
Unreal Engine 4 shots that are unbelievably realistic - abrar2015
http://www.trymodern.com/2015/07/01/300/unreal-engine-4-shots-that-are-unbelievably-realistic.html
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kraftman
Skip the non-article and go straight to the original forum post link. More
information and higher res images:
[https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58385-Koola-s...](https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58385-Koola-
s-stuff/page4)

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hfsktr
The still images were really impressive (to a layman like me the bar is pretty
low but the comments indicate this too). When I watched the video though it
broke the realness...not sure how to describe it but everything seemed 'too
still' or something. Mostly with the water. Not like it's less impressive or
anything but I was hoping it would feel like the images or something.

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UnoriginalGuy
You mean this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slc--
V2pi5c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slc--V2pi5c)

To me it at least looks as good if not better than many movie's CGI. It has a
little bit of "uncanny valley[0]" but not enough if I suspend my disbelief a
little.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

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wigginus
This video is much better:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nLGoqqDc0w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nLGoqqDc0w)

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joshuapants
That one is a lot better, but still looks off enough that I didn't even
approach the uncanny valley. It looks _great_ but it doesn't look _real_.

In the other video the foliage looks horrible. Come to think of it, I doubt
I've ever seen _good_ 3D foliage, let alone examples that come close to
_real_.

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chii
the pebbles on the ground looks quite real. But the larger boulders in the
background is too textured and not enough bumpiness and also too uniformly
flat. That's what seems to make it fake. also the water looks great, but too
uniform and perfect. Real water has lots of little flaws and it's usually not
as clear too (things like muddy water is hard to render i guess).

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vlunkr
The problem with "realistic" graphics is that they only look that good in
screenshots, and maybe a simple video. But now add a person in there. Then
show them talking, walking on the sand and through the water. Is it still
going to be realistic? Not likely. To the people who are saying we are getting
over the uncanny valley, I think you are wrong. I think it only gets worse as
the environments look more real but the physics and characters don't match.
When everything looks fake it's easy for your brain to accept, when it looks
real but doesn't behave like reality it gets weird.

This is all coming from someone who is still playing video games from several
generations ago, so you can just ignore me if you want to.

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duaneb
This is mostly due to the fact that they use models and materials that are
easy to render. It's the things like flesh and plants that often stand out,
either because their poly count is too low so they don't look like they
should, or because the material rendering isn't there yet.

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god_bless_texas
Any of us reading this are old enough to see the progress of video games and
the idea of "immersion" happening before our very eyes. We still have faint 8
bit memories and know this is all an illusion.

I really wonder what it's going to be like for people born in the next few
years - entering a world where the games are as real as reality. It gives
"Second Life" a whole new meaning.

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sanoli
This is very interesting. I never thought about it. Someone who grows up
seeing this kind of realism in videos and pictures alongside videos and
pictures of real places, and just can't see any difference. Wow...

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4ndr3vv
As a child I thought that everything in the past was black and white

10 years time: "When my daddy was small like me everything was made of pixels"

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whatever_dude
Often the most impressive screenshots are the ones that look least impressive.

It's (comparatively) easy to have screenshots that look great if it's using a
lot of assets with baked lighting. It's a testament to the designer's effort,
but says very little about the engine.

Real-time ambient occlusion, radiosity, global illumination, refraction,
etc... _that 's_ the kind of thing that is (technically) impressive in an
engine, but so var very little of this (beautiful) Unreal/Unity/* demos
actually deliver that. And that's a shame.

The craft deserves praise, but there's a distinction between asset creation
praise (to the designer) and technical rendering praise (the engine).

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Qantourisc
I doubt the GPU's actually have enough computing power for this. (well
currently anyway)

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INTPenis
For greater effect they should have added something more unreal to the images.
Like a mech, an alien or the dopefish.

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nixarn
Like this you mean?
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/99646627@N03/16621361455/in/ph...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/99646627@N03/16621361455/in/photostream/)
=) by the same guy

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Vexs
Wow, that reminds me so much of Simon Stalenhag's work. I had to check that it
wasn't the same guy!

[http://www.simonstalenhag.se/](http://www.simonstalenhag.se/)

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et2o
This is amazingly realistic.

I don't mean to take away from it needlessly or criticize gratuitously, but if
you watch the video you can see the water turbulence is still unrealistic. I
guess this is a very difficult problem for the unreal engineers to solve
because the physics are hard.

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skizm
I never know if "physics are hard" or maybe they already have working models
that are completely realistic, just impractical to run on "normal" computers.

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peterwwillis
So. Once the uncanny valley gets crossed, and we can successfully create
synthetic images - and eventually videos - that purport to show something
happening that never actually happened.... will pictures and videos no longer
be valid evidence in court because they could be made synthetically in a video
game engine?

Going further: could wars be started because of something someone made in a
video game engine?

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PeterisP
A random photo or video with an untraceable source already won't be treated as
serious evidence in court.

A video + a testimony "This is what I saw on that fateful night" or "I
retreived this video from the officer's body cam immediately after the
incident, it was in the custody the whole time and forensic analysis shows no
sign of tampering" carries an entirely different weight than that video alone.

Regarding wars, in the recent conflicts we already have cases where doctored
photo & video evidence was used as arguments and vice versa, where real
evidence is dismissed because it can be made synthetically - and it obviously
can, they become evidence only if you[r organization] gathered it yourself or
you really trust the soruce.

Wars definitely won't be started _because_ of something made in a video game,
but such videos can and most likely will be used in justifying a war decision
to the global public and building the relevant PR/propaganda materials.

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josefresco
If I had a nickel for every _pre-release_ game screenshot that looked _realer
than real_ ...

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CyberDildonics
One reason these look so good is that they are making good use of depth of
field. It isn't something typically used to this degree in games (it would be
a hindrance to play with).

Beyond that, depth of field typically isn't carried through into reflections
(you can focus your eyes on marble floor or you can focus on the reflection in
the marble floor).

On the best looking beach shots, I don't know if the unreal engine blur the
reflections to make the depth of field look better or (more likely) the artist
saw the reflections as too sharp and softened them, which looks better because
they would be affected by the depth of field.

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aresant
Don't miss the one where the artist includes a avatar in there!

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

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uniclaude
As always, animation is definitely the hardest thing to get right when it
comes to 3D. The best animations out there still look unrealistic, it must be
incredibly frustrating for animators.

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moron4hire
Is this live rendered, or is the lighting baked into the textures?

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cabirum
Not much to bake here: one light source (Sun), shadows, AO, and some kind of
faked GI - are all dynamic these days.

[add] actually, quoting the author: "lighting is really basic, movable direct
and sky, without any GI/DFAO/bake/"

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finnjohnsen2
Wonder how long we will be stuck in a 99.X% era of realism. Our brains still
picks up the small things and tips us off that something isn't right.
Especially when things start to move about.

Not that it's not cool to be on this journey. Every one of these iteration
towards realism gets me excited.

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sanoli
I haven't played any 3d video games in about 15 years. The video at the bottom
of the page looked awesome, except for the edges of the water. I guess when
they do Engine 5 they will finally change the name to 'Real Engine'.

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gsklee
More UE4 CGs from kooooola can be found here:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/99646627@N03/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/99646627@N03/)

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eddd
I would like to see animations and the performance of the engine.

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Robadob
From the authors post[1] linked by the article, this[2] picture shows them
getting ~100 FPS.

[1]
[https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58385-Koola-s...](https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58385-Koola-
s-stuff/page4)

[2]
[http://tof.canardpc.com/view/3934ce8b-4423-4dd6-a16f-3e35376...](http://tof.canardpc.com/view/3934ce8b-4423-4dd6-a16f-3e353767d379.jpg)

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flog
A question for those in-the-know about the state of VR: Could a home desktop
render these scenes in high-enough resolution in RT for the upcoming headsets?

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thisjepisje
_Just for info, the scene runs at 1080p30 with really high tesselation, with
something less overkill it run at 1080p60 (on a gtx970)._

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ekianjo
Nice, making realistic landscapes pictures is a feat, but through a human
model in the mix and the "reality" is broken in half a second.

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kul_
I have never seen very realistic fire in any games! Is there a substantial
challenge in fire simulation vs say water?

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probablybroken
I think in part it's down to the fact that we want to interact with water -
interactions with fire tend to be more incidental, and therefore there's less
incentive to simulate or mock it up to a higher standard.

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kul_
Thats not very convincing, I am sure setting fire to zombies would be fun!

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wodenokoto
I didn't find it in the article, but is this running real time and on what
hardware?

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alloyed
Real time, on a I7-3770/GTX970 combo. It says so in the video description

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sarreph
So, is this the beginning of us coming up on the other side of the uncanny
valley?

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melling
It's all scenery. No people or anything moving, for example.

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dharma1
nice textures and lighting. Koola was killing it with the arch viz ue4 stuff
too

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agumonkey
Indeed lightning and composition, the nice contrast between reflected sky and
the darkened rocks sells the shot.

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nsxwolf
Why don't any games look like this?

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ljak
This is probably not rendered in real time.

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pikzen
Actually, these scenes run in realtime at 30FPS in the worst case, and upwards
of 100 FPS on some (like the beach scene)

[https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58385-Koola-s...](https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?58385-Koola-
s-stuff/page4)

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rasz_pl
depth/focus is wrong and hurts my eyes, its like those pictures are forcing me
to go cross-eye

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driverdan
So UE4 is capable of rending still images as good as a standard 3D image
rendering program? That's nice but until these are rendered at game level FPS
it's not very meaningful for games.

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SXX
Check description on youtube or forum posts. According to author with some
optimizations it's give 100FPS on i7-3770 / GTX970.

