-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
This was built in Dreams on a base PS4. My jaw is on the floor
- Thread starter Deleted member 46489
- Start date
Here's a cool video showing some of the cool tricks you can do to achieve this 'hyper-real' effect in Dreams
www.youtube.com
Making Realistic Textures in Dreams PS4 (Showcase)
Hey dreamers I'm excited to be able to showcase you how to make realistic textures in Dreams on a Playstation 4! With the techniques shown in this video you ...
www.youtube.com
Serious (not hating) questions, as I've only played the official levels and not tried the creator.
Is there a reason they walk so slow? Does the game struggle with loading or draw-in?
Can the engine/console handle this in big environments?
Is there a resource limit, like if you create such detailed world's, does that reduce the remove the ability to add characters, AI, actions?
Otherwise this seems to good to be true for talented people.
Is there a reason they walk so slow? Does the game struggle with loading or draw-in?
Can the engine/console handle this in big environments?
Is there a resource limit, like if you create such detailed world's, does that reduce the remove the ability to add characters, AI, actions?
Otherwise this seems to good to be true for talented people.
that's what it reminded me of. Instantly gave me the vibes but couldn't remember the name
i like walking simulators done well, so I hope to see some in dreams - this does look insane
this looks like the game I think a lot of us were hoping Below would turn out to be. and then some. that's one helluva Dreams trailer, thanks for sharing.
The stuff that's going to come out now that people are getting a really good grasp of the tools are gonna blow us away. Cowl is looking really good especially, like the best kind of indie level game.
Yes im more excited for 2d and isometric games like hollow knight and hotline miami style. For such games i think Dreams has enough thermo to provide for creators to go wild and do anything. Cowl has the trailer of a top notch indie game for example. It has a long way to go but for a single person creating it within a few months is already super impressive. Im not hoping much out of 3d games until ps5 version as apart from thermo 3d stuff requires immense amount of time as well.
How long does it take to learn the tools in Dreams? Like to get a basic grasp of them?
I need to buy this game, but I'm afraid of the learning curve.
I need to buy this game, but I'm afraid of the learning curve.
A very basic grasp, as in placing objects and very basic world building? A couple of hours tops.
Understanding sculpting and animation etc, a good few hours more.
I built a little level that looks cool in a weekend as a complete noob to it.
Reminds me of that egg and beans breakfast plate dreams piece in terms of photorealism. Except grander scale.
It sounds like a point-cloud with particles-like billboards attached to them. When we do photogrammetry (scanning real world objects) an intermediary phase is a point-cloud generation. One of the main limitation to display a point cloud is the large amount of data required to render a model in descent quality, and I guess on current gen consoles the lack of SSD really hurt Dreams' full potential. Epic just added support for rendering point-clouds in their Unreal Engine 4 as well, I'm curious what devs will come up with in the next few years.
Here's a cool video showing some of the cool tricks you can do to achieve this 'hyper-real' effect in Dreams
Making Realistic Textures in Dreams PS4 (Showcase)
Hey dreamers I'm excited to be able to showcase you how to make realistic textures in Dreams on a Playstation 4! With the techniques shown in this video you ...
Wait, the video in the OP was made from techniques like this? That's even more insane.
I'm the opposite! That's what makes it realistic looking to me.
How often in a dense looking Forrest/trail walk do you see plant life swaying about like there's a hurricane blowing through?
Look at that video above your post. The stillness of the Forrest is what makes it so full of life.
Honestly I prefer this over the average professional game which always has some hyperactive bushes swaying back and forth constantly in a very unconvincing and distracting manner. It's a calm day, things don't always sway back and forth constantly.
When I first saw the pic, I was like na na na no way. Amazing!
The PS5 version of Dreams... with that SSD and with RayTracing, will look and run.... I can't even describe it.
Plus 3D Sound and with haptic feedback...yeah, creators will have so much fun coming up with unique experiences.
There's a really good siggraph talk from 2015 where Alex Evans talks about how the art style, toolset, engine and performance requirements forced numerous engine iterations and re-thinks, a mini version of a siggraph talk I think (it's only half an hour long so well worth a watch). mmalex is one of those super geeky tech savants who can seemingly just chat away and make dumb people like me think they understood something well beyond them, no dry boring technobabble. So it's not traditional texture/model/mesh-based, and it's not voxels, what I got is that it's based on constructive solid geometry; making complex stuff by applying super basic stuff to other super basic stuff by adding, subtracting, blending and colouring. Signed distance fields define around a dozen of these primitive shapes likes cube, cone, taurus and splines, and clouds of point cloud 'splats' are used to render them. He goes into more specifics on what that offers for LODs, lighting, intersections etc.
Dreams are really tiny, and pretty much everyone I've talked to about it comments on the minimal time from launching a Dream from the cloud to playing. It feels weirdly next gen already, but on an aging console that was already pretty averagely powered at launch.
He abuses dof and fov nicely in his work along with those layered techniques for getting very texture-y results. Not sure how the videos are captured, but if it's using the ps4's in-built capture, it's pretty destructive to IQ.
Watch the video I linked above if you have 20-30 minutes, traditional LOD isn't applicable here, you get those as an inherent property of the engine. Movement might be slow because of an artistic choice, might be they're abusing motion blur or something else that would artifact with faster movement. You'd have to ask.
Big is relative. You can certainly have large expanses in your Dreams. It's a trade off on the various thermometer aspects, but some aspects require you to think about things a bit differently than you might naturally - some simple things burn thermometer, others you feel like you're getting a lot for "free".
He says in his tweet he's almost burned through the thermometer, but I dunno how much he has in that scene. Thing with Dreams is, you can transition to another scene in a matter of a few seconds, there's no real load/wait time, so it just needs considered design.
Totally agree. I trail run through an eerie tall pine forest near here (well, used to, when we were allowed to play outside) and there's nothing but creepy stillness. The smaller vegetation, ferns etc. barely move and looking up through to the sky peeping through looks just like his videos.
Showed it to my girfriend and she thought I was showing her an Osmo Pocket video of the Forrest.
this is going to take us amazing places.
this is going to take us amazing places.
Dreams use splats for textures and hulls for opaque things, so not point cloud. Point cloud Was not performant in real time and left seams in objects, everything was transparent to a degree!
Yeah, watching this was a mistake lol. Day 20 of the quarantine and I miss the forest so so much. Going outside in general.
Absolutely phenomenal how real this looks.
Absolutely phenomenal how real this looks.
No. The higher the res the more apparent the lack of fine details become. When it's low res you can't tell the difference between a lack of detail and detail lost due to IQ, so you're brain fills in the gaps.
I really hope this game is carried over into the next generation. I know it'll be back-compat but I'd love to see some kind of proper PS5 support, so users could take advantage of that system's strengths. I don't know how they'd go about doing that but they're clearly wizards over there.
Thanks so much for taking the time to reply. Will check the video out. Possibly the first time I've been so intrigued by a game or engine more than the game itself.
:)
OP
OP
Well, I have some good news for you. Alex Evans confirmed in a recent interview that they've got the game running on the PS5 (natively). So they are definitely going to take advantage of the PS5's power.
They really have to fix the direct upload quality for PS5. All the videos that were directly uploaded are blurry as shit.
Impressive achievement though. I'll for sure jump into the Dreamiverse for PS5
Impressive achievement though. I'll for sure jump into the Dreamiverse for PS5
This part of a Q&A MM did with Alex Evans is the clearest explanation of how this breaks down:
My understanding is that the primary thing you see in Dreams is splats being drawn at the surface of the object. The hull of the object is drawn solidly, but this isn't something you'll see for the most part unless you're very distant at which point the splats disappear. The hulls are used to fully occlude anything behind the object (and facilitate occlusion culling).
I don't think it's really right to say Dreams has textures at all, but you can achieve texture by:
1) Spray-painting which is basically colouring the surface flecks
2) Fine detail sculpting which can give you genuine bumps and parallax occlusion
3) Layering 'paint' over an object, which is adding flecks without bricks
I thought it uses splats to paint surfaces on point clouds. Without the point clouds, where do you splat? I went back to the video I linked, he said "Dreams is rendering a cloud of point clouds of point clouds" right after he talks about once you're rendering everything with splats, you get certain stuff for free and can take advantage of that. The pipeline flow diagram shows edit list -> compute shader of doom -> signed distance fields -> pre-filtered & clustered point clouds (cloud of cloud of point clouds) -> software renderer (no triangles) atomic unit -> zbuffer/g-buffer/something off screen.
Did the engine change again after this? EDIT, given the link above, yes they did :) To add the "solidness" of the brick engine to stopp stuff being minutely transparent.
EDIT2: That video is really good, annoyed I'd missed it. Alex states later on in it (question at 56:25) "it's point clouds. What we're doing is point clouds... it's point clouds over the surface of a distance field which is volumetric but then is which raymarched using sphere tracing".
Last edited:
Looks great, will keep an eye out. I'm also really looking forward to this:
The PS5 could offer huge improvements, but it's not clear what MediaMolecule will do at this stage. On the graphics side you'd imagine the PS5 would trivially allow resolution/performance improvements. Whether they'll also do stuff like HDR, what if anything they'd use ray tracing hardware for, is hard to know.
The more interesting side of things is that the increase in RAM would facilitate you to have many more 'things' and the much more unique art data, the improved GPU would allow sculpt data to be evaluated faster (improving loading times), and the increase in CPU power would allow a lot more logic to be encompassed in a scene.
The big question for me though is what they could use the SSD for though, as that's where the biggest hardware jump is. If Dreams could support level streaming (something they'd have to build significant tools around), it would radically expand what kinds of games you could make with high quality visuals.
