Insane Unreal Engine 5.3 Path Tracing CQB

[bonami2]

 

 

 

Edited October 15, 2023 by bonami2

[UltraMega]

These videos really aren't about path tracing, they're about camera effects. It's the camera shaking, the first-person animations, and the very overblown/oversaturated lighting. It's similar to the Unrecorded demo, which uses heavy camera effects to make the game look more realistic. Still impressive lighting on it's own from UE5, but if you take basically any good-looking 3D environment and apply these kinds of effects, you will get similar results. If you applied these kind of camera effects and first-person animations to The Last of Us for example, I bet it would look similarly convincing and that game uses baked lighting. 

[bonami2]

14 minutes ago, UltraMega said:

These videos really aren't about path tracing, they're about camera effects. It's the camera shaking, the first-person animations, and the very overblown/oversaturated lighting. It's similar to the Unrecorded demo, which uses heavy camera effects to make the game look more realistic. Still impressive lighting on it's own from UE5, but if you take basically any good-looking 3D environment and apply these kinds of effects, you will get similar results. If you applied these kind of camera effects and first-person animations to The Last of Us for example, I bet it would look similarly convincing and that game uses baked lighting. 

True most newer game with UE5 look insane.

There a solo game dev that released a game on steam using it if am not wrong. It look already better than most game released on older engine.

 

I wonder how hard UE5 / Unrecord will be to run with current hardware.

[UltraMega]

21 minutes ago, bonami2 said:

True most newer game with UE5 look insane.

There a solo game dev that released a game on steam using it if am not wrong. It look already better than most game released on older engine.

 

I wonder how hard UE5 / Unrecord will be to run with current hardware.

There is only one game on PC right now that uses UE5 and its main features (Lumen and Nanite), Immortals or Aveon. Visually, it's very meh. Other than that, there's nothing but an endless number of demos. 

[bonami2]

14 minutes ago, UltraMega said:

There is only one game on PC right now that uses UE5 and its main features (Lumen and Nanite), Immortals or Aveon. Visually, it's very meh. Other than that, there's nothing but an endless number of demos. 

Oh he used UE4 my error.  Don't know why they are so long to release stuff in EU5.

[UltraMega]

19 minutes ago, bonami2 said:

Oh he used UE4 my error.  Don't know why they are so long to release stuff in EU5.

Probably a combination of UE5 lacking optimization, waiting for hardware to catch up, and any serious UE5 projects being long term. 

 

Based on what's out there so far, it seems like UE5 has a long way to go before it will be good enough to really shine on current gen consoles.

[UltraMega]

@bonami2 Check out this video of Wildlands using similar camera effect from the Unrecorded demo. While the videos you links are mostly just over-saturated, this serves as a good example of how distorting the camera can make games look more realistic. 

 

@Slaughtahouse you might find this interesting as well. 

 

 

[bonami2]

1 hour ago, UltraMega said:

@bonami2 Check out this video of Wildlands using similar camera effect from the Unrecorded demo. While the videos you links are mostly just over-saturated, this serves as a good example of how distorting the camera can make games look more realistic. 

 

@Slaughtahouse you might find this interesting as well. 

 

 

Damn i wonder how Arma Reforger would look with those camera effect.

 

It remind me how Battlefield 3 looked horrendous and with some color filter mod made the game 100x more realistic.

[Slaughtahouse]

Have to agree with Ultra. To push it to the next level of visual fidelity, there are a lot of camera features in Unreal that are giving the impression it’s near life like.

 

That said, the foundation of the work comes from the quality assets and the lighting. The level of quality from models like Quixel Mega Scans which when mixed with Nanite (“infinite” level of detail) allow creators to get this much more detail without blowing the render budget. Even iphones now have Lidar technology these days to start scanning on your own. Sure… it won’t match professional equipment but it just makes learning the tools that much easier.

 

I don’t pretend to understand the full pipeline from scan to game asset but sitting on the sidelines, they’re getting close to a level of fidelity that is unlike anything we could do before.

 

What I find really remarkable footage from Unreal like this is how well it can adjust exposure in a scene based on all of the lighting sources in real time. Going from interior to exterior scenes, seeing the highlights blow out or the contrast reduce is just like adjusting the aperture on a camera, or when your eyes dilate, is impressive. Mixed with HDR and post processing will really make games pop.

 

If you look at the trailer of Unrecord, compare it against the video of people just walking in the asset file (it’s accessible online) you can see how much of an impact post processing makes the footage look real 

 

The devs for that game in development have really well tuned the post processing to give the impression of body cam footage. Motion blur, chromatic aberration, fish eye lens, pixelated / compression effect etc.

 

I’ve only used Unreal personally to take models from Revit / 3DS Max for static renders (architectural visualization) but when I see footage like this, it feels like we’re on the verge of getting real time visualizations.

 

I found a video that better explains the process of how all the post processing can really spice up look and feel.

 

 

 

 

[UltraMega]

30 minutes ago, Slaughtahouse said:

Have to agree with Ultra. To push it to the next level of visual fidelity, there are a lot of camera features in Unreal that are giving the impression it’s near life like.

 

That said, the foundation of the work comes from the quality assets and the lighting. The level of quality from models like Quixel Mega Scans which when mixed with Nanite (“infinite” level of detail) allow creators to get this much more detail without blowing the render budget. Even iphones now have Lidar technology these days to start scanning on your own. Sure… it won’t match professional equipment but it just makes learning the tools that much easier.

 

I don’t pretend to understand the full pipeline from scan to game asset but sitting on the sidelines, they’re getting close to a level of fidelity that is unlike anything we could do before.

 

What I find really remarkable footage from Unreal like this is how well it can adjust exposure in a scene based on all of the lighting sources in real time. Going from interior to exterior scenes, seeing the highlights blow out or the contrast reduce is just like adjusting the aperture on a camera, or when your eyes dilate, is impressive. Mixed with HDR and post processing will really make games pop.

 

If you look at the trailer of Unrecord, compare it against the video of people just walking in the asset file (it’s accessible online) you can see how much of an impact post processing makes the footage look real 

 

The devs for that game in development have really well tuned the post processing to give the impression of body cam footage. Motion blur, chromatic aberration, fish eye lens, pixelated / compression effect etc.

 

I’ve only used Unreal personally to take models from Revit / 3DS Max for static renders (architectural visualization) but when I see footage like this, it feels like we’re on the verge of getting real time visualizations.

 

I found a video that better explains the process of how all the post processing can really spice up look and feel.

 

 

 

 

 

Pretty great explanation. I think Dice was the first to use photogrammetry in games. IMO I'd say it's as big of a revelation for gaming as path tracing stands to be, if not more so. 

 

 

One thing I think these camera effects show is that lighting in games is tricky. It's sort of simple to crush the lighting effect to make everything look like it was captured on a crappy phone to make it seem more realistic, but making it looks real and clearly visible at the same time is hard. 

[Slaughtahouse]

On 17/10/2023 at 00:01, UltraMega said:

 

Pretty great explanation. I think Dice was the first to use photogrammetry in games. IMO I'd say it's as big of a revelation for gaming as path tracing stands to be, if not more so. 

 

 

One thing I think these camera effects show is that lighting in games is tricky. It's sort of simple to crush the lighting effect to make everything look like it was captured on a crappy phone to make it seem more realistic, but making it looks real and clearly visible at the same time is hard. 

 

For sure it's not easy, otherwise I think we would see it more frequently already. Depending on the game, especially one based on realism and through a body cam, it makes a lot of sense. For a lot of games where the player camera is not meant to be a real camera, I can see why a lot of post-processing effects don't make sense from an artistic vision. 

[UltraMega]

5 hours ago, Slaughtahouse said:

 

For sure it's not easy, otherwise I think we would see it more frequently already. Depending on the game, especially one based on realism and through a body cam, it makes a lot of sense. For a lot of games where the player camera is not meant to be a real camera, I can see why a lot of post-processing effects don't make sense from an artistic vision. 

 

What I mean is it's easy to implement effects that basically just make the camera blurrier and make the lighting over-saturated + a fish eye lens resulting in segments that look more "realistic", hard to make these type of effects actually look good in a game consistently. 

 

The last Homefront game made by Crytek made an attempt at doing some of this kind of stuff, mostly the over-saturation. One of the issues with doing this in games is that lighting levels are very different outdoor vs indoor, and in real life it's not the camera but our eyes that adjust to compensate for that. What they did in Homefront was try to emulate the way our eyes adjust for brightness by having the camera adjust the brightness level drastically whenever the player went through a door that went from indoors to outdoors or vice versa. The effect was perhaps a little more realistic, but very annoying in gameplay. Other games often do something similar, but not to the extent that Homefront tried it. 

Even when done much better like in the case of Unrecorded, it raises a lot of gameplay issues. While it looks cool at first, I think most people would quickly get annoyed by playing a game that only looks realistic because the camera basically makes everything look less visible. In the first video in OP, there are a lot of lighting issues. The interior walls of the building are basically black, which isn't realistic as far as what real life would look like and is only realistic in terms of how a video would look from a crappy camera. The tires on the truck outdoors are also extremely dark. If a game looked like this on its own without the intended camera effects, people would think it was bugged. 

 

It's basically The Blair Witch Project effect. 

Edited October 18, 2023 by UltraMega

[bonami2]

@UltraMegaDark color perception may be wrong depending on if they designed it on an led or oled.

If i think about it tomorrow am going to check the video on both my 4k led and oled panel. Sometime it look horrendous on oled but not led and vice versa.

 I remember having a hard time seeing tire thread on my 40" Va 4k panel.

[UltraMega]

1 hour ago, bonami2 said:

@UltraMegaDark color perception may be wrong depending on if they designed it on an led or oled.

If i think about it tomorrow am going to check the video on both my 4k led and oled panel. Sometime it look horrendous on oled but not led and vice versa.

 I remember having a hard time seeing tire thread on my 40" Va 4k panel.

I don't think that's really a factor here. HDR in general does make this sort of thing a little more viable, but the point is that the lighting needs to be bad in order for this kinda of camera footage effects to look realistic. Not that the lighting effects are bad, but the oversaturated bright skies and the low visibility dark areas are a big part of the trick.