
Unreal Paris - davidst
http://www.benoitdereau.com/unrealparis.html
======
nailer
Worth pointing out for HN that Epic should soon release a significant update
to UE4 so you won't need to download UE source and emscripten (like you do
now) and can just export to webGL, like you were packaging for Windows /
Android / iOS etc. It's in QA right now. So soon you could wander around here
instead of playing the video. Source is the UE YouTube channel on Thursdays.

If you're into creating stuff on a computer and feel like a break from
programming, UE4 is great fun.

If you want to do archvis lighting like this, check out koola's scenes in the
forums and the Berlin Apartment which is free in the marketplace.

~~~
mortoc
Yes, you could walk around in it if you wanted to wait for 4gb of textures to
download.

I'm happy they thought to make a youtube link.

~~~
jonnyscholes
It's a shame they only uploaded it at 720p :(

~~~
abricot
And 60 fps.. that was almost painful to watch.

~~~
danellis
> painful to watch

How so?

~~~
rux
Without any motion blur at all the jerkiness of panning in the video is
tremendously apparent. If you're a gamer used to 60fps in this engine, this
hurts the eyes in the same way listening to a symphony through laptop speakers
hurts the ears.

------
daenz
Very cool. The one thing that stood out to me is the transition from screen-
space to cubemap reflections. If I understand how these are typically
implemented, screen-space reflections sample existing parts of the current
frame. These are good for real-time reflections at shallow angles. Cubemap
reflections are for the rest of the environment, when there is nothing "on
screen" to sample _from_ , and so you must resort to a pre-baked image of the
environment to represent your reflection.

~~~
rangibaby
The baked reflections (THAT MIRROR!) upset me a lot more than they should
have. I guess it's an uncanny valley effect.

~~~
maccard
Reflections aren't necessarily baked, it's equally likely that there's just no
player model.

------
jamesrom
The joystick camera work distracts from an otherwise beautiful scene.

~~~
spdustin
I think the purpose of the keyboard and mouse control is to underscore that
it's "in-game", rather than a pre-rendered cutscene. That's what I got out of
it, anyway.

~~~
ygra
Looks more like the camera was rotated with the keyboard, too, not the mouse.

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guard-of-terra
They should totally add some jitter, uneven angles and speed transitions, and
it will fool people.

~~~
thecatspaw
exactly. It looks really well made (graphically), but the camera breaks it. If
they fixed that, it really would fool people.

~~~
sp332
I was surprised that there was no depth-of-field effect. Everything is in
focus all the time. Is that feature not available in UE4, or did they just
skip it for this demo?

~~~
Apofis
Skipped. He was trying to show detail, not fool people.

------
bane
Now if only you could actually find that nice of an apartment in Paris
(complete with a sensible bathroom layout) for under 10 million Euros.

~~~
ExpiredLink
The furniture looks more LA than Paris.

------
putzdown
It's horrifying to me that such a beautiful piece of real-time rendering
should be marred by herky-jerky camera movement. Please, people: life is too
short to use gamepads to control first person games when you don't have to
(i.e. on a desktop). Get a mouse+WASD going, crank up the mouse smoothing if
it suits the mood of the piece (as it would here), and give us an elegant
viewpoint to match the elegant environment.

~~~
chm
Au contraire, I think the jerky movement was an excellent contrast to the
beauty of the scene.

If the movement was too smooth, how could you tell between UE4 and some CGI
applied to a video of a real appartment? I couldn't by just watching the
video.

~~~
geon
I was thinking it would be fun to capture real video while emulating the jerky
camera of an FPS game.

------
rikacomet
I must say, that the sense of realism in that was really good! Allow me to
just point out a few things that would help it get nearer to perfect! (This is
good heart'ed feedback obviously!):

1\. The bathroom door was somehow unnaturally bent backward, it really was the
only thing that clicked instantly (even in 144p!) [Perhaps its just me :/ ]

2\. Near the end of the video, the hallway was a bit too dark, global lights
suddenly dimmed, the transition was unnatural (slightly ..), but it is not as
noticeable as point no1.

3\. From a artistic point of you, I would have preferred if the sofa in the
second room (living room) would have had a slight shade of yellow (sun
effect).. just a tiny bit to separate it from the bedroom scene. The reason I
feel is perhaps because of nature of both rooms, Bedrooms have a blue sleepy
appeal, living room are a bit cheerful, and since here the source of light was
sun, it should have had that warm hue for the sense of realism to be even
better. The other reason is perhaps because the set contains only 3-4 rooms
plus lobby, that slight tone of diversity would have had a profound artistic
uplift.

PS: Please take it as just feedback, and not as criticism. Dude! I can't even
though half of that.. so salute to you and best of luck :)

Love from India ~

------
sebular
I've seen some beautiful UE4 screenshots and well-composed videos, but this
was the first video I've seen of someone just walking through a scene with a
controller, and it blew me away.

------
jongala
I love it. Ever since I saw a recreation of Fallingwater in the Half Life
engine (1), I thought this would be the future of architectural design (or at
least delivering design to clients). Is this becoming common now?

(1)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqsk4WARk2I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqsk4WARk2I)

~~~
tomtoise
As a guy who works in an Architectural office, I know people who are pushing
for this, however in my office specifically we still have quite a few
directors who still refuse to use Revit / Autocad and still design with pencil
and paper, so there is very strong push-back.

I'm actually downloading UE4 as I type this, I'm going to have a play around
with importing AutoCad maps and then demo to the Directors, in an effort to
show them how visually impressive UE4 could be as opposed to dry meetings with
clients showing them floor plans. It's quite a rare skill to be able to
properly visualize projects in 3d from floor plans, and I've often seen
clients going cross eyed in attempts to hold all the info in their head at
once.

------
VeryVito
Nice work. The only thing that bugged me (a lot) was the range top: It looked
like a flat image of a range, while everything else in the flat was textured
to perfection.

Only other nitpick: How many copies of Photoshop magazine does that apartment
dweller need to own? ;)

~~~
jacquesm
> Only other nitpick: How many copies of Photoshop magazine does that
> apartment dweller need to own? ;)

This is something you'll see in lots of virtual environments, there is only a
limited number of objects of a certain class so you'll see lots of repetition.
Personally, I blame the teapot.

------
contingencies
Most of the substances are convincing, though the drapes around the last
windowed room are weak and the reflective pot in the far corner of the room
immediately prior is unnatural as you transition between them. At this point,
I feel the unnatural motion is a greater stumbling block to believability than
the vision, even despite the virtual eyeball type light/dark adjustments we
see at the end when swinging between the final bright room at right and the
darker doorway.

------
Animats
That's precious. What graphics card do you need to render that in real time?

Here's the "Berlin flat" mentioned:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AMY7I_eHjk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AMY7I_eHjk)
(Great video, annoying voice-over.)

Another apartment:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTt7AGIpV2I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTt7AGIpV2I)

None of these have a refrigerator, for some reason.

~~~
terabytest
You don't need a refrigerator when your apartment is so darn cool.

------
Kiro
So I am just starting to learn Unity. Should I switch to UE4 instead? I'm a
single developer and I don't really need the fancy graphics so although this
looks really impressive I'm not sure UE4 will really help me out if that's its
biggest advantage. I'm making much more minimalistic 3D games.

~~~
gambiting
I have worked on large games in both. UE4 is a lot more powerful,but it
certainly is a lot more complex too. If you want to start on a nice,
functional indie game, go with Unity. I would recommend doing that purely
because of the Unity Assets store - when you are building your own game and
don't have money to hire an artist, the selection on that store is absolutely
fantastic.

Blueprint system from UE4 is actually very similar to what's used on huge
commercial games, the scripting is top-notch and overall UE4 is definitely a
batter tool than Unity. But like I've said above, it's much more complex and I
wouldn't recommend it for starters.

------
aresant
This made the rounds this AM on the Oculus reddit sub.

The demo is currently 404'ing if you try to download, developer posted that
he's bug-fixing and updating tomorrow. (1) but of course a redditor posted a
mirror (2)

And if you want to be truly stunned and still have an Oculus DK1 check out his
first demo: [https://share.oculus.com/app/redframe-environment-
demo](https://share.oculus.com/app/redframe-environment-demo)

Even with the DK1 screen door it's damn near photorealistic.

(1)
[http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147851](http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147851)

(2)
[https://mega.co.nz/#!nIJSmT6K!BRKQBDb0uB9V9Xbtz13c_3QZjokq_3...](https://mega.co.nz/#!nIJSmT6K!BRKQBDb0uB9V9Xbtz13c_3QZjokq_3jICCOdoAbCZtw)

------
unoti
Last I looked into this 6 months ago, there were a few things keeping me away
from Unreal Engine and keeping me on Unity. I need to be able to deploy to the
web and have the client execute there. And I definitely need to deploy to iOS
and Android. Last I checked, the workflow for deploying to web was very wonky,
not something to stake a business on for things that must deploy in summer
2015. And similarly, deploying to iOS and Android yielded really battery
hungry apps that didn't feel best of breed. Are things better now?

~~~
gisenberg
Isn't Unity's publish to web feature timebombed with Chrome?

[http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/28/the-future-of-web-
publis...](http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/10/28/the-future-of-web-publishing-
in-unity-an-update/)

------
corysama
Here's a walk-through of the scene using an Oculus DK2:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVL9yKwx_aY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVL9yKwx_aY)

------
fallat
Almost brought a tear to my eye. Only 20 years ago we were playing Super Mario
Bros on the NES. It almost scares me that we really could be living in a
virtual reality.

~~~
famitsu
While a lot of people were still playing Super Mario Bros on the NES in 1995,
the game was released in 1985 (30 years ago) and the console itself (or the
Famicom, in Japan) was released in 1983.

------
voltagex_
Getting 404 on
[http://www.benoitdereau.com/UnrealParis_v1.1.rar](http://www.benoitdereau.com/UnrealParis_v1.1.rar)

~~~
exadeci
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8957361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8957361)

------
pan69
Couldn't sit through the whole thing because of the weird camera movement. I
assume they're trying to simulate an in-game style movement but it doesn't
feel like a human operating the camera. Other than that, very impressive!

~~~
sparky_z
I thought the whole point was that it _was_ an "in-game style" real-time
rendering of somebody using keyboard/mouse to walk around inside the virtual
environment. That's what makes it impressive and noteworthy.

Am I wrong about that? If it's a pre-rendered animation, it's certainly not
state-of-the-art.

~~~
dEnigma
It's not pre-rendered, there is even a download option, though it doesn't work
at the moment. Fortunately someone uploaded it to mega[1]

[1]
[https://mega.co.nz/#!nIJSmT6K!BRKQBDb0uB9V9Xbtz13c_3QZjokq_3...](https://mega.co.nz/#!nIJSmT6K!BRKQBDb0uB9V9Xbtz13c_3QZjokq_3jICCOdoAbCZtw)

------
brianpgordon
Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

------
acd
Here is another Unreal Architecture "Loft complete project"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=admsmCmaL3Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=admsmCmaL3Y)

------
mlrtime
How long until this quality can be rendered inside a browser? It would be a
game changer for real-estate sites.

------
ape4
Obviously a great job. Paris would have traffic noise instead of chirping
birds. No coat rack by the front door.

------
malkia
Looks very realistic, and there is a bit of the "uncanny valey" at 1:40

------
ninjakeyboard
WHOEVER IS FILMING HAS NO REFLECTION! This is amazing work though.

------
zobzu
note that the appartment is very simplistic. flat surfaces, untextured walls
etc. its pretty yes - but its a very specific kind of scene. UE4 outdoors or
on more complex scenes still looks good - but not nearly as realistic. (albeit
thats partially a horse power issue, too)

------
ehosca
no shower?

------
tormeh
This is all good, but when are games going to get AIs more advanced than just
attacking you on sight and otherwise just standing around serving up pre-made
speeches? While I think view distances can certainly get better, last console
gen was otherwise adequate in the graphics department.

This is of course an impressive achievement, but I just view it as a
curiosity.

~~~
everyone
Agreed. Interesting games were never about fancy or realistic graphics. Also,
I'd bet all the fancy lighting and such in this scene is all pre-baked so the
scene is totally static. Not the best state for interesting gameplay.

Though this sort of thing would be awesome for virtual tours of proposed
buildings or faraway places and so on.

~~~
corysama
This is not a game. It is a virtual tour of a faraway (from me) place.

