Ella : a study in realism

cybereality

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

xyz

Give us a 360 degrees camera orbit ;)

cybereality

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.

cybereality

And here is a wireframe in case you think I'm trying to trick you.

Erich_L

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.

cybereality

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.

jbskaggs

Nice! This looks better and I like the behind the scenes images as well.

cybereality

Thank you so much! It means a lot to me.

cybereality

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.

Erich_L

It is amazing how real that looks. I wouldn’t mind having a few of those paintings.

xyz

Feels almost like you are there with her... practicing yoga :)

What's the bottleneck though? Triangle count?

cybereality

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.

Megalomaniak

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.

https://twitter.com/reduzio/status/1339644041265373187?s=20

jbskaggs

It s looking nice!

cybereality

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.

cybereality

Ella's been released! Download now for Linux, macOS, and Windows. https://cybereality.itch.io/ella-a-study-in-realism

cybereality

Erich_L

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?

cybereality

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.

Erich_L

Woot Woot