Tim Sweeney
speaker
640 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Tim Sweeney’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
very detailed shadows interplaying between the ice and the dirt there, that's screen space sliding. There's actually shadow calculation going on, not based on the world, but on the pixels on the screen, because that is the only way that we could possibly do those calculations fast enough, running them in a pixel shader. Yeah, watch this.
That shadowing is an amazing thing, but the reason that works is counterintuitive. When somebody first explained it to me, I was like, that's really clever, but I don't think that will work. But it does work, because if you observe the positions of incoming light and you know the Z coordinates of the different pixels on the screen, you can figure out how...
your geometry there is likely to include other geometry. And even though it's only an approximation and isn't perfect, it looks perfectly good to the human eye and gives you the subtle shadowing that you see in a scene like this that makes it look highly realistic. And the shadowing influences other things There's also some really interesting things happening with the color here.
I'm not even sure what's causing it. It looks like color is bleeding from some parts of the snow onto other parts of the snow. It looks like there's some subsurface scattering going on. I'm not even sure if that's being used. in the scene. And then there's a material layering system for laying down layers of material, dirt and snow and other things, all making that work.
And then there's the light bouncing off of the geometry, which is another system for lighting on top of the global illumination system.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. The engine supports a number of different reflection techniques. One is calculating basically textures that reflect, that capture all the lighting in the scene, and then bouncing that off of texture maps so you can see different lights bouncing off of different pixels in different ways. And then there's individual lighting casting reflections off of things too.
And a lot of this is under the control of designers. And one of the things that's yet to do a problem for the future is... You don't just press a few buttons and this kind of scene magically appears.
This is a lot of work from some highly skilled people, not only building out this particular scene, but in setting up the material layers so that you get the dirt with the ice layered on top and all the reflections working. And they had to make a number of technical art decisions to make this work.
And if a novice who hadn't worked very hard built a kind of scene like this, it wouldn't look nearly as good. So one of the challenges we have is to make building this kind of quality level even easier and more seamless and automatic. You'd like to just build a scene and say, use this material here and have this appearance come out of it.
This is the power of awesome technical art, three decades of feature development, and you have to credit it also to the 20 teraflops of graphics performance that NVIDIA is delivering. Thanks, NVIDIA. 90 megahertz to this. 90 megahertz is 90 megaflops. This is 20 teraflops. That's a big change.
Yeah. That's really cool. It's a cool system for material layering and a dozen pieces coming together here. You also notice there's fogginess and there's some hot objects emanating fog. An artist did that. That didn't just arise automatically.
Yeah, layer materials on top of each other and see how much of each material should be protruding in different places with the engine handling transitions and things like that.
Yeah, that's all real time. What the hell? How do you do that? How do you do the smoke? Well, there's a really powerful particle system underneath. It's providing the technological foundations for this sort of thing. But there's awesome artistry on top of that. and an awesome physics engine powering it.
It's hard to tell exactly which piece is doing what, but you have several different particle systems there. There's one for the fire, and then there's another one for the smoke coming out of it. The really interesting thing happening with the smoke here is that it's occluding light.
There's calculation of how the light should diminish as it travels through smoke, and so you're seeing the lighting on the smoke being the really interesting thing. And there have been a lot of attempts, but this was the first demo where I felt like this kind of smoke had really no longer looked like a video game. It looked like just a burning trash can, billowing out dark smoke.
And, yeah, it's the artist's sophistication. It's a very, very, very large part of it.
Yeah, that's right. Humans are by far the hardest part of computer graphics because millions of years of evolution have given us dedicated brain systems to detect patterns and faces and infer emotions and intent. Because cavemen had to, when they see a stranger, determine whether they were likely friendly or they might be trying to kill them. And so humans...
We people in the world have extraordinarily detailed expectations of a face, and we can notice imperfections, especially perfections arising from computer graphics limitations. But it becomes by far the hardest problem.
So the MetaHumans effort is part of a decades-long initiative that Vlad Mostilovich, the most talented digital humans visionary in the world, has been working on for generations and generations of games.
serving individual clients around the game industry for a while and then joining Epic as part of the three-lateral team, and leading now a worldwide effort to build all the technologies required to make digital humans realistic.
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