You know that a week will be busy when companies start announcing a day or two early to beat the flood. While Game Developers Conference starts tomorrow, Quixel published their Jungle demo to YouTube today in promotion of their MEGASCANS material library. The video was rendered in Unreal Engine 4.
Their other material samples look quite convincing. The vines on a wall (column in this case) is particularly interesting because it even looks like two distinct layers, despite being a single mesh with displacement as far as I can tell. I don't know, maybe it is two or three layers. It would certainly make sense if it was, but the top and bottom suggests that it is single, and that is impressive. It even looks self-occluding.
Pricing and availability for the library is not yet disclosed, but it sounds like it will be a subscription service. The software ranges from $25 to $500, depending on what you get and what sort of license you need (Academic vs Commercial and so forth).
Still has that “Unreal
Still has that “Unreal Engine” look to it. Given most engines are easily identifiable at this point to the watchful eye. I think it’s the way Epic deals with lighting that gives it a unique, and sometimes hated, feel. UE3 had the plastic-y look because of the lighting.
Either way it’ll probably be years before we can see this remotely equaled in actual games, but it’s nice to know what the capabilities are given it’ll probably be around for a good 10 years.
Pretty much happens when the
Pretty much happens when the lighting layer of the object is of a lower resolution than the mesh detail, as Weiss as the texture resolution. That ends up giving certain objects an unnecessarily rounded. Though improving the lighting detail will make things harder to render, e.g., doing in in Maya, turns a 30 minute render, into a 3 hour render.
This is rather funny. Looks
This is rather funny. Looks extremely beautiful, but VERY unrealistic at the same time. Truly hilarious. Maybe it’s because they’ve gone almost complete fantasy/sci-fi with these texture demos, and we all know that those can’t look good in human’s mind if they’re too realistic (uncanny valley, mateys).
Too plastic and vivid.
Too plastic and vivid. Where’s mud and dirt? It looks painfully fake.
It’s never going to look
It’s never going to look realistic without ray tracing, and AO(calculated through ray algorithms), but once that Ray tracing circuitry makes it onto GPUs then things are going to look better. Even if the Ray tracing is just used for close in objects, and other restricted areas, there will be a noticeable difference, backgrounds and scenes with a lot of rapid movement will be fine with the current methods. Those PowerVR demos, that utilize the PowerVR wizard’s ray tracing on a limited amount of meshes, still is able to produce some nice partially ray traced scenes, and the overall ambient scene lighting can be greatly improved by a quick ray traced pass/hybrid ray traced mix. Those vines look like they were rendered with standard shadow buffers.
It’s always going to look faux, without ray tracing.
Hay Scott, It took more than
Hay Scott, It took more than 5 hours to get this above post to take, what is up with your spam filter provider, do they even know what they are doing?
Sigh. These things wait until
Sigh. These things wait until Ryan's in another state to break, don't they. I'll let them know.