Pretty Top-notch stuff!

The only thing I didn't particularly like was the pilot's model/texture for some reason. But everything else was awesome.

Why is this a food??

What person said, it smells bad, it tastes bad, it's fermented (aka rotten) - Hey, lets eat this!!!??

Nattō is a traditional Japanese food made from soybeans fermented with Bacillus subtilis var. natto. Some eat it as a breakfast food. Nattō may be an acquired taste because of its powerful smell, strong flavor, and slimy texture.

Essentially yes. The two barriers in 98 were less RAM and no ability to address more than 4GB of it (simplifying here).

In theory, a modern machine with a 64bit processor and a bunch of RAM could load this entire map, especially at the comparatively low detail/texture level of the original HL.

Of course, the engine would need to be written as a 64bit app. I believe Source (aka HL2 engine) has been upgraded to support 64bit, but I doubt the HL1 goldsrc engine has.

Cool. I'd be more impressed with an engine that could render that in game, especially with today's graphical detail... might be possible due to the low polygon count and lower texture quality that something like the Frostbite engine could perhaps pull it off, but with better polygon counts and texture quality would impress me.

Still the amount of work to overlap the maps at the proper spots and seal things off is fairly impressive. Undoubtedly took a great deal of time.

I have a R9 280x and to be honest I've never really seen it get past about 60% GPU & 2ish Gig of the Vram.

However I'm only running a single 1080p monitor, nor am I running any kind of upscaling based anti aliasing.

The future seems to be 4k monitors and for the serious psychos 4k eyefinity and maybe even that silly Nvidia 3D thing.

When you start to get into anything like that (and 4000p will inevitably come down to consumer level in price), coupled with the recent push for texture resolution in AAA games, all your're futureproofing starts to go out of the window.

The reason people are pissed off is because this card could have easily seen users through the next few years of monitor and games tech and they artificially gimped it such that anyone that wants to stay reasonably cutting edge will have to buy new cards in 2-3 years.

4 gig is fine for now, but it's a joke that a new top end card would have less Vram than some medium weight cards from two generations ago. Even my 280x has 3.

Long story short resolution eats Vram for breakfast and resolution is where most of the next gen game developments are likely to be biased. It's frustrating but as some others have suggested, it's really nothing new.

Nothing was moved or interacted with in the entire clip, so it leads me to believe that all of the lighting and shadows were simply pre-calculated and baked on as a texture. In the same manner, the reflections are most likely environmental cube maps, rendered in 3D animation software with all the settings turned up and then saved as an image. If something besides the camera were moving then I would be impressed.

For what it's worth, I'm fairly certain it wasn't an oven-mitt the guy was using, but one of those textured mittens that are specifically made for grooming cats.

http://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Coat-Cat-Grooming-Mitt/dp/B0041OSWEM

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

This is pretty cool. I could "see" the missing textures. I remember loading that map up for the first time. So amazing.

The best idea I've heard is dehydrating them, grinding them to powder, and using it as flour (or flour amendment) as they mentioned. With a fine enough grind, you won't notice the chitin (at least not in texture).
I must say, eating most insects whole never sounded appealing.

The Gist:

Guy in business suit looking thoughtfully out of window.
(Doubtful anyone who designs fine consumer goods, *actually designs consumer goods*, wears a suit). Maybe its supposed to be you! You avant-garde millionaire, you!

Person sketching watch designs. This is probably semi-close to reality, though they don’t show the hundreds of designs the visual designer creates that are dismissed at whim by the aforementioned, assumed (but inevitable even if not shown) suits.

People fiddling with plastic representations of what one would assume as the model for said watch design. Maybe realistic, though with the caveat that two people are sitting there going over said physical design, in any serious discussion concerning the actual physics of the end product. I can *not* imagine that nearly the entirety of this process today, both visual and mechanical design, are not done digitally.

Okay, there’s some CG. Because CG is the next step, rather than the first, least expensive step in any design process today. Who wants to quickly model everything in a matter of hours when you can fabricate expensive, physical material for iterative testing?

Holy shit, was that guy just looking at a wood cutout? I can’t even think of a shitty, sarcastic/realistic remark about that one. I might have misunderstood that shot.

Alright, now we’re machining shit. You can’t really fake that with a few grand for marketing. That’s the real stuff. (1.5m in)

No, they don’t sand/polish things by hand during the fabrication phase. That’s entirely too inaccurate and subjective to the assembler to leave up to human hands. (But hey: it’s a 2.5 million dollar piece of metal, so lets make those buyers feel good about their money spent).

Oh look: gemstones! (???) That's kingly.

More faux machining that is veritably inferior to quality mechanical assembly.

Oh shit, someone just turned a nob!

3.5 minutes in, and we see some actual hand-polished work that is legitimately viable to perform by hand.

Hey lets sand those nodules off the finished pieces, and micro-inspect those printed markings, because nothing about us says “accuracy” without a fallible human to do it. Also: what are they printing shit on there for? Was it pushing the price to $3mil to engrave the timestamps on the faces? That better be the highest quality electroplated coating, but even then I can't imagine that's superior than a tactile, physical representation.

Now they’re hand-engraving the sculpted ornamentation, but it’s one more point I can gladly give them because those kinds of human touches let you know at least some sort of artisan was involved. I can appreciate that, though realizing what I just said causes me to reflect on the inaccuracies of mass-production, and why we would take one over the other…

More microscopes. (Because if one notch is off, it’s back to the furnace for you!)

Awe shit, payday. A guy in a suit looking confident is walking towards your building!

Finally, the gear assembly. It certainly looks fantastic, photographically speaking. I can’t help but notice that all that detail is lost to hundreds of textural indentations or are due to stylized alternating polish/grinding. However, I’m confident that spending $2.5mil on this product would get me the absolute, most accurate, unnoticeable details (hand-made!) within a micro-millimeter of accuracy. Those indentations are like chrome on a street-racer in the 90’s: the more you have, the greater they perform.

@~8min, I’m pretty sure no one works like that at their desk. That posture would kill you in a month.

They know you can’t spin the head of a watch while it’s on your wrist, right?

Awe! It’s got 5 ringtones! That’s way more than any other watch I’ve even heard of! Except everything that doesn’t cost $2.5mil.


If I can take anything away from this that’s even remotely positive, it’s that at least millionaire shitheads are now being just as suckered as the rest of the consumer base. Let me sell ONE of those watches, and I would have enough money to overtake their business within a year, except for that I don't have the greed, dishonesty, and overall lack of morals that it would take to set up a quality factory, and trick such dickheads into buying (even superior BS) products.

Well... there is a lot missing here. But for sure they are really getting the look of skin right. It is amazing how complex skin is to render, not because of texture but of light. We don't notice it at first but when you take away the ability of our skin to pass through and refract light, it immediately starts to look fake and inhuman.

That's awesome. Also, stingrays feel incredible. I was recently at the Osaka Aquarium and they had a petting section with some sharks (not sure what kind) and some stingrays. The sharks felt coarse (and were also covered in lots of individual particles of sand), but the stingrays had this kind of slimy texture, sort of like algae without the residue. It was really amazing.

The problem of getting higher quality graphics is what held game design back. In order to scale up the visuals, console games had to scale down other items such as world size, view distance, field of view, number of npcs, artificial loading areas, and so on. Saying that "this" is achievable with a low end PC while console games are holding "this" back is ignoring that these demos are doing the very thing console games have been doing. Cutting back the depth of the image for the glossiness of it.

Here's Hitman Blood Money and its crowd dynamics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNC2X9r0oGY

Notice how simplistic the crowd behaves. Rather than simulating individuals, the crowd is simulated in lumps. Also notice that the textures are a lot "flatter" and blander than a few other levels.

This is the simplest example of cutting back depth in order to gloss over the something else. In this case, gloss the crowd, shallow their brains.

That's why they include a wire frame editor...so you can take a simple, basic model and modify it to match your individual cat nearly purrrrrfectly (if you spend enough time on the wire frame, and if the unseen parts of it are mirrors in texture and color to the known parts in the photo).
Really, I think that's not what this is for. It seems to be for modeling and manipulating every day objects in photo realistic ways with ease, not turning your parents around in the Christmas photos so they look like they're staring into each others eyes lovingly instead of both angrily turning their backs on the other! (although you COULD use it that way, if you're artistic and patient enough) ;-)

EDIT: One thing no one mentioned yet is it seems to also automatically edit IN the background, one less step to do manually.

Please give me a link to the 'in depth' video then. I've watched the 51 second one and the 5 minute one in your post. Model distortion and best guess texture filling are SEVERELY restricted by the quality of your model, which is just a rehash of what I said.