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Real-Time, Movie-Quality CGI For Games
An anonymous reader writes "An Intel-owned development team can now render CGI-quality graphics in real time. 'Their video clips show artists pulling together 3D elements like a jigsaw puzzle (see for example this video starting at about 3:38), making movie-level CG look as easy as following a recipe.' They hope that the simplicity of 'Project Offset' could ultimately give them the edge in the race to produce real-time graphics engines for games."
They've discovered the hidden secrets to rendering Academy Award winning films such as "Gears of War" and "Crysis."
Congrats Intel dev team!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
... now they can pump out crappy movies that have quality CG faster than ever before?
Now maybe they can get to work on shipping on-board graphics cards that can actually play games released within the past couple of years...
How can there be any doubt that realtime rendering will approach the quality of today's offline rendering when computing power grows exponentially?
While the clips look amazing, I can't say that I'm in the least bit shocked by this. GPU's and CPU's are only getting more powerful, so it would stand to reason that this kind of thing is finally becoming feasible. The real question is whether or not this game
now there we have an accurate statement: "Computer Generated Imagery" quality graphics
"Movie-Quality" is basically a worthless statement. Which movie? Avatar, Final Fantasy, Toy Story, Tron? The quality of digitally produced movies, and the quality of game graphics power are constantly moving targets.
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I'd wager that their solution is way more CPU-intensive than GPU-intensive. Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
At what point will the hardware capabilities exceed the software we can write?
If we have the hardware to simulate 'The Matrix', but no-one has written the software to make it realistic, what do we gain?
someone please tag the article as /.'ed
server is already showing a 500
4 or 5 years ago, it was basically comparable to Unreal 3. The motion blur was probably the best feature I saw. Fine graphics, but nothing really mind blowing. Having said that, I have not seen what they've done since Intel bought them, but I'm guessing its basically support for Intel's research projects.
As a developer of modern console and PC games, My Professional Opinion is that there's nothing new to see here.
will they actually spend more time on the gameplay now, or is this just a new plateau in making barely interactive movies disguised as games?
It's no longer hamstrung by Larrabee to it should be pretty cool if it ships, they actually purchased this company a year or two ago. I hope they release the engine because Unreal Engine UDK is now free to develop with and you license when you ship under flexible terms. It'd be nice to get these tools from Intel, until it ships it's just a science project. There are games now which do all of these rendering effects with real game data and very large paged worlds already.
Having said that, I have not seen what they've done since Intel bought them, but I'm guessing its basically support for Intel's research projects.
Why even guess? The article there shows you exactly what they've done since Intel bought them.
Oh wait, this is /. No one reads the articles.
In all fairness, we do tend to browse the pictures.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Attention, developers: graphics are not the most important thing.
For example, the two Sonic Adventure games for the Dreamcast were imperfect but very enjoyable. Now check Sonic The Hedgehog for PS3/X360. It looked far better, but it had craploads of game-breaking glitches, long loading times, overall poor design, so the reviews were mostly negative. Another example, Doom. Everyone loved the first two games... then came in Doom 3, that looked stunning, but played more like a survival horror game. How can someone take such a wild, frantic, exhilarating series and make something so boring out of it?
So, first get a game that PLAYS good, then make it look good.
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Who said graphics are the most important thing? Why do people always defensively trot out this argument when advances are made in graphics?
meep
You will never be able to get a true representation of graphics from a compressed image or video. The only way to truely show it would be something like lagarith or bitmap, or, you know, to actually see it in person?
I've been watching the development of Project Offset for at least 3 years. Sam McGrath and Co. are doing great things. The stuff that was shown was built way before Intel bought into them.
So I went to the link in the summary to see the video, and I MUST be too jaded. It looked *exactly* like a level from Unreal Tournament 3. I love that game, so that's all well and good. I'm sure my laptop could render that youtube clip in realtime without a problem. It still seemed fake to me. The movement of the foliage was too "calculated", as was much of the debris when it fell. The camera motion was "too perfect" and looks exactly like what my camera moves look like in After Effects, which bear very little resemblance to what a camera move looks like for real.
Better than Mass Effect? yeah. Better than Counterstrike/Half-Life/Half-Life 2? you bet. Better than UT3 or Crysis? That, I feel, is debatable. If it's debatable, then I'm not certain that there is a breakthrough here. But that's just me, and I could be completely off-base here.
As stated by other posters, "film quality" is misleading. Primarily it refers to resolution and remember many cameras record at up to 4k, so the ability to render in real time at ultra-high res is definitely sought after.
Currently, the big push in 3d rendering is towards physically based raytrace or pathtrace rendering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)
Physically based rendering produces a much more accurate representation of how light interacts with and between surfaces. It has always taken a long time to render using physically based techniques due to the huge amount of calculations necessary to produce a grain free image. This has changed somewhat recently with multi-core systems and with GPGPU languages such as CUDA and OpenCL we are about to experience a big and sudden increase in performance regarding these rendering technologies.
While this game looks great, the engine is by no means going to be capable of rendering scenes containing hundreds of millions of polygons, ultra-high res textures, physically accurate lighting and shaders, and high render resolution. We are still pretty far away from real-time physically-based rendering, which is the direction film is currently headed. So that would have to be what "Movie-Quality CGI" is defined as and this game does not live up to that definition.
I didnt see anything in those videos that I can't find in most modern games. Also, they say its rendering in real time... So what? You can sit and optimize a scene for weeks before releasing it. It's when you get half a dozen real players running in unpredictable directions and in unpredictable patterns that an engine either shines or fails.
Hopefully soon games will render so realistically that no one will be able to tell them from real life. That will hopefully end the obsession with shiny graphics at the expense of all else in games. then finally they can start work on elements like depth of gameplay experience. Or maybe they will just move their attention to smell sythesisers and try and get it so you can smell those burning corpses you fragged with generic first person gun #23. Seems like the movie industry could also benefit from forgetting about shiny CGI a bit in favour of things like interesting plot developement, character depth etc.
If CGI is so great then why wasn't Star Wars Episode I better than Episode V?
Okay, so this is slightly off-topic, but something I've always wondered about.
I can take a 12megapixel picture. And reduce it down to a 12k gif. Or 120k or whatever the compression results are.
At that point, it's just a .gif. (or .jpg or whatever). The computer doesn't know it's any different than a .gif I created in MSPaint, right?
So if I open GameMaker 7, and use that photo as one of the frames in my character's animation. By repetition, I could create a character moving and walking frame by frame.
Right? What's wrong with this?
I understand that on-the-fly rendering is nice. And that the goal is to get a computer to generate a 'real' picture. But. The difference between a 'great' game and an okay one is the graphics. I could (if I could draw) take a pencil and do one of those black and white sketches that almost looks like a photo, and scan it in and use it too.
What are the technical hurdles or barriers that prevent someone from just doing this?
K.
Or maybe just start supporting OpenGL hardware acceleration? Any day now, Intel...
So this means we are going to see games with movie budgets and no gameplay at all...we already do, but the balance will detriment gameplay even further by reasoning of manpower.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpdPWVfaBQs&feature=related
Three years ago. Combat animations certainly aren't on par with GTA4 (Euphoria) and this demo at least reeks of Oblivion imo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVk1GArKqfo&feature=player_embedded
New demo is... kinda better. Impressive PhysX(R) (TM)
nVidia beat you to it nearly ten years ago, Intel... the GeForce 3 was used to create "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" big-screen movie.
Here's the thing. Normal people don't want to spend hours and hours creating detailed 3D models in Blender or whatever. They just want the easiest way to turn their ideas into reality. Reducing the implementation time for a high quality end product, and eliminating the tedious tasks is a worthy goal. It's the same reason normal people don't program in assembly anymore. With the exception of some very specific programs, higher levels of abstraction are almost always better, and this is no exception.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
As long as it gets the job done it's an interesting innovation. Real time rendering of game or modern movie quality CGI would be a good thing regardless of how it's implemented.
I will be in awe when we will have realistic AI. I would prefer a pixelated character with a realistic AI over brain dead but realisticly rendered character.
I think it is easier to push multiplayer (no need for AI) and realistic graphics than realsitic artificial intelligence.
Exactly. I've been following now for about four years and they occasionally throw out a few interesting videos and such, but ultimately I haven't seen anything new from their team in quite some time. It was an interesting choice selling out to Intel of all places... I only hope they don't turn it into another Duke Nukem: Forever.
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Game graphics seem to be getting better and better while the games seem to be getting more and more dull. Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2 are hardly games at all anymore, they are little more than movies with a fast forward button.
I used to work with Sam Mcgrath and I consider him an old friend. I was fortunate enough to be there from the very start of his new engine and see it develop back when there was no company or anything...
He blew me away years ago with the very basics of its shader editing and render quality. I havent seen newer versions of it in years but... Sam was kicking ass from the start of it.. trust me.
Sam is an incredibly talented coder, perhaps one of the best and most hard working out there. Sammy, best of luck to you if you see this. And Jon, if you're reading.. and I know you are... Modern Warfare 2 rocked ;P Great job. I'm fucking hooked.
CGI is awful, they could at least have tried for EGA
FINALLY we can have CGI-quality in computer games!
It was such a pain, when computers couldn't achieve the quality of COMPUTER GENERATED IMAGES
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
About avatar annoyed me, they somehow said that there where CGI in it that where so good that you couldn't tell it was CGI. Which isn't true at all if you ask me, all creatures and many plants looked as flawed as most CGI things generally do, heck, the uniform colors where actually worse than what I've seen in several animations earlier (for instance, the raven in the WCIII intro). Also, I'll never get why games should look real, I prefer them to look stylistic, that's more interesting.
S1m0ne.
Hmm lets see... Intel bought them to make Larabee demos, but now Larrabee is gone, so Project Offset becomes a vague FUD machine to keep idiot analysis thinking that Intel is "doing the video games thingy too".
Anyone can claim "movie quality" if we're going by Star Wars Episode 4 (original version) standards. The problem is that movies have obviously gotten a lot better though still not completely realistic. The fact is that real-time rendering will always be vastly inferior to slow rendering because you can throw at least 100 times the hardware and 100 times the time for movie making than any gaming computer. Furthermore, you only need 24 fps for movie making while you need a minimum of 60 fps with an average of 120 fps for a good gaming experience.
How about you don't be so cheap
If I wanted to be cheap, I'd buy a game console.
and by a dedicated graphics card?
Where do I plug a dedicated graphics card into a laptop computer?
I dont CARE about graphics... I mean, I've been playing X-Com for the last few weeks... I want good gameplay, something fun dont need to have uber realist graphics... what would really change something for me is immersion. Give me a nice 3D environment.. and by that I dont mean something more shiny or more realistic on a screen... I want to turn my head and see whats behind me... IMMERSION... not even more realistic graphics... I always tough I would perform really great in shooters if it weren't a question of aiming with a mouse but aiming with my hands!! Give me something to make me feel like im inside the thing... Im soooo bored with those comment "but the graphics are so nice." Yeah so what... Its like the only thing that changes in modern games is graphics... Damn it..
"CGI Quality" = "Computer Generated Imagery Quality".
That makes no freaking sense. Its like cable companies saying "Our signal is DIGITAL QUALITY!" I see plenty of poopy lookin JPEGS and they're "digita quality" as well.
Every game is CGI quality.. its all computer generated. I'm gunna start saying my clothes are fabric-quality.
Freaking retards (Disclaimer: "Retards" is being used in satire and is in no way implying literal mental retardation)
Major advances have been made in real-time rendering previews and game engines, but you'll notice the more you actually get your hands on these that they can't currently do anything too complex.
The scenes demoed on their website use simple light sources with what appears to be a little bit of ambient occlusion. It's immediately noticeable that the geometry is low poly, and that the texture maps are procedural and tiled. Impressive for sure to be done in real-time, even though I'm not sure what amazing hardware you'd need to perform such a task, but not quite "cinematic quality" anyways.
. Let's see some real-time full scale global illumination, sub surface scattering, high resolution displacement, convincing reflections and refractions, etc. all done on some complex geometry at a decent resolution with some anti-aliasing before we make such a statement. Even though the bar is being raised for realistic visuals in computer games, that bar is also being raised in CGI for films...
This is ridiculous. I've been following the development of "Project Offset" since about 2006, when I was still in highschool, before they were bought by intel. Back then, those graphics looked pretty good alongside something like Half-Life 2, and honestly they still look pretty good today. And yes, they have come up with a technique to render CG quality graphics in real time. Find the video of the Dragon, or of the character fighting the troll, if those videos still exist. You'll see what they're talking about.
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As long "real time" is not a real media - quicktime hybrid.
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I guess I'm not that impressed. I saw the same thing months ago from an indy developer. The sample footage of the editor looks like the in game editor that wolfire is putting in Overgrowth. Look at 5:17 in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taX4h3UajBc They've improved their editor a lot since then.