t surprise me that a real-time render could have produced the final print in one pass. But it doesn’t excite me, either.
^^This^^
But seriously, the hair makes me think it’s not a realtime engine, like you will never see that kind of stuff taking place inside the game when playing it, plus the world is HUGE, makes me think it would be more of a backdrop than an actual place.
It reminds me of “The Last Of Us” trailer, I told everyone that it was NOT the realtime internal engine and even explained why (SSS, Hair), I got seriously berated by PS3 fanboys, I see the actual game play, I was right.
^^^Square Enix did the same thing with FF7. Amazing (for the time) realtime tech demo, but the actual game didn’t look nearly as good. I can believe they could render this short in real time and allow minimal interaction. However, if you added all the functions of a game engine, the fps would crash.
Of course they cheated with the transitions and the like but that doesn’t make it less visually impressing.
The amount of particles, the complex lighting computations, the post-processing filters and the shaders are top-notch results for what hardware we have today, we probably won’t see games looking like this for a while but we’re not far from those results already.
Also this is a tech demo, it is for showcasing what can be done using their realtime tech right now, not for showing their superior animation skills or logical abilities of counting bullets in a mag.
@jackblack it is a realtime engine and it is displaying all those things in realtime, Square Enix is a company based in Japan and the Japanese are well known for their extreme attention of detail to hair.
The girl does get shot and expels the bullet with the magic glowing water. The mindblowing final shot is never shown in the “real-time” videos. But to me, the most impressive part was the actor behind the old guy doing the summon: it packed the demo with real drama that was missing in the U4 demo (but was in Samaritan). Other than that, it’s straight Final Fantasy props, creatures, summons, a damsel in distress, an army of rebels etc.
I have no doubts games will achieve this level of presentation in the nextgen machines (not the WiiU). But I also have no doubts the videos shown were not real-time and the guy with the microphone showing off the demo just had it all from memory (“see, we can do dreadlocks” rather than “hey, let’s do some dreadlocks here”). They are aiming at hardware not still present here (aside perhaps if they’ve pulled a Samaritan and did use 2 or 3 cards).
I also believe the japanese games industry is trying to push back, to get to the first spot again they lost to westerners this generation. They had to make an impressive showing, if not quite real-time yet.
Regarding The Last of Us, it’s mighty impressive what hardware from 2006 is still able to do today along with the incredible artistic skills and high production values. It’s surely not quite like the original trailer, but they were able to capture the feeling, ambience and lighting very well in the game. I also believe it’s one of the smoothest and most natural camera motions I’ve yet to see in a game. Love the motion blur it generates too.