Blue Dot: A 3Lateral Showcase of MetaHuman Animator

littleclaude

Blue Dot: A 3Lateral Showcase of MetaHuman Animator

That bar just keeps getting higher! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIGnx2jvrbg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vnuxzne6ic

pior

I must say I am fascninated by the hypocrosy (or perhabs, the ignorance ?) of anyone in the movie industry singing the praise of any production workflow related to UE5.x.

The technology sure is amazing by many accounts (from the high end rendering to the quality of the freely provided assets), but sure enough, none of these people ever launched the editor themselves, right ? Merely opening a blank projects can take forever, with the editor stuck on the splash screen computing shaders. And that's not even talking about the time it takes to bring a Metahuman into a project through Bridge. There was already similar friction with 4.2x, but nowhere near as bad as with 5.x.

@littleclaude : as in instructor teaching this, can you share some info on how you alleviate the issue ? Having the students sit for hours to wait for the Editor to launch is not sustainable, so there has to be some tech solution being deployed. Are you guys pre-computing the cache somehow ?

thomasp

I don't think load times will be an issue in the movies. Years back I was told of load times of well beyond half an hour for Maya scenes and the like. Granted, that was back before we had SSD's and lower network speeds but I imagine with the overall increased complexity of the work the situation can't possibly be all that much better nowadays.

Working with Unreal has always been slow, wasn't it? Computing, caching, auto-saving, .... always interrupting. Been that way since at least UDK. Doesn't help that the sample projects I look at always seem to be humongous with texture resolutions and shader complexity way beyond what would seem necessary.

littleclaude

pior said:

I must say I am fascninated by the hypocrosy (or perhabs, the ignorance ?) of anyone in the movie industry singing the praise of any production workflow related to UE5.x.

The technology sure is amazing by many accounts (from the high end rendering to the quality of the freely provided assets), but sure enough, none of these people ever launched the editor themselves, right ? Merely opening a blank projects can take forever, with the editor stuck on the splash screen computing shaders. And that's not even talking about the time it takes to bring a Metahuman into a project through Bridge. There was already similar friction with 4.2x, but nowhere near as bad as with 5.x.

@littleclaude : as in instructor teaching this, can you share some info on how you alleviate the issue ? Having the students sit for hours to wait for the Editor to launch is not sustainable, so there has to be some tech solution being deployed. Are you guys pre-computing the cache somehow ?

Hi, yes you can store the cache before the lesson. I learnt that lesson when I taught Ray Tracing for the first time. I will make a tutorial on that next week to help anyone with the same issue. You just need to have the files set up before the session. 

pior

@thomasp : well, it's a bit different with UE5 though, as I personally find it to be straight up unuseable compared to UE4.2x in that regard (now in a backwards way this is fine for me, as I produce Marketplace assets which require strong backwards compatibility as to not fragment the userbase, meaning that I author everything with 4.26 or 4.27). Meanwhile I am seing even more comments than ever on the UE forums by users who experience even worse shader compilation in UE5 than I do. Something that should take no more than a second (just like launching any other software) should certainly not take 30 minutes.
And still, suffering in pain is never the solution IMHO ... the correct course of action is to complain about such unaccpetable things - especially since managers are very receptive to it, given the cost of an hour worth of work being wasted waiting for things to load.

@littleclaude : that would be great. My gut feeling is that the people at Epic don't experience the issue themselves, probably because their IT deploys some sort of precompiled cache. I can only imagine the frustration of students installing the engine for the first time, and being greeted by one hour of shader compilation time when loading up the default thirdperson project ...

Epic has been unhelpful at adressing the issue - they of course mention that the cache can be saved, but never adressed the issue in a straightforward way. So if you have some sort of reliable solution everyone would be grateful, I think. IMHO epic should provide a separate download for compiled cache for all starter content, but I don't think they do.
- - - - -
All that said I refuse to believe that any director interviewed in these promotional videos ever used the editor themselves. It just doesn't add up ...

kanga

Yeah the load issue is annoying. None the less this blows the uncanny valley out of the water. There were only a few micro seconds at the start of the performance that looked synthetic. This touchy feely stuff is worst case scenario, and the demo handled it.

Pretty snazzy.

pior

Well, it's not just the loading time though - the whole thing is incredibly fragile : 


And then, when attempting to retrive/import a MetaHuman that has already been used many times, it is marked as "Downloaded" but needs to be "generated" again.



Now of course this is par for the course for heavy tech - but the whole ecosystem is a complete mess at this time. It makes me all the more infuriated by the platitudes that are being thrown around by Mr Ivan Sijak here. I am 99.99% sure that he never, ever touched the editor (or rather, the four different apps required : UE5, Quixel Bridge, MHCreator, and LiveLink), so why would he be qualified to talk about it ?

Anyways, just ranting I guess. I just find the whole thing incredibly counterproductive, since it basically reinforces a lie or at best a half truth. The only saving grace is how MHCreator is all hosted on Epic servers and is basically just streaming a video feed ; and LiveLink is quite solid once connected. These are pretty much the only things that work well at this time.

ZacD

The only place I could see improvements are sticky lips and saliva, everything else breaks the uncanny valley.

Leinad

Truly amazing stuff in the Blue Dot video. It's one of the most impressive demos I've seen. If I didn't know it was 3D in advance I would have probably been fooled into thinking it's a real human actor.

Two times where he raises his eyebrows it looks a bit uncanny for a brief moment. Specifically at 0:23 and 0:32 mark in the video. I can't really figure out why, is it the motion blur or brow/eye tracking related? Super awesome!

iam717

wild speculative take, perhaps from pc's to applications & hardware, they are purposefully making things bad to remove competition.  Wild idea i know but its a great "strategy" to stay on top.  I made connections to hardware/gpu's, to engines not working, to pc's "blowing up"... irl events in tech conversations, so not so speculative to me.  I could keep going and then it would go into billionaires "faking" deaths to avoid whatever is planned next... if what is true about these towers everywhere, everyone will be having a bad time, think of it like aoe over time damage if radiation issues are a real thing, tbh idk what these towers are capable of but they are owned by an azn group, zayo (block 3rd party frames) so anyone want to look into their b.g. and who may have obtained them recently might find valuable info.  <this is why i didn't want to continue.

poopipe

don't be silly

They're not purposely making things bad, they're developing what their marketing department tells them will get the most people into the asset store because that's what drives profit and they need profit to keep their investors happy. Whether that generates a useful product for people developing games or not is a secondary concern - not least because larger studios modify UE extensively.

In terms of competition in the professional studio space - they don't have any. 
Large studios might start using UE in place of proprietary engines but they're not making a decision between UE, Unity,  03d and Godot, they're  deciding whether the investment in retooling and retraining their devs to work with UE is a better investment than continuing development on their own tech. 

IMO etc. 

Ruz

I can't even open UE5 , just crashes immediately

m1sterv1sual

poopipe said:

don't be silly

They're not purposely making things bad, they're developing what their marketing department tells them will get the most people into the asset store because that's what drives profit and they need profit to keep their investors happy. Whether that generates a useful product for people developing games or not is a secondary concern - not least because larger studios modify UE extensively.

In terms of competition in the professional studio space - they don't have any. 
Large studios might start using UE in place of proprietary engines but they're not making a decision between UE, Unity,  03d and Godot, they're  deciding whether the investment in retooling and retraining their devs to work with UE is a better investment than continuing development on their own tech. 

IMO etc. 

Wrong on many levels. First, you want to best of promotional nature, to drive the users. Regarding the stakeholder situation, Tim Sweeny, founder and still main shareholder is not driven by profits. Epic main revenue channel is Fortnite and income is used to build this "metaverse" ecosystem. UE started to gain traction from 2019/2020 in other industries. The second main investor is ByteDance and Sony.  UE bussnies model is free until you hit 1 mil dollar in revenue, then you have to pay 5% of revenue.

pior said:

Well, it's not just the loading time though - the whole thing is incredibly fragile : 


And then, when attempting to retrive/import a MetaHuman that has already been used many times, it is marked as "Downloaded" but needs to be "generated" again.



Now of course this is par for the course for heavy tech - but the whole ecosystem is a complete mess at this time. It makes me all the more infuriated by the platitudes that are being thrown around by Mr Ivan Sijak here. I am 99.99% sure that he never, ever touched the editor (or rather, the four different apps required : UE5, Quixel Bridge, MHCreator, and LiveLink), so why would he be qualified to talk about it ?

Anyways, just ranting I guess. I just find the whole thing incredibly counterproductive, since it basically reinforces a lie or at best a half truth. The only saving grace is how MHCreator is all hosted on Epic servers and is basically just streaming a video feed ; and LiveLink is quite solid once connected. These are pretty much the only things that work well at this time.

If you change quality settings you will need to regenerate MH, yes. Regarding compiling shaders, still experimental is the "compiling on the go" new system that will avoid situations all at once. Since you are ranting about other people, I don't think you are giving a valuable opinion, since you are not a power user of UE. I've been in workflows from Maya ( classic CGI) and now as an Unreal specialist. It's not perfect but development is happening rapidly and they are doing pretty great work.  The game-engines are the future, there's no doubt... 

Alex_J

I am not having any trouble in ue5 compared to ue4. The entire process of downloading and getting a metahuman ready in engine is maybe like 30 minutes total, most of that time is downloading it. Actually I rarely have to wait on shader compile in ue5 compared to 4. I thought that was one of the big things they improved? It happens more in the background now.

Is the machine falling outside of recommended specs?

littleclaude

Alex_J said:

I am not having any trouble in ue5 compared to ue4. The entire process of downloading and getting a metahuman ready in engine is maybe like 30 minutes total, most of that time is downloading it. Actually I rarely have to wait on shader compile in ue5 compared to 4. I thought that was one of the big things they improved? It happens more in the background now.

Is the machine falling outside of recommended specs?

 

I would recommend that you change the WorkerProcessPriority in your BaseEngine config file. This will make sure that unreal uses all of your CPU cores when building shaders giving you about a 8 times speed up.

Edit this file:

C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.1\Engine\Config\BaseEngine.ini

Find the line with

WorkerProcessPriority=-1

Change it to

WorkerProcessPriority=0

It should be on line 1731

I'm no pro but you might want to only do this if you have a good PC, maybe with a 3080 and above as it might cook your processor? Maybe a tech wizard on here can explain if I am right or not? 

Fried CPU, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of Fried CPU in the morning.   

Ruz

I prefer Unity, it's a still pain, but not quite as much a pain as UE5 whch does not even open on my machine.
they are also making great strides in photrealism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TWJCd_ithg

i think this actually looks better

kanga

Ruz said:

i think this actually looks better

Definitely kickass.

ZacD

A large part of the appeal of Metahumans is how ready to go it is. Within an hour anyone can have a performance capture going on a custom metahuman using an iPhone. 

pior

But see, that's exactly the kind of hyperbole that doesn't help IMHO. The download itself (of a single character) can take up to half an hour as reported above, even though there is no reason whatsoever for it to take longer than a few seconds/minutes since there is a setting to select texture resolution.

And then I challenge *anyone* to get a MH character ready for Livelinkface (complete with the port setup, and the Windows firewall shenanigans) "within an hour" without looking at their notes. It absolutely isn't as automagical as many make it out to be.

Adding to that the randomness of the UE5-gods deciding (or not) to force a shader recompile on project startup, and a pinch of UE5 still being a smartass with MMB pan being inverted by default (yes, I know how to change that) and you have a recipe for punching through one's screen.

Now the features themselves are fantastic. But the UX (all of the above + the godawful regressions in UI design in UE5) is just really poor.