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?

Re:I must be old

[Khyber]

Sorry, we've had graphics like this well before now in the Demoscene. At least since the 8*** series of nVidia GPUs - NINE GENERATIONS AGO.

Re:I must be old

[antiperimetaparalogo]

Sorry, we've had graphics like this well before now in the Demoscene. At least since the 8*** series of nVidia GPUs - NINE GENERATIONS AGO.

O.K., i guess i deserved to get modded down!

I am just an easily impressed old guy who does not play games anymore, so when i watched the demo i was very impressed by what exists today and i immediately got in to the usual "who would ever need more than that" old guy's mode...

Re:I must be old

[X0563511]

Even with 4 GPUs, this level of detail with realtime rendering is impressive. If you were bitching about non-realtime, I'd be on your side, but this is realtime.

Re:I must be old

[UnknownSoldier]

I concur. Visually it is mildly interesting but it ignores the elephant in the room:

* Modern game design spends more time focusing on form then function

Grind-Grind-Grind! /glares at Warframe, Path of Exile, Diablo, etc.

When your refer to your customers as whales attempting to suck as much money out of them as possible, the industry of shovelware is fucked

Re:I must be old

[Dutch Gun]

When you see a tech demo like this, you can generally assume that this is what the next generation of fighting games will at least approach in terms of fidelity and realism. Demos are a tricky thing, because unlike games, you can get away with rendering only the small environment you're currently looking at, and moreover, you can optimize the environment for viewing it only from that limited perspective, making it appear hyper realistic. This is why fighting games tend to look better than just about anything else out there - they're the closest a videogame will ever come to these tech demos in terms of being able to "cheat" like this.

Which games are at the other end of that spectrum? I'd probably have to say MMOs. By necessity, they end up looking a generation behind the latest state-of-the-art for two important reasons: First, naturally, they tend to set the minimum system requirements a bit lower to be more inclusive and attract a bigger customer base. Second, and more importantly, MMOs spend a ridiculous amount of their rendering budget on drawing the large numbers of unique characters on screen at any one time, as well as all the effects that can be fired off by them, and of course, any NPCs in the area, and finally, a typically spawling, open terrain to explore. As such, you can't expect an MMO to look like a AAA single-player game, because the rendering budget is spent in significantly different ways. So, I guess you can expect MMOs to look this good perhaps in another two to three generations.

As a game developer, was I impressed? Well, yeah, as much as I'm impressed by all our modern technology. Nowadays, it's actually pretty easy to sink your entire rendering budget into a single character (or small numbers of characters) and make her look quite impressive - she still looked good though. I was less impressed with the outdoor shots. Short of simple interiors, bare, rocky terrain is the cheapest and easiest type of terrain to build and render with the best looking relative results.

I'd call this a decent, incremental step forward, and I'd say that's a good thing. Radical leaps means everyone has to re-invent their entire production pipelines, and that takes a lot of focus away from where in needs to be, which is first and foremost in creating a fun game. In terms of creating game assets though, the major steps forward that need to be taken are how to build more high-fidelity assets for less - which right now is insanely expensive because it's nearly all hand crafted, and so far have always needed to be re-created entirely from generation to generation.

Re:I must be old

[_xeno_]

Which games are at the other end of that spectrum? I'd probably have to say MMOs.

Yeah, but this is Square Enix we're talking about. They don't let minor details like that prevent them from making the most detailed flower pots MMOs have ever seen.

Not to mention Square Enix has a tradition of making the world's crappiest PC ports. Final Fantasy XIII launched on the PC supporting 1280x720 - and nothing else. Pressing Escape while the game was running instantly quit you out of the game without confirmation. The reason for this became obvious when they tried to add a confirmation dialog - the confirmation dialog wasn't done in-engine, meaning that pressing Escape appeared to lock up your game until you Alt-Tabbed to another app and could see the dialog box.

Square Enix can create some impressive graphics, and they can create games that run well on consoles, but their PC track-record is absolutely abysmal. (Keep in mind I'm only talking about games Square Enix themselves made for PC, not games other studios made that they published.) No matter how pretty their tech demos look, you can be sure that whatever they finally create will be unplayable on the PC.

Re: I must be old

[Samantha Wright]

What does that really matter? Almost by definition, a demoscene prod involves clever choices in what to make and display on screen in order to achieve an effect. I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.) The achievement of this video isn't diminished by the achievements of the scene, nor vice-versa.

Re:I must be old

[aaaaaaargh!]

I think it's a nice scene, the hair is great, for example. The problem for me is that it is as blurry, unsharp and overloaded with artificial contrast than any other current video game graphics. I'd like it to be more realistic but apparently my apprehension of reality is different than that of the Square Enix developers.

Show me some dense dark woods with thousands of trees that move in the wind and every tree with as many leaves as a real tree, and how the sun shines through the roofs of the trees like in real life and without any artifical effects like 'rays of god' etc. And all of this as sharp as possible, please. That would impress me more.

Re: I must be old

[Khyber]

"I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.)"

Actually, they've had the assets and more for a LONG time. Procedural generation eliminates the need for a LOT of work, can be done with a HUGE degree of detail, takes up ungodly tiny amounts of space, and yes, we've had facial emotional animation in demoscene projects well matching up with stuff like LA Noire.

Re:I must be old

[X0563511]

I'm sure you have. Care to share some examples?

Re: I must be old

[Samantha Wright]

Yes, I'm very aware that demoscene groups form (often very excellent) game companies, but I don't think any of those endeavours have resulted in products with anything like the quality shown in the video.

Re: I must be old

[Samantha Wright]

I'd really love to see some examples—I've been watching demo competitions for years and I can't recall any efforts that really focused on authentic portrayal of humans.

Odd subject choice

[Anonymous Coward]

The middle aged bald guy in polo was the closest to reality, but why bother modelling that?

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.

Re:Shadows still not solved

[Khyber]

"Still saddens me that one company that made a raytracer accelerator chip just sort of vanished."

That was Intel's Knights Landing coprocessor. I don't think Intel vanished. :)

Re:Shadows still not solved

[X0563511]

The focus appears to be on the shader pipeline and raw polycount. Shadow sample sizes may not be their focus.

OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

Substitute DirectX 12 with OpenGL in TFS and this forum would be jerking off all over this

What's with the cynicism?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's amazing that when we witness boundries being pushed, almost everyone here is *extremely* cynical and negative.

On a tech site of all places????
   

Do they look good in 720p?

[MPBoulton]

You know, so the games running this engine can be made for the XBox One/PS4?

Re:Huh what??

[camperdave]

Yeah, it is a convoluted title, all right, and the lack of punctuation really scrambles it. But here's the breakdown, near as I can make out:

A Chapter of "Witch", Square Enix's Demo of Real-time CG system DX-12, Impresses at Microsoft Build

They're trying to cram too much into the title.

Bigger scenes were impressive IMO

[MrL0G1C]

Whilst the character was solidly in the uncanny valley, I though the real impressive stuff was the big outdoor scenes. Of course youtube decimated the quality, a torrent link would be better.

But this took thousands of dollars of graphics card, I'd hate to see the framerate for 1 sensibly price card.

Re:Bigger scenes were impressive IMO

[jeffb (2.718)]

I don't know -- I'd say the character is well up the slope on the "realism" side of the valley.

As for the cost of hardware, well, an ATI video card that I installed about ten years ago came with some canned demos. It casually mentioned that one of the demos implemented a technique that was first displayed at SIGGRAPH in, I believe, 1995 or so -- some ten years earlier -- at which time each frame took several minutes to render on a large server farm. In the space of ten years, hardware advances took us from the render farm to real-time rendering on a sub-$1K card.

Now, maybe we're too close to the far end of the S-curve to see that kind of improvement over the next ten years. But I'm not convinced.

Cool

[ArcadeMan]

Any chance they'll update Final Fantasy XIV with this new engine?

Better-looking catgirls? Yeah! ^_^

Re:Cool

[Megane]

Considering that FFXIV began as a project to put a new graphics engine on FFXI, the answer won't just be no, but "they'll start to do it, but end just up making FFXVI with it instead".

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[LostMonk]

Those are NOT the people to rant about!
When you see a movie you thought was boring do you rant about the camera manufacturer?
These guys are developing a very cool technology, it’s awesome. What game designers are doing with their games’ story-telling and plot lines is a very different discussion.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[ArcadeMan]

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

What the hell are you talking about? DX12 is available on both Windows 10 and Xbox One!

What next?

[koan]

Empathy for pixels.

One question

[PopeRatzo]

Is there multiplayer?

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Megane]

You are talking about a company that made two MMOs for aging console platforms on their way out: FFXI on PS2+hard drive and later X360, then FFXIV on PS3, though that time they wisely did it for PC first. Locking themselves into ecosystems is a way of life. Also, someone over there has a hard-on for flashy graphics as a priority over gameplay. All the graphics in the world didn't save them from having to literally re-make FFXIV after it flopped hard.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[X0563511]

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

No argument there, but progress needs to happen somewhere. We'll all benefit from it in the long run.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[ledow]

Is it just me that worries more that they are releasing a sequel to something so sequel-ed already that you have to resort to Roman numerals?

Re:Very impressive

[ledow]

If PC gaming has taught me anything, it's "never be on the cutting edge". It's expensive, very expensive, and very fleeting.

A $2000 four-card SLI setup will be two-card setup next year. And a one-card setup the year after. And mainstream the year after.

It's going to TAKE you three years to produce any game of value with this level of model quality anyway.

It's not wasted in that sense. But it is a bit pointless. Stop focussing on the graphics, because I don't want a $100m animation of any level of detail. I played through GTA V and skipped EVERY cutscene. I literally did not care about the pre-rendered or even engine-rendered bits over which I had no control, I just wanted to play the damn game.

Hopefully we'll reach a point where the level of detail is the same wherever you go, and all that differs is the actual gameplay. The AI in GTA V, for example, is still absolute crap. Want to evade the cops? Turn corners lot, get yourself into a point they can't sneak up on you. Pretty much you can last out from a 5-star wanted level until you run out of ammo.

Now go online. Even a couple of people actively hunting you is certain death in a short time unless you are kitted out to the absolute hilt.

We need to stop focusing on graphics, fuck even my old laptop ran GTA V at enough speed that I could complete the game without going blind, and focus on all those other areas of gaming that we're still just completely ignoring.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[BitZtream]

In general, if your game engine is tied to DX or OpenGL, you suck at making game engines or aren't trying to be cross platform anyway.

Rending backend abstraction is ultra trivial when it comes to game engines.

Old Man Murray

[Guppy]

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

The style of the article reminds me of an Old Man Murray new article, featuring a glowing description of the rendering power of the (then not yet released) PS2 (article at bottom of page): Playstation 2 To Usher In New Era Of Underage Girlfriend Simulation

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Blaskowicz]

Now use OpenGL 4.3 or 4.4, and you find yourself tied to Windows again, perhaps Mac, and a tiny portion of linux users with recent AMD or nvidia hardware, recent distro and proprietary driver installed.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Talderas]

The only roman numeral game in the Final Fantasy series that can be construed as a sequel is Final Fantasy XV and even that is an exceedingly tough sell since it only uses a similar mythology to Final Fantasy XIII, based on information known so far, but it was also initially developed as Versus XIII rather than XV. Each of the rest have their own narratives that are isolated.

Re:we want gameplay, not "imperfections in the ski

[Talderas]

Sequels are a function of narrative. Series is a function of brand.

Harry Potter, for instance, is a series of seven books which six are sequels. Each book in the series builds on the narrative of the series as a whole.

Goosebumps is a series of 180 books where each book, with a few exceptions, is it own narrative. Goosebumps #2 "Stay Out of the Basement" is not a sequel to Goosebumps #1 "Welcome to Dead House".

Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII continue the plot from the previous game (XIII-2 continuing the plot of XIII and LR continuing the plot presented by XIII and XIII-2). Thus these two games function as sequels to Final Fantasy XIII. Final Fantasy VIII has no relation to the plot or narrative of any preceding Final Fantasy game so it's not a sequel.