Square Enix Witch Chapter Real-Time CG DX12 Demo Impresses At Microsoft BUILD

MojoKid writes: Computer generated graphics have come a long way in the past several years and are starting to blur the line between animation and real actors. One of the more difficult tasks for CG artists is to recreate human emotions, especially crying, though you wouldn't know it after watching a tech demo that Square Enix showed off at the Microsoft BUILD Developer Conference. The real-time tech demo is called Witch Chapter 0 [cry] and is part of a research project that studies various next generation technologies. For this particular demo, Square Enix put a lot of research into real-time CG technology utilizing DirectX 12 in collaboration with Microsoft and NVIDIA, the company said. It's an ongoing project that will help form Square Enix's Luminous Studio engine for future games. The short demo shows some pretty impressive graphics, with an amazing level of detail. As the camera zooms in, you can clearly see imperfections in the skin, along with glistening effects from areas where the face is wet with either tears or water

Comments

I must be old

[BitZtream]

Because this sort of thing doesn't impress me anymore. It looks pretty much the same as every other demo I've seen for the last several years. Sure, it IS more detailed but those details do pretty much nothing to enhance realism and in fact as the demo shows, the artists go out of their way to show off these features (like 3d movies) and ruin it in the process.

I don't need to be blinded by your overpowering puddle of water, thats not impressive, I don't even need thousands of dollars of GPUs to do that.

Instead of showing me tears that look fake as shit and being proud of it, or a dirty face, why don't you work on things that make the whole scene clearly a rendering instead of reality.

Worse still, you can STILL see that the shadows are not actually calculated real time and not only lag but are jerky in their transitions.

So 10 our of 10 for heating up your GPUs and frying eggs, but 0 for actually impressing me with an advancement in rendering that I can about.

Re:I must be old

[marcello_dl]

Well grandpa, do you remember the HiFi craze? we wanted to completely simulate an orchestra, or whatever sound. Turns out that you can get easily to 95% of fidelity while the other 5% still makes the difference and can't be overcome, unless you spend insane amounts of efforts.

Look at this demo. Impressive, yes. Real, no way. At this stage I think we could convincingly fake a super8 movie, sure. So what? what for?

Shadows still not solved

[phantomus]

One of the things that struck me in this video is that shadows still are very problematic. When the shadow is adjusted manually, flickering faces on the rock appear, and on the face, they don't move smoothly either. Quality of reflections / refraction is hard to judge in this scene. All in alll this is just another high-detail demo that emphasizes the fact that we're stuck in terms of rendering quality; engine complexity goes through the roof, but returns are diminishing. Looking forward to the era of path tracing.

we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the skin"

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. "So realistic you can see their pores!"

Who the hell cares. We want good gameplay, not graphics so massively realistic you can see their nose hairs twitch. Too many games worry far too much about graphics and not nearly enough about making an actual good game. gameplay mechanics people. That's what matters. If I wanted to watch a movie, I'd just go watch a movie.

Also, DX12 = the fail. News flash: there are more platforms now than Windows. Locking yourself into that ecosystem is pretty 20th century.