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

[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

[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.

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.

Do they look good in 720p?

[MPBoulton]

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

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.

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!