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Graphics Microsoft Games

Square Enix Witch Chapter Real-Time CG DX12 Demo Impresses At Microsoft BUILD 87

Posted by timothy from the killer-graphics dept.
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
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Square Enix Witch Chapter Real-Time CG DX12 Demo Impresses At Microsoft BUILD More

Square Enix Witch Chapter Real-Time CG DX12 Demo Impresses At Microsoft BUILD

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  • I must be old (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BitZtream ( 692029 ) on Saturday May 02, 2015 @07:17AM (#49599497)

    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: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by marcello_dl ( 667940 )

      Well grandpa, do you remember the HiFi craze? we wanted to completely simulate an orchestra, or whatever sound. Turns out that you can get easily to 95% of fidelity while the other 5% still makes the difference and can't be overcome, unless you spend insane amounts of efforts.

      Look at this demo. Impressive, yes. Real, no way. At this stage I think we could convincingly fake a super8 movie, sure. So what? what for?

      • 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

        The style of the article reminds me of an Old Man Murray new article, featuring a glowing description of the rendering power of the (then not yet released) PS2 (article at bottom of page): Playstation 2 To Usher In New Era Of Underage Girlfriend Simulation [oldmanmurray.com]

    • 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.

    • I concur. Visually it is mildly interesting but it ignores the elephant in the room:

      * Modern game design spends more time focusing on form then function [furiousfanboys.com]

      Grind-Grind-Grind! /glares at Warframe, Path of Exile, Diablo, etc.

      When your refer to your customers as whales [gamasutra.com] attempting to suck as much money out of them as possible, the industry of shovelware is fucked [gamesindustry.biz]

    • 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 anyth

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by _xeno_ ( 155264 )

        Which games are at the other end of that spectrum? I'd probably have to say MMOs.

        Yeah, but this is Square Enix we're talking about. They don't let minor details like that prevent them from making the most detailed flower pots MMOs have ever seen [slashdot.org].

        Not to mention Square Enix has a tradition of making the world's crappiest PC ports. Final Fantasy XIII launched on the PC supporting 1280x720 - and nothing else. Pressing Escape while the game was running instantly quit you out of the game without confirmation. The reason for this became obvious when they tried to add a confirmation dialog - th

    • I think it's a nice scene, the hair is great, for example. The problem for me is that it is as blurry, unsharp and overloaded with artificial contrast than any other current video game graphics. I'd like it to be more realistic but apparently my apprehension of reality is different than that of the Square Enix developers.

      Show me some dense dark woods with thousands of trees that move in the wind and every tree with as many leaves as a real tree, and how the sun shines through the roofs of the trees like in

  • Odd subject choice (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The middle aged bald guy in polo was the closest to reality, but why bother modelling that?

  • Shadows still not solved (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phantomus ( 1249544 ) on Saturday May 02, 2015 @07:42AM (#49599551)
    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.

    • The focus appears to be on the shader pipeline and raw polycount. Shadow sample sizes may not be their focus.

  • OpenGL (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Substitute DirectX 12 with OpenGL in TFS and this forum would be jerking off all over this

  • What's with the cynicism? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's amazing that when we witness boundries being pushed, almost everyone here is *extremely* cynical and negative.

    On a tech site of all places????
       

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

  • Bigger scenes were impressive IMO (Score:3)

    by MrL0G1C ( 867445 ) on Saturday May 02, 2015 @08:46AM (#49599703) Journal

    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.

    • 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

  • Any chance they'll update Final Fantasy XIV with this new engine?

    Better-looking catgirls? Yeah! ^_^

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )
      Considering that FFXIV began as a project to put a new graphics engine on FFXI, the answer won't just be no, but "they'll start to do it, but end just up making FFXVI with it instead".

  • Empathy for pixels.

  • Is there multiplayer?

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