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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an area that wasn't hit by any light being completely black. But in reality, light bounces around the entire scene, um, dynamically. When a light hits a red wall, then, uh, Most of the blue and green light is absorbed, but the red light reflects off and now is hitting other things.
And so if you have a red wall with a white floor, light is bouncing off of the red wall into the floor, and now the floor is being turned red. And so the entire bouncing of light around the scene through multiple bounces is the critical challenge to solve here. And again, laws of physics are known, and so... The complete solution to this was written down in the 1950s, I think.
The real magic here in Lumen is this system that Daniel Wright developed over the course of many years, based on ideas formed over a longer period of time, to calculate the way lighting bounces around at different scales, ranging from the scale of miles or kilometers down to the scale of pixels and millimeters.
and to not only calculate at each level, but integrate it seamlessly at each level to give the appearance of completely seamless and accurate lighting. And previous techniques were highly specialized, and artists had to make a decision for each light about exactly what it did.
And a lot of the practice with it right now is you build a scene, you place lights in it, and it just works to make it that much easier.
Yeah, that's right.
Light in the real world goes through a lot of bounces, and the effects of it are very subtle, but when they're not there, you miss them. Often a person can't point out why a scene is wrong, but they know it looks wrong, and it's the lack of the subtle lighting cues that we're seeing here.
Yeah, the industry's gone through a massive evolution and there's so many supporting systems to make this awesome. And always artists.
And you have to appreciate the algorithms are doing quite a lot here. You can have a scene with a huge number of not just lights, but also bright objects who reflect light off of them. Every one of those has to be captured in the reflections in order for it to be realistic. And you can't calculate every photon in the scene. And so you need really detailed approximations.
And that's the field of computer graphics. It's about increasingly effective approximations of the laws of physics, which are just totally intractable.
Increasing capabilities and productivity, the limiting factor in every one of these businesses is cost. And the more the engine can make their jobs easier, the more power that brings them. One of the big revolutions we've seen in Hollywood is moving away from
doing computer graphics integration into a human scene with green screens, to moving to these large LED wall panels where they're displaying real-time computer graphics powered by the Unreal Engine. And that's a massive improvement in quality. You can recognize the old green screen movies because the lighting on the characters is just wrong.
And, you know, as much as they try to fix it up, it never really works. When you're filming in front of an LED panel with LED light emitters in front of you as well, the actor not only picks up all the lighting from the actual natural scene that they're supposed to appear in in the movie, but they also can look around and see it, and they're aware of exactly what set they're acting in.
And just the overall end result is that much higher. It's as much because the actors are able to do their jobs better, seeing the scene they're in, because the technology is enabling a better lighting calculation and a better interplay of virtual light and real-world light to make the end result awesome.
I think a lot of people in the industry are overly optimistic about the rate of progress of AI for video and other things like that. The real problem is consistency. Like, spurting out an image is really high quality. But with video, over the course of seeing all the AI approaches have consistency issues going from one place to another. And I don't think that those will just be remedied easily.
Fundamentally, AI just doesn't have anything resembling an understanding of the entire scene they're in, the entire arc of the movie or plot they're in, and the entirety of the world around them and how it might affect the scene. Whereas game engines have that exactly where they need to be.
And so I think what we're going to see in the space of world-class high-quality productions isn't just everybody moves to AI and a large part of the human creatives contributing to that are obsolete, I think what we're going to see is AI becoming a multiplying force on the power of human creatives, making them able to create better stuff more quickly and with higher quality and results.
I think unlike the fields of generative 2D art and generative text, I think the future of AI is much more complex and nuanced. And I think your interview with Mark Zuckerberg conducted in VR was a really good first example of this. So you did this VR discussion. It was capturing your faces and then rendering a completely 3D computer graphics model of your faces.
And then the end result was patched up by an AI image enhancer that was able to add an awful lot of the missing subtleties that are lost by normal computer graphics rendering. And that's the first step. You can imagine the output of Unreal Engine being enhanced by an AI pixel shading post-processor is one thing.
You can imagine creation of objects being enhanced, especially mashing up high-quality objects that have already been created. Epic's Quixel team went around the world and scanned tens of thousands of real-world objects at extremely high levels of quality. They have everything from rocks to trees to archaeological finds and so on. all captured there.
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