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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

Really neat to see a big hairy problem broken up into so many small chunks. Multi-pass rendering, level of detail culling, soft-shadow blurring. It reminds me of the Arthur C. Clark quote that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". There's a phenomenal amount of processing steps happening here, on a frame-by-frame basis. I feel old thinking of how many hours this type of rendering took running 3D Studio Max back in 2002 on a network of Windows NT boxes.

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Yup, modern game engines are complex systems with many parts.

Getting nearer to photorealistic graphics [1] isn't just about doing "more of the same and faster" (Moore's Law), it's increasingly also about "division of labor" across many subcomponents.

I like this rendering passes breakdown for Battlefield 4 (there are 54 passes):

http://imgur.com/N4gJkbm

(Frostbite engine by DICE, started as Battlefield franchise backbone, now it's becoming the engine for EA, sharing tech across many games - Battlefield, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Need for Speed, Star Wars: Battlefront, Mirror's Edge)

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[1] See e.g. here how close to photo sources Frostbite engine can get today (latest Need for Speed game):

http://static1.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1539/15391776/2...

I will say it took me an uncomfortably long time to determine which pictures were real. The pavement is a pretty good giveaway, but incredible nonetheless.

Yeah, they got really good. For the rest - two pictures on the left are from the game engine and two pictures on the right are photographs.

From what I saw, Frostbite is the most impressive engine out there.

a lot of 3d work can be as much determined by stylistic choices and level of artist talent.. frostbyte is likely able to replicate quite a wide range oh physical phenomena and photographic artefacts much like GTA5 but it also heavily depends on the tiny tweaks made to the particular methods used and the assets fed into it to make it truely "photo realistic"

honestly these days I'd much rather play a game with good style and direction rather than perfectly repicating reality. it's impressive and will continue to get better for a while, but I like my art a little less like a photo :)

(I'm a 3d artist myself, and have to deal with the tradeoff between quality and time on a daily basis)

>"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

I am a software engineer, and I think its black magic. Probably inside your nvidia chip there is a ouija board summoning spirits to conjure images onto your screen. Why else would cards have names like Voodoo?

This took us minutes per frame in 1997 in 3DS4 on a couple of Pentium Pro 180s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU8pfwlPF4I

I had to dump the rendered frames off on to the video playback server every 4 hours for about a week over Christmas 1996 because the local disks would be full. That was a weird week !

Wow, long time since I've heard that. (I loved "C'mon Kids"!)

I met the Boos a few times but I don't really know their music. We had their heads scanned in at a specialist place in London and went to one of their shows.

I got on with Martin and I particularly enjoyed the sequence flying around inside his psychedelic head. I made the animated textures and mapped them with C++ and then 3DS did the rendering.

The walking tiger is from a plastic toy. I took a scan on an A4 flatbed scanner, rotated it, took another scan until I had a full rotation. I then turned the outlines into vectors with the same number of vertices and made those into a triangulated solid.

The three minutes of video took about three months of very long days.

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