“Back Stage” Ray Tracing Tech Demo - Created By Luminous Productions

[Inuhanyou]

Bit surprised to see Square committing to the Luminous Engine. Thought it would've fizzled out with whatever drama ended up happening with Tabata.

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sunk cost fallacy. im guessing its not as big a dumpster fire as crystal tools, and its future proof so they can add stuff onto it...but its def not malleable or easy to use like UE4...the studio working with it also has to be the engine programmers for it...rather than teaching others how to use it

 

[benzy]

sunk cost fallacy. im guessing its not as big a dumpster fire as crystal tools, and its future proof so they can add stuff onto it...but its def not malleable or easy to use like UE4...the studio working with it also has to be the engine programmers for it...rather than teaching others how to use it

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Again, what are those assumptions based on? There's no doubt UE4 is probably the most versatile generic engine out there, but when you say not as easy to use like UE4 because the dev team needs to be engine programmers for Luminous, you're saying that UE4 is so easy to use that the KH team didn't need UE4 engine programmers? which is false.

The KH3 devs have said they initially couldn't even get their game to render when they first switched to UE4 and needed Epic's assistance.

https://kotaku.com/kingdom-hearts-iii-is-being-made-with-unreal-engine-4-1643235633

Talking with Famitsu, Nomura explained, "Development is steadily proceeding as planned. Due to the impact of changing the game engine to Unreal Engine 4, which we did for various reasons, there is some difficulty rendering images. And with the full support of Epic Games, we'll be able to progress smoothly."​

KH3 co-director in a post mortem even said the switch to UE4 was difficult (as with any large game for a team initially unfamiliar with said new engine) and that the KH3 dev team hit several brick walls and couldn't progress if it weren't for Epic's support team.

https://www.usgamer.net/amp/kingdom...e-spoilers-gdc-2019?__twitter_impression=true

It was a tough switch, Yasue says, because the team working on Kingdom Hearts 3 wasn't used to the new engine and had to learn it from scratch—even the differences between Unreal Engine 3, where Kingdom Hearts 3 was once tested, and Unreal Engine 4 were astounding. Luckily, with Unreal Engine 4 creator Epic Games available for help along the way, the switch eventually worked out very well. "We hit a lot of brick walls, but someone was there to help us out," says Yasue. "So I think that's a major thing, connecting to people. It's not just the technology and the engine."​

Every new AAA game is going to require engine programmers to help build new tools and tech and optimization to fullfill the creators' an artists' desires for what they want to do with their game, UE4 included.

Furthermore, the switch to UE4 wasn't even the dev team's decision. It was Square Enix higher-ups call, taking on the advice of Julien Merceron.

"We were first trying to test the game on Unreal Engine 3," Kingdom Hearts 3 co-director Tai Yasue tells me during this year's Game Developers Conference. "Then we switched to Luminous. Then we shifted to Unreal Engine 4, and that was a corporate decision. So it wasn't really me deciding that I wanted to use Unreal because of this and that; it was a decision from the top."​

Former Luminous Engine Lead Explains Why Square Enix Is Using it Only for Final Fantasy XV For Now

During a masterclass lecture held at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris, that DualShockers attended, former Square Enix Worldwide Technology

www.dualshockers.com

"former Square Enix Worldwide Technology Director Julien Merceron explained why Square Enix shifted from using Luminous Engine on several games to only Final Fantasy XV.​

​

Merceron explained that it's difficult to share an engine without first creating a game on it. Some companies do that, but he wouldn't. When he creates an engine, a game also has to be developed with that engine. After the engine proves itself in said game, then the technology can be shared, as the developers can finally say that it works.​

​

If the engine hasn't proved its worth, there's a constant risk of problems."​

 

[Strings]

Its still a really impressive tech even if the deficiecies of the demo seem to be negatively affecting why its impressive. I think a better way of doing this demo is to have a moment halfway through where someone turns on a point light above the head, the natural transition of the lighted environment like that doesn't really exist for most games these days in a super realistic way, especially when it comes to soft shadows.

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I think an ideal way to show off this tech is basically an equivalent to this:




Going for a low-key presentation just doesn't sell it.

 

[KKRT]

Yes but this is a bit of the problem. Raytracing appears in offline rendering everything else was very impressive out of shading PBR and raytracing appears at the same moment... Texturing, displacement mapping + tesselation for high polygon model with pixel-sized triangle, non blurry texture, decoupled sampling and decoupled geometry for crazy AA, motion blur and depth of field with 64 samples to 256 samples... In Turing there is some impressive feature like Mesh shading an improvement of PS2 vector unit for geometry back to the right manner to do geometry, texture space shading, VRS this is probably more important currently than raytracing...

When everything else will be nearly perfect lighting limitation will begin to be a problem and in realtime, PBR is used without RT this is more difficult for raytracing to impress than in offline rendering where RT and PBR arrive at the same moment... We reach 4k which is a very good resolution for playing inside a couch, if all other aspects of the rendering improve and reach great quality I think we can go with RT...

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I disagree, we can do good shading and texturing with pretty limiting budget, last gen era games are good examples of this, but lighting and shadwoing is not that great in games, especially real time one solutions.
I would trade current gen textures and shading for next-gen lighting any day of the week.

 

[benzy]

 

[blimblim]

Thanks for the hint !

Ooh great blimblim i beseech thee, The iniquity of this people according unto the greatness of thy mercy and by all the transcendent glory of Thy Name, to clothe Thy loved ones in the robe of wonder and upload a lossless video of the demo .

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We've asked both Square and Nvidia for an original file, but so far no luck.

 

[jmelons]

The animation bugs me. I get the whole ray trace/simulated light bit. Pretty cool. As a famous DP once said, the study of life is the study of light. The closer we get to simulating light, the more realistic the world will become. Cool bit. Animation is garbage though. Janky ass fingers, weird twitching lip. What's going on? No one holds things like this.

Cool tech, boring demo.

 

[Dictator]

Minecraft is a tough call as it's reportedly running simpler maps than the full game, but look at the Quake player hand & gun - the reflections and lighting are clearly added to a rasterized diffuse. If your GPU is constructing a G-Buffer, the renderer is a hybrid rasterizer+raytrace. I don't care what the marketing says.

Frankly, I don't think a fully path-traced game is possibly with the current RTX cards - we're probably looking at Turing's successor for that.

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You are saying two different things. I contradicted your point that primary visibility is done through the path tracer in Qauke II RTX and Minecraft. Which is very true if you watch presentations on it by Christoph Schied or NV. Or you can just load up quake II RTX, turn off all lighting except primary visibility and the denoiser you will see tons of noise and swimming all in primary visibility surfaces.

Like the above ^^

I would not contradict the fact that they use a Gbuffer for things (the volumetrics for example in Quake II need a shadow map and a G-Buffer as far as I know), but primary visibility is done via the trace and not via rasterisation. It was a big talking point as it costs 2 ms on turing (like nothing), but is SOO much more expensive of course on pre-RTRT hardware.

Minecraft is a tough call as it's reportedly running simpler maps than the full game,

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Minecraft is not running simpler maps than the full game, rather in the WIP demo its performance cratered past a 8 chunk world. 8 Chunk is not a simpler world than standard MC worlds.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

As a famous DP once said, the study of life is the study of light.

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Confession time: I was scared of math for a large portion of my life. I didn't take calculus till college, and the experience was basically traumatic as it was awful trying to learn it in a setting where the class was over 500 people big. It wasn't until maybe 5+ years ago that I buckled down and taught myself vector calculus, and holy shit.

I don't quite know how to put it into words correctly, but there's like this secret mathematical language that governs the universe. Calculus, the study of change, is the secret to all sorts of advanced mathematics. They teach math incorrectly in America. What we think are "fundamental maths" like addition subtraction, etc, are more like learning individual letters. The most math people get to is algebra or trig, which is kinda like learning how to put together letters to form a word.

By contrast, calculus is like learning how to structure and write paragraphs. Once you understand vectors and forces, once you understand that all numbers are inherently multidimensional, once you understand matricies, the entire world opens up. I see raytracing cards not as graphics technologies, honestly. I said earlier that it's more like a physics card, but even that's not quite right. It's a vector calculus tool. It is applicable in so so many ways. This type of math, which we now have a very powerful consumer tool for, opens up a LOT of possibilities, not just in games but all over. This is all insanely cool tech.

The math this stuff enables, I'll say it again, unlocks the secrets of the universe.

Anyone who wants to have their minds blown, watch these:



Once you start getting into calculus, you start talking about mathematical concepts which can't be understood in singular moments. They can only be understood when observed through time or change. That's the driving principle behind vector mathematics. A vector doesn't represent a point in space. It represents the transformation from one moment to another. With a mathetmatical language to describe changes like this, you can model and calculate all sorts of very complex things. This all plays back into the hardware that powers this type of raytracing. That's exactly what it's doing. It's giving us an answer -- in this case, the color of the resultant pixel on screen, that can only be understood by examining the change in position of photons over time. You can replace light and photons with any sort of driving force. It's nuts.

 

[LabouredSubterfuge]

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This is arguably more obviously instructive than the video. Also shows the scene isn't being solely lit by the mirror lights.

 

[chris 1515]

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Where does it comes from?

 

[sweetmini]

We've asked both Square and Nvidia for an original file, but so far no luck.

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Thanks for listening to my prayer and taking the time to reply :)
I shall wait in the shadows~ (path-traced)

 

[benzy]

Where does it comes from?

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They had another live-stream presentation yesterday on next-gen character rendering and showcased it with the same ray-traced demo. They took down the video after the livestream though.

They scanned in real people, but these models are also fully deformable with age, fat, muscle parameters. Looks like a next-gen version of the character creator from FFXV Comrades.

 

[Tappin Brews]

"meh, not impressed. i've seen games that look better on todays console"

-arguably the best looking game of all time-

 

[Deleted member 54292]

Confession time: I was scared of math for a large portion of my life. I didn't take calculus till college, and the experience was basically traumatic as it was awful trying to learn it in a setting where the class was over 500 people big. It wasn't until maybe 5+ years ago that I buckled down and taught myself vector calculus, and holy shit.

I don't quite know how to put it into words correctly, but there's like this secret mathematical language that governs the universe. Calculus, the study of change, is the secret to all sorts of advanced mathematics. They teach math incorrectly in America. What we think are "fundamental maths" like addition subtraction, etc, are more like learning individual letters. The most math people get to is algebra or trig, which is kinda like learning how to put together letters to form a word.

By contrast, calculus is like learning how to structure and write paragraphs. Once you understand vectors and forces, once you understand that all numbers are inherently multidimensional, once you understand matricies, the entire world opens up. I see raytracing cards not as graphics technologies, honestly. I said earlier that it's more like a physics card, but even that's not quite right. It's a vector calculus tool. It is applicable in so so many ways. This type of math, which we now have a very powerful consumer tool for, opens up a LOT of possibilities, not just in games but all over. This is all insanely cool tech.

The math this stuff enables, I'll say it again, unlocks the secrets of the universe.

Anyone who wants to have their minds blown, watch these:



Once you start getting into calculus, you start talking about mathematical concepts which can't be understood in singular moments. They can only be understood when observed through time or change. That's the driving principle behind vector mathematics. A vector doesn't represent a point in space. It represents the transformation from one moment to another. With a mathetmatical language to describe changes like this, you can model and calculate all sorts of very complex things. This all plays back into the hardware that powers this type of raytracing. That's exactly what it's doing. It's giving us an answer -- in this case, the color of the resultant pixel on screen, that can only be understood by examining the change in position of photons over time. You can replace light and photons with any sort of driving force. It's nuts.

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This post rules

 

[Grue]

Does anyone else feel like this was missing the splash at the end, where they tell you which perfume to buy?

 

[zedox]

Krejlooc The part of calculus that made me real stupid (damn it was hard in college) was that this fucker Sir Isaac Newton "invented" (he still learned things from his teacher and some other people made some other shit that he used but he's credited for it) calculus to answer another question about why the planets move around the sun as an ellipse instead of a circle...in like some months. Like tf. Crazy smart people. But after you learn it and do game dev is becomes second nature, especially with physics involved.

 

[benzy]

"meh, not impressed. i've seen games that look better on todays console"

-arguably the best looking game of all time-

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Man, that looks very underwhelming compared to this tech demo, noticeably generations behind.

 

[chris 1515]

Man, that looks very underwhelming compared to this tech demo, noticeably generations behind.

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Yes the demo is far ahead, now we need to see what it will be ingame...

 

[kuhn87]

Wow, nice PS7 graphic