I’m within the midst of an existential disaster about videogame graphics. For so a few years, I’ve nodded and acquired into new expertise, swallowing the road that as a result of it seems prettier, it should be higher. Why do I would like, say, HDR now, after I was floored by 256 colors in 1993? Is there something in any respect to help the concept that higher graphics imply extra contented gamers?
I got here so near revelation, to freedom from a gnawing techno-hunger that may by no means be satiated.
But then I noticed this ivy.*
Obviously, I’ve spoiled it for you. If solely I may have headlined this put up “here is a video of some real ivy*, just for fun and because ivy is quite nice, and it’s definitely not computer graphics even though this is a site about videogames.” But you already know that it’s graphics. Bah!
Even so: wow. Wow wow wow wow wow. I’d have mistaken that for actual ivy* any day.
As yon tweet says, it’s made within the Unreal engine, plus assorted instruments together with Speedtree. It’s truly a VR challenge, a part of Zoan’s Virtual Helsinki initiative, which is “designed to be the digital twin of the Helsinki City centre.”
An enormous a part of the magic right here comes from the camerawork, the jerky actions giving it that filmed on a smartphone vibe, and I ponder if that much less filmic motion is a part of what methods our brains into pondering that is actuality. The shakycam impact was truly achieved by turning a Vive controller into “a virtual handheld camera,” which I discover reasonably thrilling. Let’s have in-game cameras do much less aping of cinema and extra aping of somebody staggering again from an enormous evening out at Yate’s wine lodge.
But additionally, clearly: the leaves and lighting are superb. And the canny particulars, the chips on the pots, the grime alongside the sting of the wall…
I’m positive having a static and faceless topic helps – you most likely couldn’t create a superbly photoreal and animated Ainsley Harriot with this tech, for example – however I might be so, so down with a strolling simulator made by these people and with this tech. (I’ll regulate Virtual Helsinki, in fact, however the decision of my standard-issue Vive is hardly going to do this).
I extremely advocate searching the feed of Brazilian artist Guilherme Rabello, the chap behind this, for extra eye-popping wonders. Look at this, rendered in 30 FPS real-time at 1440p on a GTX 1070, for example:
So yeah, perhaps, perhaps now is just not the time for me to have a Damascan epiphany about graphics in any case. Gods, don’t make my purchase a kind of new GeForces with all that raytracing jazz…
*The artist who made it refers to it as ‘ivy’, however there’s some vital disagreement within the RPS treehouse as as to whether that is appropriate. Alice O believes it to be Pothos – which is often known as Devil’s Ivy, the seemingly supply of confusion right here. Clearly it is a matter of utmost urgency – can any botanists settle it a method or one other?
