Lorne Lanning On Real-Time CG & Machinima

ILL Robinson writes "Just finished reading a great interview with Oddworld president, Lorne Lanning, over on VFX World. In the interview, Lorne speaks of the latest in real-time 3D technologies and Machinima, and how it relates to not only game graphics, but also how it will impact filmmaking in general. He also speaks about Epic Game's latest engine, Unreal3, and how powerful and impressive the latest Epic Games engine is."

Comments

WOW

[haijak]

I hqave never seen Screen shots from U3 That dose look nearly movie quality!

it's like reviewing half-life2 before release

[abandonment]

sure the screens look good but they don't tell you that they are running at 3 fps because the engine doesn't run on anything close to consumer-level hardware...

what's the point of giving these glowing reviews to an engine that isn't going to be released until 2006 (by their estimate)...

spend some time reviewing the existing tools for machinima developers that are available.

http://www.realityfactory.ca provides a complete machinima game engine under an MIT license, complete source code, scripting language, cinematic camera system, not to mention the interactive possibilities...

of course i'm biased (i'm the project lead), but these articles do nothing to help the machinima community, which is almost exclusively indie (no budget) and needs tools that are affordable and commercial quality...

Re:it's like reviewing half-life2 before release

[Naffer]

You know, I found myself marveling at the quality of 3d graphics that can be done on today's hardware. I remember my Super Nintendo, and how great the graphics on it were. Then I remember buying a 3d accelerator card, a Voodoo Blaster Banshee (16MB PCI) and playing OpenGL quake2 for hours. I swore to myself, "It'll never get any better then this" Boy was I wrong. I can remember a dozen games that wowed me at the time, but are now totally unimpressive. That is the nature of computer generated graphics. As computers and their addin cards get faster, we can push more polygons, use higher resolution textures, and play with complicated lighting and surface manipulation in a way that no one was able to before.
Yea, those screenshots are impressive. So what if they won't run on consumer grade stuff yet? Give it a year or two and we'll be looking back at Doom3 and wondering what was so impressive.

Re:it's like reviewing half-life2 before release

[_egg]

I saw the new Unreal engine demo running behind closed doors at this year's GDC. It was on an unreleased NVidia part, but was running at a pretty high res and at least 30fps... and it was beautiful. Screenshots don't do it justice.

Re:it's like reviewing half-life2 before release

[Romeozulu]

Give it a year or two and we'll be looking back at Doom3 and wondering what was so impressive.

I'm doing that right now.

Actually

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe it does run in realtime. I believe thier real time demo was on an nvidia 6800, though not sure. They did give an impressive interactive demo though.

Thriller

[Anonymous Coward]

A machinima version of Michael Jackson's Thriller using Second Life's custom animation feature can be found here. The graphics are as good as UT and Second Life provides in-world tools to create sets, costumes, and props. Custom animations can then be uploaded to animate characters. It's a machinimist's dream!

If you are a machinimist and would like to sign up for a free trial of Second Life, enter "Ulrika Zugzwang", the film's creator, in the "Resident Referral" box and join the in-world film-production crew.

Unreal Engine 3 Video

[Anonymous Coward]

Unreal Engine 3 is going to rock. Unfortunately it runs at 3 fps on todays hardware.

Here is an awesome 7 minute video that shows scenes from Unreal Engine 3 and explains some of the technologoy behind it.

http://e3.gamespot.com.cn/movie/unreal30demo_e3200 4_wm.zip

I think it's interesting to note though that what really makes Unreal Engine 3 powerful is the tools. The truth is that even the open source OGRE engine supports all of the graphics features of Unreal Engine 3:

• Full shader support, including normal mapping, offset normal mapping(or "virtual displacement mapping" as they call it in ue3), frame buffer distortion(refraction effects, etc...), custom lighting models, and all other shader based effects
• High Dynamic Range Lighting(HDRI), "light blooms"
• Shadows - stencil and projective
• Projective textures("stained glass" lighting)
• Skeletal Animation

What OGRE doesn't have though is a complete set of powerful tools, and so artists have no chance of creating high quality content. But OGRE would have no trouble at all rendering all of the scenes in that video.

Review before release? Its called a "preview"

[MachDelta]

Whaddya mean "whats the point"? The point is, exciting new tools for machinima developers will be available within just a few years here, enabling them to take their art to entirely new levels. Oh boo-hoo, it won't be available for two years. Why the hell would Slashdot even exist if everyone went "Whats the point?" every time some exciting new future technology was announced? We thrive off this shit man!

And anyways, if you're looking for some definitive 'reviews' for existing machinima tools, I highly suspect you (and any other serious machinima devs) are in the wrong freakin place.

Now, if you're just looking to cheaply plug your own project...

Re:Review before release? Its called a "preview"

[abandonment]

except our 'product' is open-source and binaries are also available for free.

spreading the word about open-source projects is one of the goals of slashdot i would hope...

Um, what?

[__aatgod8309]

One wonderful quote (from whoever picked the accompanying images, i'd guess, not from the interview), 'Unreal Engine 3 is being utilized on such big games as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.'

Good article/interview besides that.