Game engines for realtime movie post production

[dartmonkey]

 

It's a bit difficult to see with the cam footage I can't be the only one to think this looks incredible, no? I realise it's only droids and storm troopers but it looks... real. Apart from the floaty boxes. In realtime. Is this what they were waiting for before making the TV show, I wonder.

 

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/200959/Lucasfilm_using_game_engine_to_render_movie_scenes_in_realtime.php

[TychoCelchuuu]

It doesn't look real to me. I mean, it looks really nice, but if it were on a movie screen it wouldn't really hold up without some serious post production work. By the time you want to integrate actual people and sync up the lighting and everything, you're going to end up basically doing what Avatar did rather than making movies in real time.

[dartmonkey]

But for a TV show based around predominantly suited characters, perhaps for kids, this looks to have loads of potential in the very near future. Maybe the gleaming 3PO and stormtrooper (and that music) are convincing me it's better than it is. I'm just blown away by the realtime of it.

[Thrik]

It definitely looks game-like to me, but that footage is indeed from a game (Star Wars 1313) so that's no surprise. I can't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to render film-quality visuals in real time should you have the hardware required and a game engine that can actually make use of it rather than being limited in the same that PC games have been by consoles for many years.

 

It doesn't surprise me that the film industry is starting to make use of real-time stuff. Lots of stuff in films is already simulation, for example things involving huge amounts of physics, explosions, and water. Isn't it just a matter of technique whether you run those simulations in real time using a game engine or do it separately in some dedicated application? The end result is the same, but there are clear workflow benefits to being able to literally go into a game 'set' and start smashing things up.

 

There will be lots of hurdles to figure out once they go past simple dialogue and movement, though. To handle set-piece scenes in films you'd need a very flexible game engine and a lot of scripting, and at that point you're coming very close to being better off just doing it the traditional way as scripting is a pain in the ass compared to just hand-animating a scene.

 

As you guys already pointed out though, this is great stuff for made-for-TV films and CGI TV shows and stuff. The quality of the animation in those tends to be questionable at best anyway, so if a flexible game engine could liberate those low-paid artists from only having time to put out relatively shitty-looking stuff it'd only be a good thing.

[TychoCelchuuu]

It doesn't surprise me that the film industry is starting to make use of real-time stuff. Lots of stuff in films is already simulation, for example things involving huge amounts of physics, explosions, and water. Isn't it just a matter of technique whether you run those simulations in real time using a game engine or do it separately in some dedicated application? The end result is the same, but there are clear workflow benefits to being able to literally go into a game 'set' and start smashing things up.

Er, no, the reason it can take between an hour and a day to render certain VFX heavy frames in films is because they're using different methods than real time game rendering does. Raytraced lighting, for instance. The frames of film with your avatar in them aren't things that could ever have been rendered real time, nor could the water simulation in those films.

[Thrik]

Sure, but those are for final renders. During production renders are done much more roughly and quickly, and we're probably at a point now where what could be done as a 'quick render' in ~10 seconds a decade ago can now be done in a fraction of that. You won't be doing this stuff at 60 or even 30 frames per second, but perhaps enough to be manageable.

 

I personally see real-time rendering as a starting point of a production. Things could be broadly fleshed out that way, and then (similarly to how Source Film Maker works) more sophisticated and time-consuming rendering could be applied to the captured footage — density of physics and particle simulations dramatically increased, camera effects applied, extra elements added, etc. It'd be a quick way of blocking out scenes.

 

Again though, I can't see this applying very much to blockbuster movies. There's just too much involved and most of it would end up being done manually anyway. I can see huge potential for this in the bucketloads of low-end CGI stuff that's made though. Again, TV shows and straight-to-TV movies. The important part is getting the currently disparate worlds of game and film production to somewhat integrate beyond sometimes using the same modelling tools.