
Adam - nikolay
http://unity3d.com/pages/adam
======
valine
Much of what makes this appealing has nothing to do with the render engine.
What I saw was some really excellent character animation / motion capture. The
rendering itself wasn't particularly jaw dropping. And that's not a critique
of unity. Rather it's a critique of their chosen subject. Metal, walls, and
artificial objects in general are all very easy to render convincingly. Show
me some trees, grass, translucency, or volumetrics and then I'll be impressed.

~~~
zevets
Even then, I'm unconvinced that the ability to do realistic graphics in real
time will actually manifest itself in vediogames/VR experiences we can
interact with. So much of what makes this look good is the excellent art
direction, and as you stated, excellent textures and animations of an
artificial thing. But animation students have been producing similar quality
visuals for their show-reels for ages. All that has changed is the ability to
render faster, but the creation of this content is still being done by the
same processes.

For videogames/vr to break the photorealistic barrier, there needs to be some
order of magnitude reduction in art development costs for these experiences to
be affordable. Not all videogames can be star wars battlefront, where probably
$150M ($330M overall cost to develop and market [1]) was spent making the best
damn textures videogames have ever seen, but produced a simple, limited game.

Photorealism is a dead end for videogames unless art costs come down.

[1] [http://fortune.com/2015/12/30/star-wars-video-game-
sales/](http://fortune.com/2015/12/30/star-wars-video-game-sales/)

~~~
huuu
Well, John Carmack was impressed by the results of Brigade. And I think Otoy
is a company to watch when it comes to VR and 3D.

[https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/](https://home.otoy.com/render/brigade/)

~~~
TrevorJ
That's so really impressive stuff. The problem is though, that asset
_creation_ remains massively expensive.

~~~
otoy
Thanks! Asset pipeline for Brigade is Octane.

~~~
aidenn0
I'm curious how you manage noise in low-light situations. The one video I
found had significant compression artifacts so I wasn't able to tell what the
actual engine looks like.

------
BinaryIdiot
Honestly the most impressive part to me was being able to convey a story of
"human somehow put into a machine" pretty much only through physical acting.
That's not something you see every day in video games.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
That was what mainly put me off, it makes no sense. First the robot starts off
breathing like he'd been under water for 3 minutes and came up for oxygen,
what? A robot running on oxygen? Then he breathes and moans, what? Vocal cords
on a moaning robot? Stumbling because his robot muscles haven't been used in a
long time? It made no sense, they took a human's motion, behavior, appearance
and sound, and then just exchanged flesh for metal, which makes no sense to
me. And then you say that it's only the acting that made him human, come on,
everything except his skin made him appear human!

I mean, anyone can come up with some convoluted ideas that explain why the
above does make sense... like the robot breaths because there's an organic
brain in there that needs oxygen, they moan because it's still a human brain
and the machine is sending his brain an overload of sensory data that is hard
to deal with, the robot stumbles because his brain is new to interfacing with
its machine parts etc. But I personally didn't like it and kinda roll my eyes
when they go overboard with the anthropomorphism. Still it was hella cool,
hope the full version will explain away my doubts neatly :)

~~~
TrevorJ
I assumed it was all in his 'mind'. These didn't act like AI robots, seemed
clear from some of the exposition that there's a mind in there that thinks it
is human. Notice the different choices different robots took - one ripped the
covering off it's arm, in the big crowd you can see different robots reacting
differently - one pushes another out of the way for instance. I'm pretty sure
there's reasons for how they acted.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Put me in a vat, I'm not going to make moaning or breathing sounds in my mind.
And it seems like a pretty silly engineer who'd simulate such a thing. That's
really my point. If it was a cartoon I couldn't care less, but I like my sci-
fi to approach some level of realism. (and I'm really not the type of guy who
complaints about sound in space, it's about immersion for me and a breathing
and moaning robot kills it for me.)

~~~
TrevorJ
Amputees still 'feel' the missing limb months and years later, so I find it
plausible you would still 'feel' reactions in your body even if you no longer
had one. I didn't take the sounds to be literal, just an artistic technique.

To be clear though, I think your opinion on this is every bit as valid as
mine, I just really enjoy discussing film.

------
bd
Here it is running real-time in Unity editor:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN3PsU_iA80&t=37m50s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN3PsU_iA80&t=37m50s)

It's a standalone PC project using DX11.

Cloth and cables physics simulation is pre-baked, lighting is dynamic.

~~~
fastball
Fixed link.

[https://youtu.be/eN3PsU_iA80?t=1266](https://youtu.be/eN3PsU_iA80?t=1266)

~~~
bd
Thanks. Seems they must have edited the video since yesterday, cutting out
early part of the stream.

Curiously I can still see the proper thumbnails when hovering timeline at the
original timestamp.

------
emehrkay
I want to watch this movie/or someone play this game for a few hours. I can
assume that Adam is a human who was put into a robot for some reason. There is
some potential there, like Chappie re-imagined.

~~~
bahularora
I am sure we would be able to clone/copy/emulate brain to machines someday. It
will change the world in so many ways. We would be Immortal and that will
change our priorities so much. People living in virtual worlds. Future would
be so cool.

~~~
chanux
We'd probably kill earth before that.

------
jitl
This reminded me of the pod scene from The Matrix (1999):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WCcX0KQ9V0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WCcX0KQ9V0)

Very similar tubes removal process :)

~~~
petrbela
I'm pretty sure that was the plan.

------
kmfrk
There have been a couple of games with atrocious performance on PS4 including
Broforce and Firewatch—and Broforce is a 2D sidescroller(!)

I don’t know whether Unity is innately bad, or whether frameworks in general
just tend to enable bad code.

Would love to hear more from people who know more; right now I associate Unity
with people starting out in games rather than a platform people continue to
use after they hone their skills.

~~~
TillE
Unity's massive problem is that it's still using an ancient version of Mono,
with awful garbage collection and other performance issues.

In most other respects, it's an acceptable game engine. It's been used for a
ton of big professional games you've probably played without even being aware:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unity_games)

~~~
unsigner
It might have "awful garbage collection" and "other performance issues", but
it has nothing to do with Mono for the last almost two years:

[http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-
scripting-...](http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/20/the-future-of-scripting-in-
unity/)

------
tlrobinson
> Rendered in real time with Unity

...on what hardware?

~~~
binarycrusader
From the YouTube comments:

Processor: Octacore Intel Core i7 6th Generation GPU: Nvidia GeForce Titan X
(3x SLI)﻿

~~~
thedak
From the youtube comments that was also buddy pulling a guess out of his butt.

Was the commenter making it up.

~~~
binarycrusader
Sure, but same info here: [http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2016/03/16/check-
amazing-short...](http://thenextweb.com/gadgets/2016/03/16/check-amazing-
short-film-rendered-real-time-using-unity/#gref)

Someone should ask though given another poster's comment below about the GDC
demo of the editor where they were using a GTX 980.

------
pcurve
love the ending... probably all going back to their cubes to write themselves
some React JS code..

------
supercoder
Damn, I thought this was running _in browser_ until I read the comments.

~~~
mortenjorck
I went from "Whoa, this is astounding for WebGL" in the first scene to "Ok,
this probably isn't actually rendering on the client" as I saw some of the
diffuse reflection shaders in the escape to "I feel kind of silly now" once
all the other robots appeared.

The YouTube chrome is hidden, but the video must be in 4K; it looked like
native resolution on my Retina MacBook Pro.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
It's up to 1440p, played 1080p by default on my rMBP but I may have set that
as the default a long time ago so perhaps you saw 1440p.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44M7JsKqwow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44M7JsKqwow)

------
bcheung
Realtime with what hardware?

~~~
bravo22
Even if high end I imagine in 2-3 years you'll have the same quality on
mainstream.

------
pcurve
the best part was the real time orchestra sound track.

~~~
deanstag
haha. and the realtime coordination of all the 100+ agents.

------
kmfrk
If you like the philosophy of this, I heartily recommend you check out the
first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. The second season is
so-so, but the first season is amazing and jam-packed with cyberpunk and
philosophical challenges like this one.

They’re also doing a (whitewashed) live-action version of some amalgamation of
the movie and TV show, so might as well watch the original (1.0) movie and
anime, before Hollywood ruins them for you.

------
kristofferR
Have Unity fixed the supposed big threading issues causing bad performance
with v5.4?

[https://youtu.be/HnVOi9wrZVU?t=188](https://youtu.be/HnVOi9wrZVU?t=188)

------
BogusIKnow
Especially the second part with the humans looked very real.

------
zyb09
Why not use the Unity Webplayer?

~~~
rtpg
The webplayer actually doesn't work anymore in most recent browsers because of
changes to how plugins work/security concerns with plugins in general.

~~~
Geee
Nowadays you can build to Javascript/WebGL. This demo uses special DirectX 11
features so it runs only on Windows native.

------
coolnow
Anyone else reminded of the Metal Gear Solid series? The cutscenes (especially
in MGSV) had the same exact shaky cam and overall feel in this clip.

~~~
ekianjo
Thats nothing remotely new in games though.

------
bunkydoo
This is pretty cool. I'd be really interested to play around with unity to
build webpages for VR or something of the sort

------
grogenaut
I was confused for a bit but it's a youtube video not running in engine... you
can understand how I'd be confused as unity has a web player.

Edit: Apparently they don't really have the web player anymore. Still
confusing. Was actually hoping that for once I'd be proved wrong about WebGL /
encriptem.

~~~
izym
It is still possible to export to e.g. WebGL, but the features required for
something like this is not available in the browser. Also they were running on
3x Titan X, which doesn't exactly have widespread adoption :)

------
Geee
Great idea for Unity to have their own demo team producing stuff like this to
push the technology further.

------
keyle
Great demo by the unity folks. Hopefully the small studios can harness that
power just as the people that make the engine. They usually know how to cheat
it best.

------
daveheq
Great graphics do not make great games.

------
tibbon
This is... too good. This is seriously all in browser?

~~~
thearn4
Actually, it looks like it's a streaming video from Youtube (right click on
the player while it's playing).

~~~
Carrok
Direct link: [https://youtu.be/44M7JsKqwow](https://youtu.be/44M7JsKqwow)

~~~
nilkn
So what exactly is being rendered in real-time? Honest question. I don't quite
get it.

~~~
mparlane
What they mean is that it was rendered in a way in which it took 1 minute to
render 1 minute of footage.

Instead of a typical movie rendering which can take a long time for just a
single frame. Like toy story "Our original toy story frames were averaging
four hours, which is 240 minutes" \- [https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-
would-it-be-to-render-...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-
to-render-Toy-Story-in-2011-compared-to-how-long-it-took-in-1995)

~~~
robbrown451
It just took a cluster of a thousand computers to do it.

~~~
izym
It was run on a single PC with the following hardware: Processor: Octacore
Intel Core i7 6th Generation GPU: Nvidia GeForce Titan X (3x SLI)

~~~
thedak
No it wasn't, that commenter was _guessing_.

A tweet above says it was on a GTX 980 in 1440

~~~
robbrown451
Actually I was joking.

------
imperialdrive
woah, what is this??

nvm i scrolled down lol

~~~
ludamad
I had no clue to scroll down till I saw this.

~~~
qewrffewqwfqew
Heh, I saw the scrollbar but it broke my brain a bit to see a button in the
middle of the page that wasn't going to make it scroll.

cf: [http://adventurega.me/bootstrap/](http://adventurega.me/bootstrap/)

------
edem
If it is rendered in real time why do I see a youtube logo at the bottom right
corner?

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Because it's a recording of a real-time render.

As opposed to a recording of a 1 minute video that took a few hours to render
on industry hardware.

They ran it on a pretty beefy consumer PC that would cost thousands of
dollars, definitely not feasible for ordinary gamers. Point is, it ran real-
time on consumer hardware. It's sort of a showcase for what might become
mainstream in the future, and what is already possible if you're the type of
consumer who buys graphics cards that cost $1k for gaming.

------
lifeisstillgood
Wait what? It says rendered in realtime. You mean there was an actor with dots
on him / her and that film was playing on a monitor next to them so the
director could see the cables popping of?

Surely not

~~~
mryan
Not quite - the animations would have been created "off-line", and included
when rendering the scene.

mparlane explained it nicely:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294300)

PS: Hi Paul, hope all is well :-)

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Cool - thanks for the link. I imagine everyone else is living about ten years
more in the future than i do. Or maybe I am just ten years behind ...

Very well thanks. Doing any conferences this year?

------
linhchi
How can a robot have breaths?

Why does he try to take off the "mask"? How can he identify that it's not a
part of his "body"?

~~~
scotty79
I find it particularly clever. What they are telling is that this is body for
a human to occupy. Sensation and sound of breathing is simulated for him.

He's still in bit of a shock of waking up not in his own body. I guess pulling
was instinctive reaction upon seeing it and finding a (painless) hole in the
side of his face.

~~~
linhchi
I thought that also, but look at his body, it's machine to the bone so I was
thinking where is the place for the human to occupy? I was thinking, maybe he
just "thinks" that he is breathing because he was a human and wakes up to be
like this.

What's that with the downvotes? A robot doesn't need oxygen to fuel chemical
reactions.

------
intrasight
Moore's Law would predict realtime rendering as inevitable. Now let's hope
something interesting comes of it.

~~~
grogenaut
You're referring to Raytracing or other physical rendering approach.

This is still polygonal rendering but by real time they mean that it was
rendered 1:1 live on a cpu.

Most games trailers actually render at some fraction of real time (12:1) (and
often up-res everything) to a series of files which are turned into the actual
trailer.

Also this is running on a pretty beastly machine. So realtime for them might
be 12:1 time ratio on your machine at the same quality. Or much lower res and
real time.

~~~
intrasight
No. I meant high-fidelity rendering as was shown in the post. Of course
Moore's Law will soon give us high-fidelity ray tracing in real time also. The
new hardware implementations are a step in that direction. As for "running on
a pretty beastly machine", that's my point - Moore's Law says this will soon
run on your phone.

------
xyproto
This isn't realtime rendering, like demoscene demos. It's just faster
rendering of a video. I think the webpage is misleading.

------
davidw
I'm tired of projects using 'Unity' as a name.

There's this, there was an Apache Unity thing that was a Java implementation.
There's an Ubuntu thing. Who knows how many others.

~~~
supercoder
I'm tired of parents using David as a name.

~~~
davidw
Well that was an oddly personal response.

