Large Open-World Kid Kite Demo

anonymous_user_d829b65b · March 8, 2015, 8:14am

Oh okay, then I think my concerns vanished. Was just wondering if is going to be the case. I’m mostly excited about the ecosystem they mentioned in the open world stream. For now working hard with 4.7.2

anonymous_user_fc9eac1f · March 8, 2015, 12:14pm

Are you sure the dynamic lighting/GI in demo is DFAO/DFGI?

Seemed to me it wasn’t ready yet for such rendering…isn’t it rather VXGI?

anonymous_user_bcf66e2c · March 8, 2015, 12:49pm

It says in the Unreal Engine 2015 video that its DFAO and Dynamic GI from heightfields: ?=player_detailpage&v=CFpdx1wDOoU#t=28

John_Alcatraz · March 8, 2015, 4:49pm

Do you really think 500 AIs will work well? I know they implemented navmesh walking, but apart from I have not heard about any AI improvements.

John_Alcatraz · March 8, 2015, 5:03pm

I think approach is less performant than navmesh walking since you have to check for collision with ground every tick.

anonymous_user_f2b8b290 · March 8, 2015, 10:38pm

Distance Field Ambient Occlusion was used for sky shadowing, and Ray Traced Distance Field shadows were used for tree shadows in the range 100m - 1200m.

A new method was created for computing dynamic GI from heightfields, which is a part of Distance Field Global Illumination. The other part handles bounce from arbitrary static meshes, but that wasn’t enabled as its bounce distance is too low and costs too much in a huge scene. On a 980 GTX the heightfield GI is 2.6ms.

GavinM · March 8, 2015, 11:12pm

We hired and motion-captured a child for a lot of the motion just after the New Year. We used to layout in the engine, modifying as necessary to make it work in the cut. It was laid out to storyboards that I had created late last year.

We baked out the scenes as they were (messy, choppy and nasty as all Hell) and gave them to the animators who threw away whatever they wanted or cleaned up what they wanted depending on the situation. For example, when the kid runs across the rocks that is mocap that has been stylized to improve arcs and spacing as well as push the bounding quality of his movement BUT the 3 shots afterwards had the mocap binned and were hand animated.

We did what we could till the final rig was ready and then with about 2 1/2 weeks to go we started on the facial animation. The cut changed a bit during the production of so some shots got longer but most they got shorter till we felt we had a cut that we were happy with.

At that point it was a sprint to the last day which was EOD Thursday before the GDC demo. 7 weeks production in all.

BinarySword · March 9, 2015, 2:53am

We hired and motion-captured a child for a lot of the motion just after the New Year. We used to layout in the engine, modifying as necessary to make it work in the cut. It was laid out to storyboards that I had created late last year.

We baked out the scenes as they were (messy, choppy and nasty as all Hell) and gave them to the animators who threw away whatever they wanted or cleaned up what they wanted depending on the situation. For example, when the kid runs across the rocks that is mocap that has been stylized to improve arcs and spacing as well as push the bounding quality of his movement BUT the 3 shots afterwards had the mocap binned and were hand animated.

We did what we could till the final rig was ready and then with about 2 1/2 weeks to go we started on the facial animation. The cut changed a bit during the production of so some shots got longer but most they got shorter till we felt we had a cut that we were happy with.

At that point it was a sprint to the last day which was EOD Thursday before the GDC demo. 7 weeks production in all.

I would love to see a detailed write-up of the entire process on the forums, blog and/or wiki, including a breakdown of price/availability of all the gear you used to accomplish such results

Sotalo · March 9, 2015, 3:33am

demo is a much better representation of UE4 than any other demo we’ve ever seen. Infiltrator, Elemental, tops them all, by far!

John_Alcatraz · March 9, 2015, 3:41am

I don’t agree, Infiltrator is a really great indoor demo while kite is a good outdoor demo… And indoor environments are always looking better than outdoor environments since you can put a lot more detail in there. Infiltrator is movie quality, while kite is the… well, the first step on the long way to realistic looking outdoor environments in UE4.

Netrve · March 9, 2015, 8:18am

I loved the Kite demo and I’m really excited for 4.8 now!
One thing I hope for are the tools which Epic used. I know, that might be too much to be asked for, but things like the script they used in Maya (I think it was Maya) to get the Albedo would be amazing or the ecosystem for planting vegetation and so on. But I guess that most of the tools are Epic intern only, but maybe we get lucky
At last I do share’s original concerns, I know that most of those games sell bad, but they still somehow end up on Steam and co. (I remember an example which ripped the ShooterGame). But some of the assets might be useful when used wisely (maybe stuff like vegetation, given that you are going for a realistic look). Let’s hope for the best ^^

Greetings,
Dakraid

GavinM · March 9, 2015, 2:54pm

‘I would love to see a detailed write-up of the entire process on the forums, blog and/or wiki, including a breakdown of price/availability of all the gear you used to accompolish such results’

Potentially could happen. I was going through my files on my computer to reclaim some space on my HD when was done and within the folder I have over 7000 files. includes everything from the initial pitch, through various storyboard iterations, musical inspiration, character design and notes on everything to do with the production of the cinematic part of the demo. It’ll take a while to organize and put it into a document which clearly breaks down the parts of the process that I had anything to do with but it may be worth doing while its all still fresh.

knack · March 9, 2015, 4:18pm

if i understarnd right (my bad english) the rocks and others meshes was building from photos with app for photoscanning right? what application?

anonymous_user_9d619a8e · March 9, 2015, 5:49pm

11.5

11.5Gb dont you mean haha

BinarySword · March 9, 2015, 7:13pm

That would be brilliant

Perhaps even a PDF Breakdown document would be a good resource to have? With that being said, will the PowerPoint slides from GDC be uploaded to Unreal Resources any time soon?

Moreover,
Welcome to the forums Gavin

KITATUS · March 9, 2015, 7:20pm

Was there any music track in mind during creation that the creators dreamed of using but knew they couldn’t get the rights / Didn’t get the rights in the end to use?

Also, I said during the stream but I’ll say it again: I think I understand the story of the mini-movie and I think else is wrong. I actually think the boy wants his kite so bad that he climbs into a cave and the bit at the end with all the kites is actually some kind of hallucination. In reality, He never got his kite and was super-angry. Then, for some reason, He was stuck in the cave and slowly morphed into the creature from the Elemental demo. I’m sure if you looked super-close in the distance of the Elemental demo, You might see a kite. Then the boy, Now a giant lava warrior, Gets up from the throne keeping him captive and went after that darn kite!

But… Epic’s description of the story is better Yeah… That kite totally represents “Unreal Engine 4”… 8] /conspiracy

ChrisTm · March 9, 2015, 7:34pm

We hired and motion-captured a child for a lot of the motion just after the New Year. We used to layout in the engine, modifying as necessary to make it work in the cut. It was laid out to storyboards that I had created late last year.

We baked out the scenes as they were (messy, choppy and nasty as all Hell) and gave them to the animators who threw away whatever they wanted or cleaned up what they wanted depending on the situation. For example, when the kid runs across the rocks that is mocap that has been stylized to improve arcs and spacing as well as push the bounding quality of his movement BUT the 3 shots afterwards had the mocap binned and were hand animated.

We did what we could till the final rig was ready and then with about 2 1/2 weeks to go we started on the facial animation. The cut changed a bit during the production of so some shots got longer but most they got shorter till we felt we had a cut that we were happy with.

At that point it was a sprint to the last day which was EOD Thursday before the GDC demo. 7 weeks production in all.

Thank you for the note and really great work , I have not seen any break between Mocap & hand animated.

Defaultsound · March 11, 2015, 12:17pm

Would be really interested to know more about the Albedo Recovery process. The De-Shadow mapping technique looks really interesting. Any potential write ups about ?

anonymous_user_86c7f04e · March 11, 2015, 3:14pm

;240452:

There is a huge difference between a tech demo and a game, and tech demo was going for quality at distance. Every rock and tree was 3d photoscanned to create both the meshes and the high res textures, which is something that has not really been used in any realtime game with dynamic lighting so far. Some other features that contribute to performance are:

DFAO

Dynamic GI using Heightfields (coming in 4.8)

Ray-Traced Distance Field Soft Shadows (4.8)

the new 2 sided foliage shader (4.7)

A new kind of motion blur (4.8)

SSR for translucency (4.8)

And possibly even more we aren’t already aware of. The Dynamic GI alone is likely the single most performance hungry in the demo.

On top of all that demo was meant to push the hardware to the , meaning there are likely quite a few performance optimizations that could be used but weren’t since the frame rate was within their target FPS for the demo.

Until we get our hands on the project it will be difficult to know what was done and why, and how it can be improved. I personally have no doubt they will release the demo with performance optimizations. After all there is only one person with a Titan X so far, I highly doubt it will be required to use the demo.

+1

Technical demo != game

hopefully the upcoming 4.8 version will be optimized as much as possible for lower configurations , not has a titan X .

Netrve · March 11, 2015, 4:21pm

I don’t know how close the tech-demo is to a real application, but I doubt that you would need a world as huge as the one in the Kite Demo and especially with that kind of detail.
My guess is that most of the features will be optimized (I mean, they weren’t implemented for the Demo solely), but the Kite Demo will only run on very high end rigs despite the optimizations.
I do hope that most of the features will be “game-ready” (yeah, I have no other idea how to label it); DFAO alone is fairly performance hungry and has a few major limitations.

I’m still waiting for someone to ask when is coming to mobile, so I have something to laugh about…hehe :o