[HN Gopher] Why Unreal Engine 5.1 is a Deal [video]
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Why Unreal Engine 5.1 is a Deal [video]
        
       Author : ksec
       Score  : 131 points
       Date   : 2022-11-27 10:47 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
        
       | veidr wrote:
       | The TL;DR of the video is that 5.1 can render foliage
       | (trees/shrubs) better, and that is a significant advance.
       | 
       | It's not that it's a bargain, or a good value for the price. The
       | title of the video is "Why Unreal Engine 5.1 is a Huge Deal".
       | 
       | Without the word "Huge" it comes across rather differently.
        
         | ohgodplsno wrote:
         | That's definitely not all it can do.
         | 
         | Foliage without pop in and into Nanite is cool, but Nanite
         | still has work to be done on (AFAIK you still cannot deform and
         | animate Nanite assets). Lumen advances to get translucent
         | materials working is massive. Large worlds is super cool. And I
         | can't remember if it's in 5.1 in beta, but it brings a new
         | layering model for complex materials that works better than
         | clear coat (which is the current 2-layer model, like a car with
         | blue paint and a protective layer on top) with many more
         | possibilities.
         | 
         | Putting those abilities into the hands of anyone is a massive
         | thing (well, putting all of UE5). I've seen firsthand people
         | with absolutely no experience in gamedev but in other media
         | production get up to speed with building environments in less
         | than a week, complete with animations & all. Making small
         | virtual worlds is available to basically anyone.
         | 
         | And yes, the author of the video has a target audience of
         | people who already use Unreal Engine. To these people, 5.1 is
         | pretty damn massive.
        
         | herendin wrote:
         | There's a HN auto filter that removes unnecessary words from
         | titles
         | 
         | That could be the cause
        
           | Aardwolf wrote:
           | This are the weird and visible cases of HN's title rewriting
           | algorithm going wrong.
           | 
           | I guess the cases where it does the right thing are not
           | noticeable, and that's why I only see the bad cases. Are
           | there examples where HN title rewriting did something good,
           | or cases where before HN did this titles were very bad or
           | clickbaity?
        
           | veidr wrote:
           | Thanks! (Including the descendant commenters.)
           | 
           | Wondering about that is why I bothered to comment at all. I
           | assumed there must be some logical-but-not-quite-working
           | reason. :-D
        
           | okamiueru wrote:
           | Expressions like "huge deal", should perhaps be left alone.
           | Either that, or replace both with "significant" or
           | "important". But that too seems silly.
        
             | burntalmonds wrote:
             | Perhaps? It completely changes the original meaning.
        
         | nailer wrote:
         | 2:20 for the impatient.
         | 
         | This really is a huge deal.
         | 
         | For gamers: Unreal 5.0 removed the awkward transitions between
         | low and high poly assets, but removing the need for low and
         | high poly assets (called Levels of Detail or 'LOD' s) at all.
         | The engine just works out how many polys are necessary.
         | 
         | But 5.0 didn't do this for foliage - so trees and shrubs and
         | forests look crappy when you zoom out.
         | 
         | 5.1 does this for foliage.
         | 
         | So you can now...
         | 
         | See the forest from the trees.
         | 
         | (sunglasses emoji)
        
           | morjom wrote:
           | You could say you, nailed it, nailer.
           | 
           | I saw this video on my youtube recommended and man am I glad
           | they're figuring out how to phase out billboarding. One of my
           | pet peeves in video games is pop-in and billboarding of far
           | objects.
        
             | nailer wrote:
             | > One of my pet peeves in video games is pop-in and
             | billboarding of far objects.
             | 
             | Yep pop-in within natural environments is one of the last
             | big immersion breakers. Fly or climb to what should be a
             | majestic view and suddenly fake-looking trees spoil
             | everything.
        
             | Aardwolf wrote:
             | That's one of them for me. A few others are:
             | 
             | -visible banding, especially in skies, in some games, which
             | is very possible even with 24 bit color in this types of
             | gradients, sometimes the monitor itself can cause it too.
             | Dithering should fix this (24-bit color dithering should be
             | almost unnoticeable), since banding looks so ugly this
             | would be a great fix.
             | 
             | -textures that repeat themselves. Even in some modern games
             | like Cyberpunk 2077, you'll e.g. see a repeated pattern of
             | reflective rain water on road surfaces. Imho, have 2-4
             | varitions of the same texture and use a pseudorandom
             | pattern to tile them, that completely eliminates this. Even
             | if it's 4x lower resolution to have 4 variations in the
             | same amount of memory it'd look better.
             | 
             | -round things (barrels, round tables, a goblet, ...) that
             | look like a blocky polygon instead of a circle, in games
             | with otherwise incredible amounts of details. Either use
             | more triangles, or, I wish these were a thing, quadratic
             | surfaces. In games that are low detail in general this
             | matters less, in those it fits the style.
             | 
             | Fix those things, and several immersion breakers would be
             | gone!
        
               | Animats wrote:
               | > textures that repeat themselves.
               | 
               | Use this one weird trick to fix that.[1]
               | 
               | The theory: [2]
               | 
               | This can be done in the GPU, so you only need one copy of
               | the repeating texture in VRAM. It's good for semi-random
               | patterns such as dirt, gravel, water, grass, asphalt,
               | forest floors, etc. Not good for regular patterns such as
               | bricks and tiles.
               | 
               | [1] https://user-
               | images.githubusercontent.com/20206840/174149327...
               | 
               | [2] https://jcgt.org/published/0011/03/05/
        
           | MegaDeKay wrote:
           | Next timestamp that jumped out at me as around 3:45. The
           | camera pans around within the forest showing that all the
           | leaves are also now translucent, with the result that shadows
           | suddenly become more accurate. Wow.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | barbariangrunge wrote:
       | You could actually already preserve the shadows when using
       | billboards in unreal by using distance field shadows
        
       | synergy20 wrote:
       | Love it. It supports ubuntu 22.04 with a 22GB download size. I
       | need find a better desktop with better graphic card to run this I
       | assume, any recommendations?
        
         | jamesfmilne wrote:
         | Runs fine on Rocky 8.6 as well.
        
         | samspenc wrote:
         | Just FYI, it also needs 200+ GB hard disk space to install, I
         | believe minimum GPU recommendation is Nvidia 2080 (or
         | equivalent) with 4-6 GB GPU VRAM. I've seen posts online where
         | they recommend higher-end chips and much more GPU memory (12+
         | GB VRAM) for building larger worlds and higher poly
         | resolutions.
        
         | rozhok wrote:
         | Worked fine on i7-9900k + AMD RX 580. Not sure about supporting
         | nanite/lumen though.
        
         | barbariangrunge wrote:
         | What about the epic launcher to download your marketplace
         | assets or megascans?
        
         | sogen wrote:
         | You can get an external gpu (eGPU) to keep your current setup.
         | Check the Razer Core X, and add a graphic card of your choice.
        
           | synergy20 wrote:
           | Thanks! looks like it only supports windows and macos though.
        
             | Operyl wrote:
             | There are numerous posts of people getting it working on
             | Linux, with some caveats:
             | https://y.tsutsumi.io/2020/08/15/egpu-linux-core-x-chroma/
        
             | sogen wrote:
             | The egpu forums might be a good resource:
             | 
             | https://egpu.io/forums/thunderbolt-linux-
             | setup/ubuntu-19-04-...
        
       | jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
       | Years ago I worked on an ill fated game project with the Unreal 1
       | engine. It is dumbfounding to me to compare that to the modern
       | engine. It's just incredibly sophisticated.
        
       | RepAgent wrote:
       | When real time looks this good, low budget CGI movies or TV-
       | series look even better.
        
         | Someone1234 wrote:
         | When it is real-time, we may see this get used for live
         | programming too like The Weather Channel or for dynamic
         | animated ads put over whatever you're watching.
        
           | kyriakos wrote:
           | Every kind of technology can be abused, doesn't mean progress
           | should stop.
        
           | bick_nyers wrote:
           | The Weather Channel and Unreal Engine 4, 4 years ago:
           | https://youtu.be/x2aCSV5zYlA
        
         | sod wrote:
         | There is a stark effort, skill level, art direction and knowing
         | the limits of cgi cliff between good and "slightly off". How
         | else do you explain district 9 from 13 years ago vs e.g. 200
         | mio. budget black widow from a year ago.
         | 
         | Meaning: The best tools in the wrong hands can still produce
         | mediocre results.
        
           | Beltalowda wrote:
           | Related story from a few months ago: "Hollywood's visual
           | effects crisis":
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32421538
        
           | mensetmanusman wrote:
           | District 9!! Thanks for reminding me about such a funny
           | movie.
        
             | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
             | Wasn't that Jackson's first big deal?
        
               | oblak wrote:
               | Blomkemp. Jackson's first big deal was Braindead/Dead
               | Alive. Still his best movie, imho.
        
               | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
               | Ah! Thanks for the corrections!
        
               | dagw wrote:
               | Peter Jackson? If so, no. District 9 came out years after
               | LOTR and Peter Jackson only produced it. The advertising
               | however splashed his name all over the movie to try to
               | associate it with LoTR so that more people would go and
               | see it. "From the Director of a few car and shoe
               | commercials, plus a couple of indie short films you
               | definitely haven't seen" doesn't really have the same
               | ring.
               | 
               | Fun fact. District 9 was born out of a failed attempt by
               | Peter Jackson to make a Halo movie. Due to financing
               | troubles the Halo movie ended being put on hold, but
               | since they already had a team and all these sets in place
               | they decided to use that to make a cheaper and quicker
               | movie instead, and so District 9 was born.
        
             | mashygpig wrote:
             | Why do you say funny?
        
           | kyriakos wrote:
           | Exaggeration in blockbuster movies doesn't help in this
           | respect. Action sequences are so beyond reality that no
           | matter of how well the cgi is done it will still look
           | unrealistic. On the other hand District 9 in addition to
           | artistic excellence it was also grounded in terms of plot
           | which helped with suspension of disbelief.
        
           | theCrowing wrote:
           | The VFX studio puts out what they are briefed to do. When you
           | go to Siggraph or FMX and watch the long making of
           | presentations most of the time they had better design or
           | comps and had to change because of the director/studio. The
           | cats presentation was fascinating they had really good
           | designs for the cats and had to go with the abomination we
           | saw.
        
           | lm28469 wrote:
           | I recently watched jurassic park 1 and jurassic world 1 back
           | to back, it's the perfect example of that
        
           | noobermin wrote:
           | Someone will mention AI in this thread I promise you.
        
       | air7 wrote:
       | A bit off topic, but are there any free 3D real-time rendered
       | scenes where you can move around that exists just to be
       | pretty/show off the graphics card abilities?
        
         | Animats wrote:
         | Some Unreal Engine demos:
         | 
         | - 2013 - The Valley [1] A nice, explorable forest with weather.
         | Requires a reasonably powerful PC and graphics card.
         | 
         | - 2017 - Superposition.[2] A very detailed lab scene. Requires
         | a good gamer PC.
         | 
         | - 2021 - The Valley of the Ancients [3] The first UE5 demo.
         | Requires a _really_ good gamer PC.
         | 
         | - 2022 - The Matrix Awakens [4] The high-end UE5 demo. If you
         | have to ask what hardware it requires, you can't afford it.
         | 
         | The Valley is from 9 years ago, and it still looks good. Try it
         | first.
         | 
         | From a metaverse engineering perspective, hardware requirements
         | limit what you can do. What's possible today is incredibly
         | good. What you can run on the average user's laptop in the
         | browser is way, way below that level. This is the era of the
         | $1000 phone and the $100 laptop. GPU price/performance hasn't
         | improved much in years. NVidia doesn't market anything below
         | US$250 any more, although some old cards are sometimes
         | available.
         | 
         | The average Steam user has an NVidia 1060, released in 2016. It
         | cost $250 back then, and it costs about $250 now on Amazon.
         | 
         | Yes, there's cloud gaming, where the GPU is in a data center.
         | Now look at the pricing on cloud gaming. Many cloud gaming
         | companies have gone bust, including Google Stadia, because the
         | economics don't work. To get a mass market, you have to sell at
         | a loss. To run at a profit, the pricing looks like Shadow PC.
         | 
         | [1] https://benchmark.unigine.com/valley
         | 
         | [2] https://benchmark.unigine.com/superposition
         | 
         | [3] https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/valley-of-the-
         | ancien...
         | 
         | [4] https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/introducing-the-
         | matr...
        
         | samspenc wrote:
         | If you're looking for a raw "benchmark" style program to
         | measure performance of your CPU and GPU for 3D tasks, I highly
         | recommend the open-source Blender Benchmark
         | https://opendata.blender.org/ . It also has a bunch of existing
         | data points for a large number of CPUs and GPUs already.
        
         | mastax wrote:
         | There are a bunch of demos for the unreal engine that you can
         | download. I wanted to try them out recently after I built my
         | new computer but unreal engine crashes every time I launch it.
         | Oh well.
         | 
         | Edit: funny, reducing my DDR5 memory speed seems to have fixed
         | unreal engine. New platforms are fun.
        
         | pippy360 wrote:
         | Archviz (architecture visualization) is very good for this.
         | Just search "ue5 archviz" on YouTube
        
         | solardev wrote:
         | Yeah, the Ue5 engine comes with a bunch of demos, like a city
         | you can walk around in with a bunch of buildings and cars and
         | streets and such.
        
       | sylware wrote:
       | If you want to help debug the build of UE5 on native elf/linux,
       | on steam, get the demo of "vein", play it and report back the
       | bugs to help the devs pushing them upstream.
        
       | edf13 wrote:
       | Those reflections and lighting effects are incredible!
        
       | thaumasiotes wrote:
       | Title has been mangled to the point that the meaning is gone.
        
         | tomcam wrote:
         | That's a huge deal ;)
        
       | bitL wrote:
       | Is Unreal 5 now mostly software-rendered in the Nanite mode and
       | only large triangles (>32 pixles diameter) are HW-accelerated?
        
         | Jasper_ wrote:
         | Anything animated isn't supported as well, only static meshes.
        
         | jiggawatts wrote:
         | Everything you see made by the Unreal engine is hardware
         | rendered. More and more computations are being offloaded to the
         | GPU over time, not less.
        
           | bitL wrote:
           | I thought so as well, then I read the Unreal 5 SIGGRAPH 2021
           | presentation where they stated:
           | 
           | "Turns out we can beat the hardware with triangles much
           | bigger than expected, far past micropoly. We software
           | rasterize any clusters whos triangles are less than 32 pixels
           | long."
        
       | ArtWomb wrote:
       | I think it's a big deal because of efficient micropolygons. I
       | know for myself a custom sub-pixel shaded micropolygon renderer
       | running natively on vulkan is what I am looking forward to most
       | for xmas holiday hacking ;)
       | 
       | https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/Karis_Nanite_SI...
       | 
       | Building a micropolygon rendering pipeline
       | 
       | https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15418-s12/www/l...
        
         | bitL wrote:
         | Reading the CMU article, how do you actually make it fast? For
         | each frame you need to collect all objects in the scene (for
         | ray traced scenes anything that can be reflected), split them
         | into micropolygons (either from a triangle mesh or from
         | parametric meshes) and then render all this at e.g. 4K. Each of
         | these steps is extremely demanding.
        
           | xyzzy_plugh wrote:
           | Segmentation in CPU is pretty common as there's huge
           | opportunity for caching. It's possible to push segmentation
           | into GPU as an optimization but it might not be worth it if
           | the GPU is busy enough with downstream operations. Even then
           | you still cache the results.
           | 
           | I would be surprised if they don't have a dynamic pipeline
           | that can be optimized at runtime.
        
           | mastax wrote:
           | I can't remember the specifics to give you a summary, but
           | this presentation was fascinating:
           | https://youtu.be/eviSykqSUUw
        
           | Jasper_ wrote:
           | You do as much of that offline as possible. The "split them
           | into micropolygons" happens at editor time, along with a
           | search tree that makes it really easy to find them.
           | 
           | It's still very demanding! But the goal is that you bake as
           | much of it that you can.
        
             | xyzzy_plugh wrote:
             | I suppose it depends on what you define "editor time" to
             | be. Importing an asset into a scene live appears to be
             | pretty seamless, at least in comparison to preprocessing
             | stages of yore.
        
       | gdtfmaster wrote:
       | 5.1 also includes improved DMX Plugin for proper lighting shows,
       | the plugin adds support for DMX over Ethernet (sACN, Art-Net) and
       | allows lighting fixtures based on devices imported via GDTF [1],
       | [2].
       | 
       | [1] http://gdtf.eu/
       | 
       | [2] https://gdtf-share.com/
        
         | brookst wrote:
         | I'm way into DMX and lighting but only familiar with Unreal as
         | a game/3D engine. What kinds of lighting things are people
         | doing with Unreal?
        
           | jasonjamerson wrote:
           | One big thing is Virtual Production, where we shoot video in
           | front of large LED screens showing a 3D scene in Unreal. DMX
           | allows seamless integration of live show control lighting
           | with the lighting in Unreal.
        
       | VMtest wrote:
       | is nanite foliage just shader mesh? and
       | https://nitter.it/search?q=%23Stutterstruggle
        
       | cainxinth wrote:
       | The narrator mispronounces _foliage_ every single time. It has
       | three syllables, not two.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | That two-syllable pronunciation initially struck me as wrong
         | too, but it turns out:
         | 
         | > _The disyllabic pronunciation \'fo-lij\ is very common. Some
         | commentators insist that foliage requires a trisyllabic
         | pronunciation because of its spelling, but words of a similar
         | pattern such as carriage and marriage do not fall under their
         | prescription._ [1]
         | 
         | The speaker otherwise has a fairly General American accent, so
         | I'm curious if the two-syllable version is a geographic thing?
         | Unfortunately, it was never included in the Harvard Dialect
         | Survey [2].
         | 
         | [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/foliage
         | 
         | [2] http://dialect.redlog.net/
        
           | thaumasiotes wrote:
           | >> _The disyllabic pronunciation \'fo-lij\ is very common._
           | 
           | MW does also note that that pronunciation is nonstandard.
           | 
           | I checked the first 20 samples on youglish (
           | https://youglish.com/pronounce/foliage/english/us? ). 16 used
           | an unambiguous three-syllable pronunciation, 3 unambiguously
           | omitted the middle syllable (#9, #16, #22+), and one (#12)
           | was ambiguous. Of the disyllabic pronunciations, only #9 had
           | a marked regional accent.
           | 
           | + Why is #22 one of the first 20 samples? Two of the earlier
           | samples are different timestamps into the same video, which I
           | only counted once, and one is missing, which I counted zero
           | times.
        
         | ricardo81 wrote:
         | Yes, I was thinking ESL, no big deal either way. Noticed with
         | the pronunciation of cupboard as two separate words.
        
           | thaumasiotes wrote:
           | ESL is not a likely explanation for someone using a
           | pronunciation of "foliage" that is counterindicated by the
           | spelling. (It is a much more likely explanation for
           | pronouncing cupboard _according to_ the spelling.)
        
             | ricardo81 wrote:
             | I think more along the lines of what people hear everyday.
             | If you're in an English speaking country day in day out,
             | you will hear it phonetically. If not, much more
             | possibility of interpreting a written word differently.
        
               | thaumasiotes wrote:
               | > If you're in an English speaking country day in day
               | out, you will hear it phonetically.
               | 
               | Yes, that's how you get pronunciations that differ from
               | the spelling.
               | 
               | If a word is rare enough, its pronunciation will be
               | regularized to match its spelling. And for a foreign
               | speaker, almost all words are that rare.
        
         | udp wrote:
         | They do the same with "quality" too so I guess it's just their
         | accent.
        
         | tom_ wrote:
         | English has a wide range of accents, and correct pronounciation
         | of even common words can vary widely.
        
       | synergyS wrote:
       | Unreal is the platform for the metaverse
        
         | arminiusreturns wrote:
         | Disagree. A good metaverse (not the corporate hellscape
         | metaverse of SnowCrash), requires copyleft, and UE is not it. I
         | was devving in UE since 4 was a paid product, until I realized
         | there are a lot of questionable practices by Epic and TS, and
         | that the license was actually quite bad, and moved into Godot.
         | Are there missing features? Yes, but many features in 4 are
         | quite nice, and not too far behind UE/Unity.
         | 
         | I had been thinking about my version of the metaverse for a
         | long time and even before FB did their changeup, my conclusion
         | was that this is exactly the reason the corporate metaverses
         | will fail in the long run.
        
           | xyzzy_plugh wrote:
           | Look I'm no lover of Unreal or Unity and adore Godot but...
           | 
           | > Are there missing features? Yes, but many features in 4 are
           | quite nice, and not too far behind UE/Unity.
           | 
           | Godot is about infinitely far behind from Unreal. That
           | doesn't mean it's not useful, but Unreal is borderline
           | research, cutting edge techniques, applied in a production
           | engine. And Godot will continue to lag until they start
           | putting out techniques before Unreal. Unreal has the
           | advantage that they can just hire researchers before their
           | papers are published.
           | 
           | Their business model is sane, sustainable, and pretty
           | flexible.
           | 
           | > until I realized there are a lot of questionable practices
           | by Epic and TS
           | 
           | Such as?
           | 
           | > and that the license was actually quite bad
           | 
           | In what ways? It's about the best commercial license I can
           | imagine.
        
             | arminiusreturns wrote:
             | Most of the stuff people talk about as next gen is more
             | like feature sugar, while the core of Godot has lots of the
             | same core features in a different state. I recompile main
             | branch almost daily, and things like Vulkan are working
             | very well. Of course I'm not saying feature parity, but
             | more to the point that despite the lack thereof, licensing
             | itself is one of the things that does and will make Godot
             | so powerful and why I think it or another FOSS engine like
             | it will become much more than what people assume now.
             | 
             | I won't go too much into Epics lies about the engine and
             | other issues (things like refusing all of the linux editor
             | pr's and a community run one was better maintained, not
             | releasing a launcher, using phone home stuff, to be fair
             | this was UE4 days) TS talking lots shit about linux,
             | pushing more launcher fragmentation via store exclusives,
             | and other things that just showed me repeatedly Epic is not
             | to be trusted... and thats before we even get to the
             | license stuff.
             | 
             | Commercial licenses are bad, copyleft is good. Even for
             | games, and sometimes I miss out on a few features by making
             | almost all of my daily stack gpl-compat, but I also believe
             | that computing is an inherently philosophical choice and I
             | wish, more than anything on the topic, that people would
             | get over their fear of selling copyleft software.
             | 
             | Tron fought for the user. Thats what copyleft does.
             | Commercial licenses do not. Niether do BSD style licenses.
        
         | Animats wrote:
         | If only.
         | 
         | Unreal Engine relies on two things large metaverses don't have
         | - precomputation of entire scenes in the creation tools, and
         | extensive asset reuse. In a real metaverse, there are thousands
         | of creators, all making assets. Second Life has over 60,000
         | different chairs for sale. Each was created independently. The
         | world is assembled dynamically. There is no external "level
         | editor" for a good metaverse, only object editors. You build
         | the world in the world. Although some of the low-end
         | metaverses, like Decentraland, do make you edit your entire
         | land parcel externally and upload it as a unit.
         | 
         | Epic might eventually offer a more dynamic system. It would
         | involve back-end servers doing much of the optimization that
         | the Unreal Editor does now. Maybe in UE6 or UE7. It's certainly
         | possible, but a big job.
         | 
         | Nanite does not eliminate levels of detail. It just does them
         | within meshes, rather than external to them. In most computer
         | graphics, you have explicit objects which appear more than
         | once. That's called instancing. But within a mesh, there's no
         | optimizing out duplicate submeshes. That's what Nanite does. A
         | Nanite mesh, rather than being big lists of vertices and
         | triangles, is a directed acyclic graph, in which common
         | subsections are combined. So, if you have a huge area of
         | buildings, but not that many different windows, the windows are
         | unduplicated.
         | 
         | Notice that in the UE5 demos, they have lots of dirt and rocks,
         | lots of copies of the same statue, and buildings which have a
         | lot of repetition. That's the key here. Those are all things
         | for which this optimization works. Even then, the download for
         | the Matrix Awakens demo is about 16GB, which expands to about
         | 250GB after decompression.
         | 
         | The instancing is recursive. A good example would be a long
         | chain-link fence. If you zoom in close enough, you can see the
         | bends in the wire and the flaws in the galvanizing. Maybe now
         | and then there's a piece of trash or a leaf stuck in the fence.
         | If you zoom out far enough, you can see kilometers of fence.
         | That can all be one Nanite mesh. And if you need to cut a hole
         | in the fence somewhere, that will work.
         | 
         | The level of detail system is automatic. The mesh
         | representation contains within it level of detail information.
         | Nearer areas go further down the DAG to higher levels of
         | detail. There's a clever geometry trick which makes the
         | transitions look good. In general, the idea is to maintain
         | about one triangle per screen pixel. The key to all this is
         | that there are only so many pixels on the screen, and that
         | controls how much geometry detail needs to be displayed. So
         | there are still levels of detail, at a fine-grained level.
         | 
         | All this, unfortunately, turns out to be badly matched to what
         | GPUs do. So about 60-70% of the rendering is done in the main
         | CPUs. Nanite really needs a new generation of GPUs, ones that
         | are good at chasing around complex data structures with
         | internal links and offsets.
         | 
         | If you want to understand Nanite, here's the 155 page paper.[1]
         | There's a video which goes with that. It's brilliant, but it's
         | not magic.
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/Karis_Nanite_SI...
        
           | AstralStorm wrote:
           | The return of the raycasting renderer, with a vengeance. ;)
        
         | gfd wrote:
         | Just a few weeks ago I remember reading Zuckerberg wanting to
         | acquire Unity as part of their leaked VR strategy
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33538742
         | 
         | I wonder why they didn't consider unreal instead?
        
           | stuckinhell wrote:
           | Epic already has a big big backer in Tencent
        
         | MR4D wrote:
         | I'm curious what Zuckerberg thinks when he sees things like
         | this compared to Meta's own attempts. The sheer magnitude of
         | the difference has to make him wonder (and if not, shareholders
         | certainly have!)
        
           | andybak wrote:
           | Unreal is a platform for creating applications. The Meta
           | product you refer to is an application built on such
           | platforms (not Unreal in this case).
           | 
           | Meta's app has to run on what is essentially a mobile phone.
           | You can barely run Nanite in VR on desktop let along on a
           | mobile phone.
           | 
           | Not saying Meta's product couldn't be better but we are
           | talking "better like Rec Room" not "better like UE5's best
           | efforts"
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | whywhywhywhy wrote:
           | Mark isn't stupid. His metaverse is specifically targeting
           | lower end hardware so it can run on stand alone headsets and
           | so eventually those headsets can be cheap.
           | 
           | A lot of the earlier PC Oculus UI was unreal engine anyway.
        
             | bergenty wrote:
             | I know it's not practical but I wish Oculus had a mode
             | where you could plug it in and the graphics were
             | supercharged.
        
         | afarviral wrote:
         | Its already a cooler name _for_ the metaverse if you think
         | about it. Welcome to the unreal.
        
           | RamRodification wrote:
           | Wow, yes! "The Unreal". That's really good.
        
       | molszanski wrote:
       | This looks like something Euclidian / Unlimited Detail promised
       | 10 years ago
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2022-11-27 23:02 UTC)