[HN Gopher] Cesium for Unreal Now Available
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Cesium for Unreal Now Available
Author : kylebarron
Score : 240 points
Date : 2021-04-05 05:22 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cesium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cesium.com)
| a_c wrote:
| I think it is a bedrock in bridging gaming and real life. From
| now on you can visit virtual store in real-but-in-game location
| and do all the purchase without leaving the game. Imagine GTA,
| but everything you buy is real
| tpoindex wrote:
| Nice models of Denver on the video, especially Union Station,
| City & County Building, airliner flyover. But the car is driving
| the wrong way on Broadway, even though the parked cars on the
| right side are pointed in the correct direction. Maybe a new GTA
| Denver edition is in the works? heh.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Can anyone comment on how good these datasets are? Are these
| going to be down to like, an individual tree?
|
| I also note it mentions integrating with unreal's water engine.
| Unreal's water engine is excellent, but as of yet, not so great
| with tiled landscapes. Curious how that'll work.
| dvdkon wrote:
| Oh, I thought someone made an addon for the original Unreal from
| 1998. I should have known better, but it's still funny to me.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| Frankly, I think that would be more HN worthy, and much more
| interesting as it would like likely involved a clever hack.
| notum wrote:
| Apologies for potentially asking a really silly question but:
| Cesium plugin is free and open source, however the Ion service
| (the actual data) is paid.
|
| So of what use is the plugin without the streamed data? Can we
| choose to patch into Bing photogrammetry data as an alternative?
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| You could potentially create a different world and use Cesium
| OSS to do 3d tile managing
| hacoo wrote:
| I haven't looked deeply at this, but sophisticated level
| streaming for large areas isn't something Unreal supports out
| of the box. Very cool of them to open source this.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| > sophisticated level streaming for large areas isn't
| something Unreal supports out of the box
|
| Yes it is. I don't think this is replacing unreal's level
| streaming tech either. I'm reading this as a tool to generate
| content within unreal's existing landscape tiling/streaming
| tools.
| modeless wrote:
| Yes, you can load practically any dataset into Cesium, so you
| are not locked into their paid service and can self host. You
| might have to do a format conversion. I do think Ion is a nice
| service, and 3D globe data is going to be expensive no matter
| who you license it from.
|
| I'm using the web version of Cesium in
| https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/ and I'm self hosting
| everything including the globe imagery, for free. (I don't need
| high resolution imagery for the whole globe because I only show
| a zoomed out view, but you could store and serve it all
| yourself in principle).
|
| In addition to the nice 3D graphics I'm also using a bunch of
| Cesium functions for the actual satellite visibility
| calculations. It's a great library.
| darkwater wrote:
| > https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/
|
| Wow, super nice website, gonna use it to try to see some
| satellites from now on! Thanks for creating and sharing it.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| Wow, I love your site! It makes such a big difference when
| you give the situated view of what the object in the sky will
| look like from my point of view, using Street View imagery.
| Totally raises the bar for any site giving you visibility
| predictions.
| jjwiseman wrote:
| I'm sure that required a lot of fiddly details to get
| right, but it pays off hugely. And I can imagine it's the
| kind of thing that lots of people wouldn't even think of as
| important. Well done!
| willio58 wrote:
| In theory you could create your own data source. I mean, good
| luck, but you could. I think keeping the data closed is totally
| fine in this case.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > So of what use is the plugin without the streamed data?
|
| None, but so what? Being open source is useful even if the data
| you use it with is proprietary.
| notum wrote:
| Absolutely. They just make a huge point about the plugin
| being open source, how that's "how business should be done",
| I thought there would be more to it, some useful tech beyond
| the same-old vendor lock-in or anything.
| lnanek2 wrote:
| As a developer, having an open source client side is hugely
| beneficial. With closed source mapping libs you often know
| what is wrong with the providers library from your stack
| traces, but have no way to fix it. Open source means
| trivial bugs handling things like nulls and deallocation
| and even more serious bugs like CPU use regressions (which
| are easy to introduce with an incorrect condition somewhere
| and can slip through the cracks until end user's batteries
| are dying) become trivial fixes instead of: notify
| provider, provider may or may not road map a fix, provider
| may or may not provide the fix weeks later in their next
| closed source SDK update.
| ihsw wrote:
| The goal is (probably) for the Cesium data platform to be
| number one 3D geospatial content standard and for the Ion
| service to the first (and best) provider of Cesium data.
|
| There is also an implicit service where they (Cesium GS Inc)
| offer consulting and collaboration on curating high-quality
| private Cesium data sets in parallel to their own, eg: military
| applications.
| mike_d wrote:
| From the demo video this looks really interesting for games/use
| cases that are centered around the >1000ft view.
|
| Even in the video showing off the technology things look
| downright terrible up close. If you pause at the very beginning
| you can see handrails on the stairs that are just odd floating
| blobs, cars have all melted into the ground.
|
| It is incredibly impressive that they have managed to get aerial
| LIDAR into a game engine, but the visuals are quite jarring up
| close.
| Gabriel_Martin wrote:
| I've noticed a trend of games graphics being fairly oldschool
| while the mechanics are modern. Maybe this'll lend it's self to
| that trend?
| rtpg wrote:
| I imagine this will be used for stuff outside of games
| primarily. My understanding is that Unreal is now used a lot in
| specialized domains like film-making (globe fly-bys in the news
| and documentaries?) and sort of general "dashboard"-y stuff.
|
| I'm sure someone could think of an "interesting" game built off
| of this data but I highly doubt you go through all this
| engineering effort on that idea alone.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Unreal is now used a lot in specialized domains like film-
| making (globe fly-bys in the news and documentaries?)_
|
| It goes further than that now. For _The Mandalorian_ , they
| famously set up a "20-foot high, 270-degree semicircular LED
| video wall"[0] to use as a backdrop for the shots, and that
| wall was rendering the desired environment using Unreal
| Engine. No need to chroma key an alien planet in post, when
| you can make it a part of the scene (and now the actors can
| see it too as they play!). More at [1].
|
| --
|
| [0] - https://www.polygon.com/tv/2020/2/20/21146152/the-
| mandaloria...
|
| [1] - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/forging-new-
| paths-fo...
| anentropic wrote:
| From what I read about it previously I think they do
| actually re-render the backgrounds in post
|
| But the LED video walls serve two purposes: ensure the
| lighting and reflections on real objects in the scene match
| up with the CGI, and give the actors a visualisation to
| work with.
| sbarre wrote:
| > From what I read about it previously I think they do
| actually re-render the backgrounds in post
|
| All the videos and reels I've seen on this talk about
| "capturing the effects in-camera", so while I wouldn't be
| surprised if there's some integration and cleanup work to
| be done (particularly where the wall meets the set), it
| does sound like what is on the LED wall is what we see in
| the final footage and it's not just placeholder or pre-
| viz.
| ubercore wrote:
| I think you're right. They use terms like "final pixel"
| when they talk about it, which leads me to believe
| they're capturing the background and not just rerendering
| in post.
| RobotCaleb wrote:
| I think the biggest wins they get from it are that the
| actors can see what they're supposed to be standing in
| front of and that they get realistic lighting on the
| actors and other props from the environment
| sbarre wrote:
| ILMVFX's YouTube channel has some fantastic BTS footage of
| how this works, for anyone curious:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjnYk44Aj9E634TPucpIXnQ
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > My understanding is that Unreal is now used a lot in
| specialized domains like film-making (globe fly-bys in the
| news and documentaries?)
|
| It's also used to create TV studios [0]. In the UK, BBC
| soccer punditry programmes such as 'Match of the Day' are
| filmed in a green-screen studio with the pundits, desk and
| chairs, and a virtual studio created using Unreal Engine.
| Different programmes can get a totally different look by
| using different Unreal environments.
|
| [0] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/industry/broadcast-
| live-e...
| sbarre wrote:
| It can also be used as a starting point to "rough in" your
| layout and then clean up and refine by hand..
|
| If you were trying to build a virtual version of a real-world
| location, I would imagine the time savings in starting from
| real landmarks and buildings would be significant.
| terhechte wrote:
| It would still lend itself to some interesting games, such as
| Mech Battles or Warcraft with oversized vessels or hordes of
| leming-sized people in these environments.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Maybe a game of Global Thermonuclear War?
| unixhero wrote:
| Shall we play a game?
| zokier wrote:
| It has very distinct low-res photogrammetry look yes. But if
| embraced and under good art direction I think it could be made
| to work as a stylized look. Maybe throw in some shader effects
| to spice it up a bit and make sure that the hand-modeled
| objects fit into the design, and it could be pretty cool.
| rebuilder wrote:
| Also good for prototyping and seeding ideas for level design,
| I'd imagine. I saw someone proto their run-and-gun game on
| google maps geo - they'll have to model everything once they
| lock a location down, but can test complex environments very
| quickly. Also having a real location, however rough, as a base
| gives you a lot of ideas you would have a hard time coming up
| with, starting with a blank slate.
| tinco wrote:
| This is due to the method of data acquisition. My company also
| uses cesium (in the browser) for visualization at sub cm level
| for inspection. Our quality bar is that inspectors have to be
| able to inspect the grain of the grout between the bricks.
|
| We acquire the data in 3 modes for high buildings, we do low
| altitude fly over with the 2m drone, then we do facade with the
| regular drone, and finally we shoot from the ground. We only do
| ground based lidar, but aerial lidar is improving so maybe
| that's next. The rest is all high detail photos fed into
| photogrammetry.
|
| The final results look perfect in cesium, some thin rails might
| not show up, and windows get a bit funky, but the geometry and
| the textures load in without a hitch, really cool technology
| that's so simple in the basis that we built an alternative
| viewer in Rust+WASM in 3 weeks.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Could you use a technique like this to do facade inspection
| as mandated in nyc?
|
| I just happened to watch "how to with John Wilson" S01E02
| which was talking about how scaffolding is put up everywhere
| in nyc because the facade needs to be inspected for loose
| bricks every 5 years
| maxhq wrote:
| Off topic, but: would you mind telling which software you are
| using for the photogrammetry?
| reactive001 wrote:
| Having worked at a company with an identical premise,
| Reality Capture (because it's faster) or Bentleys
| tinco wrote:
| Nice! where did you work?
| tinco wrote:
| We're using Metashape and Reality Capture. We used to use
| Bentley, but they've got unethical business practices so
| we're avoiding them now.
|
| Metashape has really good licensing, and their software
| runs on Linux and is easy to integrate into processing
| pipelines, also they've got a big featureset.
|
| Reality Capture was super expensive, though that has
| seemingly changed now that they're bought by Epic, so we
| might reconsider our strategy there. They make better use
| of hardware, making them faster, and their resulting models
| look great. Their licensing was so expensive that we just
| couldn't afford switching all of our processing to RC.
| andybak wrote:
| > We used to use Bentley, but they've got unethical
| business practices
|
| Go on. I'm curious now.
| tinco wrote:
| You can google a bit about Bentley Connect charges, we
| were not the only ones who called their sales reps in a
| panic.
|
| https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2129583-gathering-
| inf...
|
| If you can get a good deal with them it's probably fine,
| and we only talked to nice people there. But we're still
| on limited runway, we can't deal with random $20k
| invoices, even if a nice sales rep reverts the charge
| when called.
| StavrosK wrote:
| Wait, if the technology is so simple that you can build an
| alternative viewer in 3 weeks, what are they selling? Is it
| the data format?
| asutekku wrote:
| They're selling it so you don't have to get it by yourself.
| sbarre wrote:
| 3 weeks for a prototype
|
| 3 months for an alpha
|
| 3 quarters for a production release.
|
| You know how engineering estimates work... ;-)
| tinco wrote:
| They've got a whole bunch of features in their viewer,
| making a feature matching viewer would take years. The
| basic technology is a tree of JSON files describing what
| models or other JSON files to load for regions of space. So
| the nodes are JSON files and the leaves are 3d models
| basically. There's a simple algorithm that you give your
| current perspective (i.e. where you are in space, and what
| direction you're looking in) that will walk the tree and
| decide what models will be in your field of view and which
| won't be, and at what distance (which decides the level of
| detail). Then the last step is simply downloading those
| models, while at the same time evicting irrelevant 3d
| models from your gpu.
|
| They hand rolled an entire high performance 3D engine in
| Javascript, which is a big challenge in and of itself. We
| cheated by using WASM and a high performance programming
| language, making the 3D engine part trivial. Likewise, I'd
| be surprised if it took them more than a week or two to get
| their initial proof of concept working in Unreal Engine.
|
| Oh and I believe their business model is/was to sell
| hosting and processing for the 3D models. We've been paying
| them a couple hundred per month just for this service.
| StavrosK wrote:
| That's helpful, thank you!
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