Ella : a study in realism
cybereality
Posts: 5,318Moderator
Here is something I've been working on over the past few days.
The model is a 3D scan of a real human. The background was purchased from an amazing artist. It took me about 1 day to get the assets imported into Godot and set up the basic scene. It took another 3 days to get realistic lighting. This is using 100% real time lighting, with global illumination (no baked lightmaps).
I pushed everything to max with some 8K textures, so performance is not great. I was getting around 20 fps at 4K on my RTX 3060 card. At 1080p it is just below 60 fps. I plan to optimize it to do a video soon, but I might have to reduce some of the graphics settings.
January 12th, 2022 Update: Ella is out: https://cybereality.itch.io/ella-a-study-in-realism
Comments
Give us a 360 degrees camera orbit
Well I have to see if I can get it optimized. I'm just barely getting 60 fps at 1080p and I have a monster machine. Want to do a video next and possibly a real time demo if I can get it working well. I'll just be reusing all the code from Decay and a new music track, so it should be pretty quick, maybe 3 days.
And here is a wireframe in case you think I'm trying to trick you.
Shoot I thought I was being tricked! You know you’ve been in a yoga pose long enough when you can start seeing the mathematical interweaving of the universe around you. My yoga instructor did always go at lengths to explain how we’re all most likely inside a simulation.
Yeah, I hear that. I don't do yoga, but I'm into new age metaphysics, and I read this book about asking the universe for stuff. Anyhow, as part of the book you do this meditation, it was a quick like 5 minute thing. The author said you would have a euphoric feeling when you connected with the universe. So it worked, I was amazed. I've never felt anything like that in my life. Except, it lasted for 2 weeks. I'm not joking. It was nice at first, but after a few days I started to get worried it would never go away. And after like 2 weeks I was really concerned. But then it finally went away.
Nice! This looks better and I like the behind the scenes images as well.
Thank you so much! It means a lot to me.
Okay, so the graphics are finished. It looks way better now, just had to play with the colors a bit.
Did some optimization too, it's running a lot better but sadly it's super high end and there is only so much I can do. I did get it running on my laptop, but with lowest settings and 24 fps. But movies are 24 fps, so I'm willing to accept that.
It is amazing how real that looks. I wouldn’t mind having a few of those paintings.
Feels almost like you are there with her... practicing yoga
What's the bottleneck though? Triangle count?
Seems like it's the poly count and/or memory. The scene is 5.4 million polys, which is quite high for such a small room. It also takes about 8GB of memory (5 system RAM and 3 VRAM), which is a problem on integrated graphics that shares the memory with system RAM and only has 8GB total. I tried turning off the global illumination and some effects and it didn't change the performance at all. So it's not a rendering issue. But I can't really fix it without doing a lot of work, and it may compromise the graphics, so I might have to accept that really old computers just won't work.
Godot version 4 has a dynamic decimator(think like blenders decimate modifier but dynamic) for effective automatic LOD. That would likely help significantly in this case.
It s looking nice!
So I finished it. I'm uploading the 4K video now and I have to make some promo material. Should be live in a few hours.
Ella's been released! Download now for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
https://cybereality.itch.io/ella-a-study-in-realism
I'll be seeing that face in my dreams that's fore sure. Really nice job on the painting reflections- I think they're my favorite part. Whole room looks incredibly real. Shadows are baked in right?
Yeah, I'll probably see her too, I've been staring at her face for 7 days straight. This is 100% real time using global illumination (GIProbe). I wanted to use baked lighting, since that would be faster, but the models I got wouldn't work (still don't know why, I checked all the settings) but I decided to try to do it with GIProbe. GIProbe is more limited, and doesn't look as realistic, but can work better depending on the use case. And it was a fun experience, since I really liked the artwork and didn't want to give up.
Woot Woot
Yeah, I can't believe he did a video on this, and so quickly. Huge exposure.
yeah I see now you already saw this 4 hours ago. congrats m8
I was about to post this video from Games from Scratch and you beat me to it, Way to go I am so proud of you!
I got about 20 frames per second on my old i3 with an Nvidia 950 or something. That's turning a few things down. It started at 15. Looked good though.
Yeah, a 950 is pretty old and wasn't even all that great when it came out. I did try to optimize, but there was only so much I could do with this demo, considering the graphics.
@cybereality what did you do to celebrate such a wonderful event? Hopefully you had a wonderful meal to celebrate! Seriously I watch Gamesfromscratch everyday and it was so encouraging to see you covered. Surely that deserves a nice meal.
I got Mongolian beef chow mein and xiao long bao. Totally not on my diet but worth it.
Actually, it's a 750 ti. I can never remember, but you know, Windows 11 decided my hardware wasn't good enough so it's getting pretty dated. Still runs quite a few games, though. I don't think that modeler was really a game modeler because I think he could have done a lot of those models with a lot fewer polys and not made it noticeable. Now days with sculpting, modelers use a ton of polys and don't retopo. But yeah, I'll always be in the low poly camp till I decide to update. I don't have any plans of it right now because the games don't really interest me.
Well the detailed assets weren't modeled, they are 3D scans of real objects (photogrammetry). That is why the poly count is massive. Godot 4.0 has auto LOD so this would help, it would have been too much work to do the retopo myself (and probably ruin the graphics).
I used to have a 750 Ti, it was a solid card a few years back. Think it might still be in the closet somewhere, I did love that card. Never used it seriously, but when I built this crazy computer, the card I wanted wasn't out so I got that for like a few months to hold me over. At 1080p it was actually way better than I thought. But that was several years ago.
Ella's even more real with patch 1.1. More realistic lighting and shadow. Reworked PBR textures. Improved tone mapping. Desaturated colors. Less bloom. New assets. Better resolution on presets. If you use the itchio app, it should update automatically.
https://cybereality.itch.io/ella-a-study-in-realism
And I had to make this image for Reddit because people keep scrolling past my posts thinking it is an ad of a real person and not actual real time graphics in Godot (I guess a good problem to have).
Here is the latest video, recorded at 1080p with the improved default settings.