35: Every Polygon Is a Pixel

00:00SPEAKER- I documented the process for creating the jails.

00:03SPEAKERSo I at least have the links that I use

00:05SPEAKERto make the jails the way I like them.

00:07SPEAKERSo I can then go find the updated versions

00:09SPEAKERwhen I have to do this again in New York.

00:10SPEAKER- What if you were to print all those webpages to PDF?

00:13SPEAKERAnd then make a little personalized doc

00:16SPEAKERand then maybe print it out

00:17SPEAKERand put it on your fridge or something?

00:19SPEAKER- Look, Brad, what I'm doing is I set up

00:20SPEAKERa read the doc server and I've got a fully

00:24SPEAKERHTML5 wiki-based documentation system

00:29SPEAKERthat's hierarchical.

00:31SPEAKERIt has an ontology and pretty much I'm good to,

00:35SPEAKERI'm good to, like we could put 300 people in here

00:37SPEAKERand get all the docs we need.

00:38SPEAKER- I, it's becoming my new Saturday morning ritual.

00:40SPEAKERI was spending some time on the archive.org page

00:42SPEAKERfor the computer chronicles this morning.

00:45SPEAKERWait a minute, what am I, hang on.

00:47SPEAKERWhat am I talking about?

00:48SPEAKERI am speaking to a computer chronicles veteran here.

00:50SPEAKERI just remembered.

00:51SPEAKER- That was the first time I was ever on national TV,

00:53SPEAKERI think. - Wow.

00:55SPEAKER- Yeah.

00:56SPEAKER- It was syndicated, right?

00:57SPEAKERIt wasn't on like PBS, public television.

00:59SPEAKER- It was like any PBS show.

01:01SPEAKER- Or like syndicated across PBS stations, I mean.

01:04SPEAKER- Yes, I think, I don't know how that worked,

01:06SPEAKERbut I assumed that like the stations that wanted to show

01:08SPEAKERpaid the people who made the show a little bit of money

01:09SPEAKERand then they got to run the show inside the PBS network.

01:13SPEAKERYeah, Gordon, Gordon Mong, who was one of my coworkers

01:16SPEAKERat Maximum PC and I got called by them to bring,

01:21SPEAKERthey wanted us to bring some high-end gaming PCs

01:23SPEAKERfrom a magazine cover.

01:24SPEAKER- You had some interesting stuff to say.

01:26SPEAKER- Well, but like we did the magazine so far in advance

01:30SPEAKERthat by the time they asked us to do that,

01:32SPEAKERwe'd already sent those machines back.

01:34SPEAKERSo we had to call, I think it was HP and Alienware

01:37SPEAKERor Compaq and Alienware maybe,

01:39SPEAKERand get them to send comparable machines

01:42SPEAKERto the ones that were on the magazine

01:43SPEAKERthat were on newsstands then back.

01:46SPEAKERAnd yeah, it was-

01:47SPEAKER- I can't believe they made you send the computers back.

01:48SPEAKER- Stuart seemed pretty dazzled by the amount of stuff

01:51SPEAKERin that machine.

01:53SPEAKER- He was very excited about it 'cause like the stuff

01:55SPEAKERthat they usually did was boring.

01:56SPEAKERIt was like, they did a lot of laser printer episodes.

01:59SPEAKER- I love how stuffy it is.

02:03SPEAKERHe's not stuffy, he was a good host, but the topics-

02:06SPEAKER- Oh, he was awesome.

02:07SPEAKER- It's very like business world.

02:10SPEAKER- Well, but like that's what computers were like then.

02:12SPEAKERThis was in like 2001, 2002.

02:15SPEAKERAnd you know, those people traded us at trade shows,

02:23SPEAKEReven at Maximum PC, which was like a magazine

02:25SPEAKERthat 300,000 people a month got, right?

02:27SPEAKERIt was a substantial print publication.

02:30SPEAKERWe were treated like children because we did like gaming

02:33SPEAKERand performance computing stuff

02:35SPEAKERand not serious computer business.

02:37SPEAKER- 'Cause you weren't wearing slacks

02:38SPEAKERand talking about spreadsheets.

02:41SPEAKER- I mean, I probably was wearing khakis then.

02:42SPEAKERThat was in khaki time.

02:45SPEAKER- Anyway, that has become a warm, fuzzy,

02:47SPEAKERand nostalgic blanket for me on Saturday morning

02:50SPEAKERto just pop on there and throw an episode.

02:51SPEAKERAnyway, I found an episode from 1988

02:54SPEAKERwhere they had a guy on there demoing a $600 CD-ROM.

02:57SPEAKER- Wow.

02:58SPEAKER- And he chose to do so by saying,

03:00SPEAKER"Hey, you can fit the entirety of the Boeing 757

03:02SPEAKER"maintenance manual on this one disc."

03:04SPEAKERAnd here it is.

03:05SPEAKERAnd it was all hypertexted up

03:07SPEAKERfrom clicking around in the service diagrams.

03:09SPEAKERAnd it was, yeah.

03:11SPEAKER- Wow.

03:12SPEAKER- A throwback.

03:13SPEAKER- The future.

03:14SPEAKER- Yeah, the future.

03:15SPEAKER- The future.

03:15SPEAKER- The past is the future.

03:16SPEAKER(upbeat music)

03:24SPEAKER(upbeat music continues)

03:45SPEAKER- Welcome to "Brad and Will Made a TechPod."

03:48SPEAKERI'm Will.

03:49SPEAKER- Hi, Brad, I'm back.

03:50SPEAKER- Hey, welcome back, Brad.

03:50SPEAKERIt's good to have you here.

03:52SPEAKER- Man, I'm so sad that I know I said this to you

03:54SPEAKERand Fitz last week.

03:55SPEAKERAs soon as you guys were done recording,

03:56SPEAKERI was so bummed that I missed that episode.

03:59SPEAKER- You, you asked questions.

04:01SPEAKERYou were there.

04:02SPEAKER- Thank you, thank you.

04:03SPEAKERI was there.

04:04SPEAKER- Yeah, limited.

04:04SPEAKER- But my, yes, my ability to pick his brain

04:06SPEAKERin a self-indulgent manner was a little limited.

04:10SPEAKER- How's the old schnoz?

04:10SPEAKERYou sound a little stuffy, but better maybe?

04:14SPEAKER- I'm a little concerned about the acoustics

04:16SPEAKERI have going on up there, but I don't know.

04:19SPEAKER- Look, what you need to do is get some tubes

04:20SPEAKERand you just jam them up and you have them

04:22SPEAKERstick out the front.

04:23SPEAKER- Okay.

04:23SPEAKER- And you always have a clear path.

04:25SPEAKER- Okay, they turn it into a musical instrument even.

04:27SPEAKERI can just vary the tone.

04:29SPEAKER- We got a lot of people asking questions about,

04:33SPEAKERI don't know, I think people were worried about you, Brad.

04:35SPEAKERWhat did you do?

04:36SPEAKER- Oh, it was, oh my gosh, I wish I had the,

04:39SPEAKERit's around here somewhere,

04:40SPEAKERthe printout EOB from my insurance company.

04:43SPEAKER- Ooh.

04:43SPEAKER- There were somewhere between somewhere around

04:46SPEAKEReight to nine oscopies and ectomies on there.

04:50SPEAKER- Which end though?

04:51SPEAKER- There's a good oscomy end and a bad oscomy end.

04:54SPEAKER- The nasal sinus areas.

04:57SPEAKER- Okay, good, good, good, good.

04:58SPEAKER- Yeah, had a lot of stuff going on up there, but.

05:02SPEAKER- But everything's fine, nothing bad.

05:03SPEAKER- Yes, it's all removed and fixed at this point, so.

05:06SPEAKER- We got you all reamed out.

05:07SPEAKER- Yeah, good, now I'm doing a sinus rinse over 12 hours

05:12SPEAKERthat's producing all kinds of spectacular results.

05:15SPEAKER- Ooh, you should document,

05:16SPEAKERyou should make an Instagram for that.

05:17SPEAKERYou should document this.

05:18SPEAKER- You don't want to see that.

05:19SPEAKER- Look, I've been on some Reddits that would imply

05:23SPEAKERthat there's a market for literally any piece of content

05:25SPEAKERyour body can produce.

05:26SPEAKER- What is the rule, 34 for this or whatever it is?

05:30SPEAKERLet's not get into that.

05:31SPEAKER- Yeah, no, no, no.

05:32SPEAKER- This is, let's move on.

05:34SPEAKER- Hey, you know what happened this week?

05:35SPEAKER- What happened?

05:36SPEAKER- Well, it's a special time in every young man's life

05:40SPEAKERwhen one of the big game engine companies

05:44SPEAKERreleases a new version of their engine.

05:45SPEAKER- Ah, that magical time of year.

05:47SPEAKER- And they show you, before the hardware people

05:52SPEAKERare really ready to talk about it,

05:53SPEAKERwhat the hardware on the next generation platform

05:55SPEAKERis going to do.

05:56SPEAKER- The flowers are blooming, the bees are buzzing,

05:58SPEAKERand a tech demo for a new engine or piece of hardware

06:02SPEAKERis upon us again.

06:04SPEAKER- Yes, and this time it was a,

06:08SPEAKERhere's what the PS5 can do with Unreal Engine 5.

06:11SPEAKERIt's nice that the numbers sync up finally.

06:13SPEAKERThey've, you know, nice job, guys.

06:15SPEAKER- Finally, after all these generations,

06:16SPEAKERthey've dialed in this, this branding synergy.

06:20SPEAKER- The name scheme is finally, yeah, it's working out.

06:23SPEAKERSo.

06:24SPEAKER- So we haven't, neither of us have watched this yet.

06:26SPEAKER- No.

06:27SPEAKER- And I think we had talked about doing like a live watch

06:29SPEAKERreact kind of thing, but it's.

06:31SPEAKER- We don't know how long, how interesting that's gonna be.

06:33SPEAKERSo we're gonna play it.

06:33SPEAKER- Yeah, and also, you know, like I skimmed through it.

06:36SPEAKERIt sounds pretty like narration heavy

06:37SPEAKERand pretty dense with info.

06:38SPEAKERSo that kind of thing is pretty tough to talk over.

06:41SPEAKER- But this week we're gonna talk about

06:42SPEAKERthe Unreal Engine 5 tech demo they released this week.

06:44SPEAKERWe're also gonna talk about the cool filmmaking stuff

06:48SPEAKERthat Unreal is doing now with real-time effects

06:52SPEAKERas seen in "The Mandalorian."

06:53SPEAKER- Yeah, like video games are cool and all,

06:55SPEAKERbut the stuff they're doing in kind of rapid fire TV

06:57SPEAKERproduction is the stuff that's really fascinating to me.

07:00SPEAKER- It's one of those,

07:02SPEAKERlook, the thing that they're doing with the,

07:04SPEAKERwe'll get into how it works,

07:05SPEAKERbut the thing that they're doing with "The Mandalorian"

07:06SPEAKERisn't, it's one of those things that like somebody was like,

07:09SPEAKER"Hey, you know, we have this technology

07:11SPEAKERand this technology and this technology.

07:13SPEAKERAnd if we put them all together in a kind of novel way,

07:16SPEAKERthen something really cool is possible and maybe it'll work.

07:19SPEAKERLet's figure it out."

07:20SPEAKERAnd then it worked and it's really cool.

07:22SPEAKERAnd like, had I not known how they did this stuff,

07:25SPEAKERI never would have believed what they were doing.

07:28SPEAKER- Okay, so that's,

07:29SPEAKERI don't want to cannibalize the latter half of the episode,

07:32SPEAKERbut I've got stuff to ask about.

07:34SPEAKER- It's on Unreal Engine 5 revealed,

07:36SPEAKERnext gen revealed three days ago, 10 million and a half years.

07:39SPEAKERThat's the one.

07:40SPEAKER- The YouTube channel called Unreal Engine has it.

07:42SPEAKERThat's the perfect place to go find it.

07:43SPEAKERIf you want to watch it along with us.

07:45SPEAKER- We'll put a link in the show notes, too.

07:46SPEAKERSo, do you want to load this bad boy up

07:51SPEAKERand hit the play button?

07:53SPEAKER- Should I watch the 1080p version or the 4K version?

07:56SPEAKER- I mean, how many p's does your monitor have, Brad?

07:58SPEAKER- Mine has 4K p's.

08:00SPEAKER- Only 1080.

08:02SPEAKEROh, what?

08:03SPEAKEROh, I'm sorry.

08:04SPEAKER- But we're going to watch the 4K version,

08:05SPEAKERso hopefully they're the same.

08:06SPEAKER- If I downscale this 4K version to 1080p,

08:08SPEAKERit'll look better, right?

08:09SPEAKER- Look, you've got four times as many pixels

08:11SPEAKERmaking each pixel.

08:12SPEAKERSo yeah, that math reads.

08:14SPEAKER- Right.

08:15SPEAKEROh, and we should mention that if you don't want to hear us

08:16SPEAKERreact to this thing live,

08:17SPEAKERor if you've already seen it or whatever,

08:19SPEAKERand you'd rather just skip to the part

08:20SPEAKERwhere we talk about it afterwards,

08:21SPEAKERthe video is just about exactly nine minutes long.

08:24SPEAKERSo, if you skip ahead nine minutes,

08:27SPEAKERyou'll get there starting now.

08:30SPEAKER- I see an Unreal logo, an Epic logo.

08:33SPEAKERNow I see an Unreal logo.

08:34SPEAKERIt's shiny.

08:36SPEAKER- Hello, I'm Brian Karas,

08:38SPEAKERTechnical Director of Graphics here at Epic Games.

08:40SPEAKER- Hi, I'm Jerome Plateau,

08:41SPEAKERArt Director of The Special Project.

08:44SPEAKER- A few years ago, we got together as a team

08:45SPEAKERand brainstormed where we thought we could push forward

08:48SPEAKERthe state of the art in real-time graphics.

08:50SPEAKERThere were two key areas that stood out.

08:52SPEAKERThe first, dynamic global illumination.

08:55SPEAKERBeautiful bounce lighting instantaneously.

08:59SPEAKER- I don't have to be constrained to do a game

09:00SPEAKERwhere the world has to be static,

09:02SPEAKERand I'm able to interact a lot faster.

09:04SPEAKER- And we call this new system Lumen.

09:07SPEAKERWe're about to show you what it is capable of.

09:09SPEAKERBut first, there was another area

09:12SPEAKERthat we thought we could push forward.

09:13SPEAKERTruly virtualized geometry.

09:15SPEAKER- Ooh.

09:16SPEAKER- Artists wouldn't have to be concerned over poly counts,

09:18SPEAKERdraw calls, or memory.

09:20SPEAKERWe directly use film quality assets

09:23SPEAKERand bring them straight into the engine.

09:24SPEAKER- And that's a big deal for artists.

09:26SPEAKERI just want to be able to import my ZBrush model,

09:29SPEAKERmy photogrammetry scan, my CAD data,

09:31SPEAKERwithout wasting any time optimizing, creating LODs,

09:35SPEAKERor even lowering the quality to make it hit frame rate.

09:37SPEAKER- In the end, that's what it's all about.

09:39SPEAKERArt that just works.

09:41SPEAKERAnd we call this new technology Nanite.

09:43SPEAKERHere is the future of Unreal Engine

09:46SPEAKERrunning live on a PlayStation 5.

09:48SPEAKER- Awesome. Let's take a look at it.

09:53SPEAKER- This has to be the Wi-Fi.

10:04SPEAKER- Wow.

10:07SPEAKER- Oh, have you not seen any of this footage?

10:08SPEAKER- No.

10:11SPEAKER- Before we continue, let's stop a moment

10:13SPEAKERand take a look at some of the key features of this demo.

10:16SPEAKERMuch of what you see was built with Quixel Megascan assets,

10:19SPEAKERbut instead of using the game versions,

10:21SPEAKERwe use the cinematic versions,

10:23SPEAKERwhich would typically only be used in film.

10:27SPEAKER- Wow.

10:28SPEAKER- And thanks to virtual texturing,

10:30SPEAKERthey all use 8K textures as well.

10:32SPEAKERNanite can render an insane number of triangles very quickly.

10:36SPEAKERThere are over a billion triangles of source geometry

10:39SPEAKERin each frame that Nanite crunches down losslessly

10:42SPEAKERto around 20 million drawn triangles.

10:46SPEAKERWhat does that many triangles look like?

10:50SPEAKERThese are the triangles, each a different color.

10:52SPEAKERMost are so small that they look like noise.

10:54SPEAKER- Yeah, every polygon is just a pixel.

10:57SPEAKERYeah.

10:59SPEAKERThere you go.

11:01SPEAKER- This amount of geometric detail requires shadows

11:03SPEAKERto be pixel accurate as well, and Nanite can do that too.

11:07SPEAKERSpeaking of lighting, all of the lighting in this demo-

11:10SPEAKER- This is, that's amazing.

11:11SPEAKER- With the power of Lumen,

11:12SPEAKERthat even includes multi-bounce global illumination.

11:16SPEAKERNo light maps, no baking here.

11:18SPEAKERWithout GI, all of that beautiful lighting is gone.

11:22SPEAKERWith Lumen enabled, we can move the light

11:24SPEAKERand the bounce changes-

11:25SPEAKER- They figured out some new math.

11:29SPEAKER- Okay, let's keep going.

11:30SPEAKER- I wanna know if that's ray traced,

11:31SPEAKERbut we can talk about it later.

11:32SPEAKER- It's not.

11:33SPEAKERI actually said it's not.

11:34SPEAKER- Oh.

11:39SPEAKER- We've made some great additions

11:40SPEAKERto our audio system as well.

11:42SPEAKERConvolution reverb allows us

11:43SPEAKERto measure reverberation characteristics of real spaces,

11:47SPEAKERlike actual caves that we sampled,

11:49SPEAKERand reproduce them in virtual spaces.

11:52SPEAKERSound field rendering allows us to record

11:54SPEAKERand playback spatialized audio.

12:03SPEAKERAll of this adds up to a more immersive experience.

12:15SPEAKER- They're doing a better job of the hair

12:16SPEAKERthan current stuff too.

12:22SPEAKER- This swarm of bats was created

12:23SPEAKERwith a Niagara effects system.

12:26SPEAKERParticles in Niagara can now talk to one another

12:28SPEAKERand understand their environment-

12:29SPEAKER- Oh, wow.

12:33SPEAKER(helicopter whirring)

12:37SPEAKER- We've also added a ton of new functionality

12:40SPEAKERto run fluid simulations like you see in the water below.

12:51SPEAKER- I wanna see the collision of the hands on the rocks.

12:56SPEAKER- The demo runs on our chaos physics system.

12:59SPEAKERHere, we are using it to accurately simulate

13:01SPEAKERthe rigid bodies of the falling rocks

13:03SPEAKERand the cloth of her scarf.

13:05SPEAKER- But does that scarf clip through a sword

13:07SPEAKERwhen it's on her back?

13:07SPEAKERThat's the real question.

13:09SPEAKER- I mean, it's not clipping through

13:12SPEAKERthe bottom of her skirt thing.

13:14SPEAKER- It's true.

13:17SPEAKERThe next generation is here.

13:24SPEAKER- Now that the environment is so complex,

13:26SPEAKERwe've needed to greatly improve

13:27SPEAKERour animation systems to adapt.

13:29SPEAKERWe've added predictive foot placement and motion warping,

13:32SPEAKERwhich dynamically modifies IK and body position

13:35SPEAKERto look more natural.

13:37SPEAKERFor the character to more realistically interact

13:39SPEAKERwith the environment, we've added the ability

13:41SPEAKERto trigger seamless contextual animation events,

13:43SPEAKERlike her hand on the door.

13:45SPEAKER- That's promising.

13:50SPEAKER- Dynamic GI is amazing,

13:52SPEAKERnot just for speeding up iteration,

13:54SPEAKERbut also for its impact on gameplay.

13:57SPEAKERAny light source can move

13:58SPEAKERwhile still having beautiful bounce lighting.

14:02SPEAKERDynamic illumination means--

14:04SPEAKER- Huh.

14:04SPEAKER- Which you can see on all the metal surfaces.

14:07SPEAKERYou can even see the Niagara powered bugs reacting--

14:10SPEAKER- That's super cool.

14:12SPEAKER- Lumen not only reacts to moving light sources,

14:15SPEAKERbut also changes in geometry.

14:25SPEAKERRemember we mentioned high poly assets?

14:28SPEAKERThis statue was imported directly from ZBrush

14:30SPEAKERand has more than 33 million triangles.

14:33SPEAKERNo baking of normal maps, no authored LODs.

14:37SPEAKER- Wow.

14:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I think authored is the key word there.

14:40SPEAKER- Yeah, like the simplification of the asset pipeline

14:42SPEAKERis gonna be huge with this, right?

14:44SPEAKER- More than a single statue.

14:46SPEAKERThere are nearly 500 of that exact statue

14:49SPEAKERat the same detail level placed in this room

14:52SPEAKERfor a total of over 16 billion triangles--

14:55SPEAKER- Remember that's instance, that's not, that isn't,

14:59SPEAKERthe new thing there is the--

15:00SPEAKER- For this entire demo,

15:02SPEAKERthere are hundreds of billions of triangles.

15:16SPEAKER- I wonder if those statues can be dynamic,

15:19SPEAKERlike if they can move or you can move them.

15:25SPEAKERSo with Nanite, you have limitless geometry

15:28SPEAKERand with Lumen, you have fully dynamic lighting

15:31SPEAKERand global illumination, all running on a PlayStation 5.

15:46SPEAKER- Wow.

15:55SPEAKER(dramatic music)

16:05SPEAKER- There's not much time left.

16:07SPEAKER- And this doesn't need to be constrained to small rooms.

16:10SPEAKERIt can stretch all the way to the horizon.

16:16SPEAKER- The portal, it's open.

16:21SPEAKERDon't fail me now.

16:25SPEAKER(dramatic music)

16:37SPEAKER- Wow.

16:44SPEAKER- Whoa!

16:55SPEAKER(dramatic music)

16:59SPEAKER- It's time to see what's next.

17:04SPEAKER- Man, they hit those sub harmonics hard, got arm chills.

17:08SPEAKER(dramatic music)

17:21SPEAKER- Unreal Engine V has come too, apparently.

17:24SPEAKER- Yeah, well that's for the Xbox Series X

17:26SPEAKER'cause V is before X, so you get V on the Xbox

17:29SPEAKERand you get V on the PS5.

17:31SPEAKER- They're just getting them back for that 360 move.

17:34SPEAKER- Yeah, that's bananas.

17:35SPEAKER- Yeah, feeling pretty good about that.

17:38SPEAKER- I mean, look, if you compare that

17:39SPEAKERto the great Unreal Engine tech demos of times past,

17:43SPEAKERthere was what, the UE3 one was the one

17:46SPEAKERthat showed what was gonna be Gears.

17:48SPEAKER- Right, with the Brunac stomping around

17:49SPEAKERand what was the big, I guess like normal mapping

17:52SPEAKERand that sort of thing was normal mapping.

17:54SPEAKERProbably like DX8 programmable shader stuff

17:57SPEAKERback then was the big innovation.

17:59SPEAKER- It might've been DX9 even, it was--

18:01SPEAKER- Oh, you're right, 360 generation, you're right.

18:04SPEAKER- But it was like particles, there were like dust motes

18:07SPEAKERand light beams, stuff like that.

18:09SPEAKERIt was the incredible amount of detail

18:14SPEAKERon the smashed concrete brutalist architecture geometry

18:18SPEAKERin the world and stuff like that.

18:20SPEAKERAnd then I think the UE4 one was that Citadel thing, right?

18:22SPEAKERThe Citadel fly through, that sounds right.

18:25SPEAKER- Castle with lots of shiny bricks.

18:27SPEAKERI feel like that one was kind of overwhelming.

18:28SPEAKERThis one was very good.

18:29SPEAKER- The last one was pretty iterative,

18:31SPEAKERI think on the previous one,

18:32SPEAKERbut this felt very much like a generational shift.

18:34SPEAKER- Well, so this one showed more character

18:37SPEAKERand world interaction stuff than the last one did too,

18:40SPEAKERwhich was interesting.

18:44SPEAKERI feel like the shadowing stuff and the dynamic lights,

18:48SPEAKERthe fact that they're not baking light maps

18:50SPEAKERto do geometry that complex is really impressive.

18:53SPEAKERMeans we'll be able to have lights changing

18:56SPEAKERduring games and things like it.

18:58SPEAKERIt's gonna open up more of the kind of time of day changes

19:02SPEAKERthat we see in stuff like Stardew and Animal Crossing

19:05SPEAKERto more 3D rendered, more realistic looking games.

19:09SPEAKER- Sure.

19:10SPEAKER- That in the art pipeline stuff

19:12SPEAKERseemed like the big deals to me.

19:13SPEAKER- Yes, the effect on creating assets for stuff

19:16SPEAKERseems like the actual big story there,

19:17SPEAKERbut I feel like virtualized geometry

19:21SPEAKERis the kind of standout phrase from that thing to me.

19:24SPEAKERDoes that read to you?

19:25SPEAKERWhat exactly does that mean to you?

19:26SPEAKER- I don't know what virtualized geometry,

19:28SPEAKERyou mean referencing the statues?

19:32SPEAKER- Yeah, well, no, it was early on.

19:33SPEAKERIt was when they first revealed that first part of the cave

19:36SPEAKERand they were pulling the camera in and out.

19:38SPEAKERI mean, in a practical sense,

19:38SPEAKERI think what they're really talking about

19:40SPEAKERis just a truly seamless tessellation of the background.

19:44SPEAKERYou're not seeing, he even mentioned the term

19:47SPEAKERauthored level detail, right?

19:48SPEAKERLike you're not seeing rigid levels of detail

19:50SPEAKERpopping in and out anymore.

19:52SPEAKERBut I don't know like under the hood, like in the code,

19:54SPEAKERI don't know what virtualizing that means exactly

19:58SPEAKERin a software sense.

19:59SPEAKER- So yeah, right now, like if you were,

20:02SPEAKERso for example, in a game, like when we were doing Fusho,

20:06SPEAKERthe amount of time we spent making assets performant

20:09SPEAKERon the target platform that we wanted to run on,

20:12SPEAKERwhich was usually like PC, you know, PC VR.

20:15SPEAKERSo times two, what was it?

20:18SPEAKERA GeForce FX 90, 970 running at 90 Hertz times two.

20:24SPEAKER- Decent for each eye, decent immense back, right?

20:27SPEAKER- Yeah, but like the amount of time we spent

20:29SPEAKERtrying to get assets to run at that target was enormous.

20:32SPEAKERSo if like that, if that work can happen automatically,

20:35SPEAKERinstead of with some artists moving,

20:38SPEAKERof an artist moving levers and dials,

20:40SPEAKERit means that you can create a lot more art

20:42SPEAKERand spend a lot less time making the art

20:43SPEAKERthat you create run.

20:45SPEAKERLike you're just making the,

20:46SPEAKERit sounds like you're just making the one master version

20:49SPEAKERof like the hero asset, right?

20:50SPEAKEROf the model or the background.

20:52SPEAKERAnd the engine does all the work of making it run smoothly.

20:55SPEAKER- That sounds right.

20:56SPEAKERIt's funny, we did an episode with the Creative Assembly

20:58SPEAKERguys for Total War Warhammer two,

21:02SPEAKERand they make assets that are like film quality assets

21:05SPEAKERfor those things for cut scenes.

21:07SPEAKERAnd then that's pretty much,

21:08SPEAKERthen they scale them down for the things.

21:09SPEAKERBut if like, if you could just dump the film quality assets,

21:12SPEAKERyou don't have to do the low poly versions

21:14SPEAKERand make all the LODs and Atlas your textures

21:17SPEAKERand all the other stuff that you have to do

21:18SPEAKERthat's like technical.

21:19SPEAKER- Yeah, so that seems to be the upshot of that topic.

21:22SPEAKERAnd also that's the practical effect

21:23SPEAKERin terms of the art labor.

21:26SPEAKERBut I would love to hear,

21:27SPEAKERand I'm not sure neither of us is equipped

21:28SPEAKERto figure this out, but I would love to hear

21:30SPEAKERfrom like a low level graphics program

21:32SPEAKERor what exactly is happening.

21:34SPEAKERLike what does it mean to virtualize that process?

21:36SPEAKER- But yeah, I mean, I have the gist,

21:39SPEAKERbut I think there's a lot more to it than that

21:42SPEAKER'cause we would have done it before if it was easy.

21:44SPEAKER- Right.

21:46SPEAKER- The other thing was the fluid and the particle systems.

21:50SPEAKERSo the difference between a particle system

21:51SPEAKERand a fluid system is that fluids interact with each other

21:53SPEAKERas they're moving, right?

21:55SPEAKERSo like if you want to simulate air

21:57SPEAKERmoving through skyscrapers in a city like Chicago,

22:01SPEAKERyou have to simulate each square

22:03SPEAKERand then simulate its effect on all the adjoining squares

22:05SPEAKERand then simulate the adjoining squares effect back on them.

22:08SPEAKERAnd it quickly becomes a nightmare of loopbacks.

22:11SPEAKERDeep down, like water molecules are just slipping

22:13SPEAKERand sliding all over each other, right?

22:14SPEAKER- Yeah, exactly.

22:16SPEAKERBut the particle interaction and the fluid things

22:18SPEAKERI think are probably very similar processes

22:20SPEAKER'cause like the idea that a lot of things

22:23SPEAKERlike flocking behavior and birds,

22:25SPEAKER'cause flocking behavior is determined by,

22:27SPEAKERyou know, each bird's position is determined

22:29SPEAKERby all the other bird's position

22:31SPEAKERand like the swarms of beetles that we saw

22:36SPEAKERmoved more like real swarms of beetles

22:38SPEAKERthan anything I've ever seen

22:39SPEAKERrather than like a canned animation.

22:40SPEAKER- Like you have to assume

22:41SPEAKERthat was a particle-based effect too, right, the beetles?

22:43SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what they said, yeah.

22:44SPEAKER- I mean, it honestly, it feels like just another,

22:47SPEAKERyet another, and this is gonna like loop back around

22:49SPEAKERto the topic later in the episode.

22:50SPEAKERIt feels like another example of filmmaking techniques,

22:54SPEAKERVFX techniques, just bleeding into games.

22:56SPEAKERNow the games can actually run them

22:57SPEAKERand the hardware can run them in real time.

22:59SPEAKER- Yeah.

23:00SPEAKER- 'Cause like going back 20 years,

23:01SPEAKERlike the massive tool that they developed

23:03SPEAKERfor Lord of the Rings movies, you know?

23:05SPEAKERLike that was a massive-

23:06SPEAKER- That was the army thing, right?

23:07SPEAKER- Yeah, that was just a big, I started to say a massive system

23:10SPEAKER'cause of course it is, 'cause that's what it's called,

23:12SPEAKERbut that was just a huge system of agents

23:15SPEAKERthat had primitive behaviors programmed in

23:17SPEAKERto either like attack each other

23:19SPEAKERor run away from each other or blah, blah, blah, you know?

23:20SPEAKERBut like, that's kind of what we're talking about

23:22SPEAKERexcept now in real time

23:23SPEAKERwith actual little discrete systems

23:26SPEAKERplaying out in the world around you, right?

23:29SPEAKER- Well, it's stuff from like emergent tools

23:32SPEAKERlike Game of Life, right?

23:33SPEAKERLike if you load that thing up

23:34SPEAKERand you give it different source,

23:36SPEAKERyou give it the same feeds,

23:37SPEAKERyou're gonna get different results every single time

23:39SPEAKERbecause the things interact with each other differently

23:41SPEAKERbased on the starting location.

23:42SPEAKER- Like it's a chaotic system, right?

23:44SPEAKER- Yeah, but small imperfections in the skin, Brad.

23:46SPEAKER- That's right.

23:47SPEAKERWe'll just get Jeff Goldblum in here to explain this to us.

23:50SPEAKER- Exactly, but yeah, this is fascinating.

23:55SPEAKERSo the other thing that's huge is the amount of geometry

23:57SPEAKERthat they showed in those levels was like kind of terrifying.

24:02SPEAKER- Yeah, well, that's where the virtualization comes in,

24:05SPEAKERright, is like you can just have,

24:06SPEAKERI'm not gonna say unlimited numbers of polygons

24:08SPEAKERin your background,

24:09SPEAKERbut it sounds like you can kind of just throw whatever at it

24:11SPEAKERand it'll figure it out.

24:12SPEAKER- Well, you said it during when we were talking about it,

24:14SPEAKERbut you said some of these polygons are only a pixel

24:17SPEAKERand yeah, it looks like some of the polygons

24:19SPEAKERare even smaller than pixels,

24:20SPEAKERdepending on where you are and what.

24:22SPEAKERBut I mean, that'll solve the problem

24:25SPEAKERof your mipmaps popping in

24:27SPEAKERand your tessellation popping in as you close the LOD gaps

24:32SPEAKER'cause it should just render dynamically all the way down

24:35SPEAKERand tessellate out.

24:36SPEAKERI mean, the nice thing is now they can assume everybody

24:38SPEAKERthat's gonna be playing these games

24:40SPEAKERis gonna have tessellation hardware,

24:42SPEAKERwhich wasn't always the case.

24:43SPEAKERAnd that opens up a lot more,

24:46SPEAKERand I believe it wasn't even the case

24:47SPEAKERfor the previous gen of consoles, but it might've been.

24:51SPEAKERSo yeah, that opens up a lot of possibility there.

24:54SPEAKER- Yeah, but do you wanna talk some more

24:55SPEAKERabout the global elimination?

24:56SPEAKERIt sounds like you've seen some comments they've made

24:59SPEAKERsubsequent to the video 'cause I would've thought,

25:02SPEAKERand there were even some people on the TechPod discord

25:03SPEAKERwho assumed that that GI stuff was ray tracing based,

25:07SPEAKERbut it sounds like they came out and said it's not.

25:08SPEAKER- So the thing I, like this is my memory

25:12SPEAKERof an offhand comment on Twitter,

25:13SPEAKERbut they said, I saw somebody say

25:15SPEAKERthat there was no ray tracing.

25:16SPEAKER- Interesting, okay.

25:18SPEAKER- And honestly, it didn't look like there was ray tracing.

25:20SPEAKERIt looked better than what you get

25:21SPEAKERwith current gen ray tracing.

25:23SPEAKER- Less noisy.

25:24SPEAKER- But yeah, because it didn't have the noise pop in

25:26SPEAKERas it's, 'cause right now it's basically interpolating

25:29SPEAKERa light map based in real time

25:31SPEAKERbased on a really limited sample of rays.

25:34SPEAKERAnd that looked like projection lighting.

25:38SPEAKERIt didn't look like light probes to me,

25:40SPEAKERbut it's hard to tell in video

25:41SPEAKER'cause there's weird compression with video.

25:43SPEAKER- That's another interesting illustration of the point

25:45SPEAKERthat lighting in particular in games,

25:47SPEAKERbut especially limited to all types of graphical effects,

25:50SPEAKERthe fuzziness of doing it,

25:51SPEAKERthe quote unquote real wave versus faking it.

25:54SPEAKERThe fakery is often better and higher quality

25:56SPEAKERat a current state of hardware capability

25:59SPEAKERthan doing it the right way.

26:01SPEAKER- Well, so Unreal has always done lighting backwards

26:05SPEAKERcompared to most other engines.

26:06SPEAKERSo they were getting self-shadowing and stuff

26:11SPEAKERon those assets, which was interesting.

26:13SPEAKERWhen you looked at the light moving across the cliff faces,

26:15SPEAKERyou would see rocks dangling down,

26:18SPEAKERshadowing the rocks behind them, stuff like that.

26:21SPEAKERThey were also getting some good specular

26:24SPEAKERand some bounce back on the other surfaces without,

26:28SPEAKERand if they're doing that without doing ray tracing,

26:30SPEAKERthen they figure out something really cool.

26:31SPEAKERSo I'm interested, I assume that they're gonna do,

26:34SPEAKERI think they said they're gonna do a deep dive

26:36SPEAKERin how they're doing all this stuff.

26:39SPEAKERI can't wait for too long.

26:40SPEAKER- Can't wait for that, that sounds great.

26:42SPEAKER- Yeah, it's really neat.

26:43SPEAKER- However they're accomplishing that stuff,

26:44SPEAKERit illustrates the same point as ray tracing,

26:47SPEAKERwhich is just kind of a,

26:50SPEAKERI'm trying to think of a way to describe this.

26:51SPEAKERIt's almost like an author wants light many kind

26:55SPEAKERof situation, you know what I mean?

26:56SPEAKERIt's just like place the lights

26:57SPEAKERand just let the tech figure out how to shade

27:00SPEAKERthe entire world.

27:02SPEAKER- Well, I mean, there's,

27:03SPEAKERso if there's no pre-computed lighting,

27:06SPEAKERlike calculating light maps takes an astonishing amount

27:09SPEAKERof time, especially if you're talking about like a game,

27:11SPEAKERlike a big open world game, right?

27:12SPEAKERSo if you look at a PUBG map,

27:14SPEAKERthat's eight kilometers by eight kilometers,

27:17SPEAKERor even something like Skyrim or Zelda or whatever,

27:22SPEAKERand if you're doing pre-computed light maps,

27:24SPEAKERthose can take an incredibly long time,

27:26SPEAKEReven if you're throwing like small supercomputer assets

27:29SPEAKERat them.

27:30SPEAKER- Let me jump in real quick.

27:31SPEAKERThis is probably gonna sound incredibly naive

27:33SPEAKERto any working game developers that are listening to this,

27:35SPEAKERbut when they mentioned in that demo,

27:37SPEAKERlike, oh, you don't have to pre-compute light maps anymore.

27:40SPEAKERI was like, wait,

27:40SPEAKERare people still pre-computing a lot of light maps?

27:42SPEAKERLike, I guess I just assumed that we had gotten to the point

27:47SPEAKERnot where we had completely moved past it,

27:48SPEAKERbut it wasn't as common as it used to be

27:50SPEAKERbecause like going way back to like, you know,

27:53SPEAKERthe late nineties when like the original quake engine games

27:55SPEAKERwere out there, like you used to hear all the time,

27:56SPEAKERit's like, that's the thing that took all of the time

27:59SPEAKERin the sort of level creation pipeline, right?

28:02SPEAKERIn terms of computing, what the output,

28:05SPEAKERI don't know how to be like building stuff by hand,

28:07SPEAKERbut once you were ready to like bake it into the game,

28:10SPEAKERlike that's the thing that you have to run

28:11SPEAKERon like an SGI overnight or whatever.

28:14SPEAKER- Yeah, so now I know for a long time,

28:18SPEAKERValve had a thing that ran on all their computers

28:20SPEAKERthat would basically like folding at home

28:22SPEAKERtheir light map computation.

28:24SPEAKER- That's awesome.

28:26SPEAKER- I'm sure other people did similar stuff.

28:29SPEAKER- Jim and accounting wanted that 9900K,

28:33SPEAKERthen we're gonna pay it to work

28:34SPEAKERwhen he's not doing spreadsheets.

28:35SPEAKER- Exactly, so that was longer ago than a 9900K obviously,

28:39SPEAKERbut the, so yeah, people do light maps

28:43SPEAKER'cause they're very performant.

28:44SPEAKERI mean, all a light map is is basically a texture

28:47SPEAKERthat says, hey, this part of the map should be bright

28:49SPEAKERand this part of the map should be dark or maybe colored.

28:52SPEAKER- The benefit is it's very performance efficient,

28:54SPEAKERbut the downside is it's static, right?

28:56SPEAKERYou can't do anything really dynamic with it.

28:59SPEAKER- Well, so, but you can combine that with other stuff too.

29:01SPEAKERSo like, if you're, say you're building something

29:04SPEAKERfor the Oculus Quest, which is a mobile part

29:06SPEAKERthat can handle maybe two or less than 10 dynamic lights

29:10SPEAKERat any given moment before the performance shits the bed.

29:14SPEAKERSo if you do the basic world lighting

29:20SPEAKERfor all the light sources that can't be changed,

29:22SPEAKERcan't be turned on and off, can't be moved.

29:26SPEAKERI mean, 'cause turning on and off,

29:27SPEAKERactually you just flip a different light map on.

29:29SPEAKERBut if you can pick up the light

29:30SPEAKERand move it across the room or point it at something,

29:32SPEAKERlike you can and say control,

29:34SPEAKERthen that has to be a dynamic light.

29:37SPEAKERSo you pre-compute all the static lights

29:40SPEAKERand then you do the dynamic lights as dynamic lights.

29:46SPEAKER- Yeah, that's definitely, that's how it's been done

29:47SPEAKERfor the last, what, 20, 25 years at this point.

29:49SPEAKER- Forever, yeah, for all intents and purposes.

29:51SPEAKER- But I guess what I meant is I figured

29:52SPEAKERwe had already largely gone through that transition,

29:55SPEAKERbut it sounds like I was assuming a lot.

29:58SPEAKER- Well, I mean, there's other stuff like Unity.

30:00SPEAKERPeople in Unity use light probes for stuff.

30:02SPEAKERThere's, which are kind of in between.

30:05SPEAKERThey don't require pre-computing, but they're not dynamic.

30:11SPEAKERSo yeah, and they're only good

30:13SPEAKERfor certain pretty specific circumstances.

30:15SPEAKERSo most of the lighting solutions,

30:19SPEAKERincluding light maps, are good at some things

30:21SPEAKERand bad at others, and it's like any other tool.

30:24SPEAKERYou pick the tools that work for what you wanna do.

30:26SPEAKERAnd I assume some engines handle things differently.

30:29SPEAKERI haven't spent any time working with Unreal Engine,

30:31SPEAKERbut I know, I can tell from looking at shadows

30:36SPEAKERon games like PUBG and Fortnite

30:38SPEAKERthat they're pre-computing light maps for the world there.

30:40SPEAKERSo that if you have, for example,

30:42SPEAKERa guard booth that has some windows and some vertical rails,

30:46SPEAKERand then you see shadows inside that guard booth

30:48SPEAKERbased on where the sun is,

30:50SPEAKERthose things were all pre-computed,

30:52SPEAKERbecause when they bug out,

30:53SPEAKERthey make all sorts of interesting interference patterns.

30:56SPEAKER- And those are games where you're playing,

30:57SPEAKERand the maps are a little kind of a static sandbox, right?

31:01SPEAKERLike you don't need to worry about time of day

31:02SPEAKERor weather effects or stuff like that so much.

31:04SPEAKER- Right, I mean, and you can, there are hacks you can do.

31:08SPEAKERFor example, like in a game like Skyrim,

31:09SPEAKERwhere you want the sun to move across the sky,

31:11SPEAKERyou just compute 360 light maps with different sun positions,

31:15SPEAKERand you blend between them as the day goes on, right?

31:17SPEAKERYou'll see that in probably most, I would say,

31:19SPEAKERgames that do have time of day, like open world games.

31:22SPEAKERIf you just watch shadows on the ground,

31:24SPEAKERyou'll see them ticking along in very rigid increments

31:27SPEAKERrather than a smooth gradient.

31:30SPEAKER- Yeah, so something like,

31:32SPEAKERMinecraft is a good example of a dynamic light,

31:34SPEAKERbut they can do it because they treat each voxel face

31:37SPEAKERas like one pixel face for calculating the math,

31:39SPEAKERso it's relatively straightforward.

31:42SPEAKERBut yeah, so the lighting stuff is really huge.

31:45SPEAKERThere's a benefit, the other big benefit there

31:47SPEAKERis that the artist can literally,

31:50SPEAKERif you're doing all dynamic lights, the huge benefit is,

31:52SPEAKERyou can see what your changes look like in real time

31:55SPEAKERrather than having to change them

31:57SPEAKERand then bake the light map.

31:58SPEAKERAnd usually you bake a low res version of the light,

32:01SPEAKERmaybe a fast light map to get an idea,

32:03SPEAKERand then you don't know what it really looks like

32:05SPEAKERuntil you do the 24 hour run or whatever the big run is.

32:09SPEAKERAnd anytime you're doing that stuff,

32:10SPEAKEReither you have to have a machine that's dedicated to that,

32:13SPEAKERor you have to just not use your workstation

32:16SPEAKERfor the time that it's running,

32:17SPEAKER'cause it's gonna eat all the CPU and video card.

32:19SPEAKER- Do you think there are a lot of artists out there

32:21SPEAKERthat are just like falling to their knees

32:23SPEAKERand praising the heavens?

32:24SPEAKER'Cause it sounds like they're gonna be able

32:25SPEAKERto just export their high res assets

32:26SPEAKERand just drop them straight

32:28SPEAKERinto the development version of the game, right?

32:30SPEAKER- I mean, I think people are gun shy about that

32:32SPEAKERbecause we've heard that is a thing

32:34SPEAKERthat a lot of middleware promise.

32:36SPEAKERIt's one of those things when you walk around

32:37SPEAKERthe middleware booths in GDC,

32:38SPEAKERit's like, "Hey, take your high res cinematic assets

32:40SPEAKERand just drop them straight in."

32:41SPEAKERAnd then it never actually works out that way.

32:43SPEAKER- I would maybe give that kind of rhetoric

32:46SPEAKERa little more credibility coming from an epic

32:48SPEAKERthan your average middleware display at GDC.

32:53SPEAKER- I think that's true.

32:54SPEAKERAnd also if they're gonna come out and hype it up like that,

32:57SPEAKERthen they're going to have,

32:59SPEAKERthey feel like they have a pretty robust solution

33:01SPEAKERthat is applicable to a lot of people.

33:04SPEAKER- They can't really get away

33:05SPEAKERwith blowing a lot of smoke, right?

33:07SPEAKERBecause their tool is so widely used by so many

33:09SPEAKERand so many different applications.

33:10SPEAKERIf it doesn't live up to what they're pitching,

33:12SPEAKERthen we're gonna know pretty quickly.

33:14SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's fair.

33:16SPEAKERThe other thing that I thought was interesting

33:17SPEAKERwas they talked about sound,

33:18SPEAKERwhich seems increasingly important.

33:20SPEAKERThe spatial sound recording and stuff like that

33:23SPEAKERis a real dark art.

33:24SPEAKERAnd you get into that,

33:29SPEAKERpeople started experimenting that with binaural audio

33:31SPEAKERwhen VR started taking off.

33:33SPEAKERBecause binaural, meaning that you literally

33:36SPEAKERput microphones inside things that are shaped

33:38SPEAKERlike human ears, so you can get a recording

33:42SPEAKERof what the sound is gonna sound like

33:43SPEAKERright at the point inside your ear canal.

33:46SPEAKERAnd then when you play that back through headphones,

33:48SPEAKERit mimics the spatial stuff.

33:50SPEAKERSo people use that for 360 and 180 videos a lot.

33:57SPEAKERThe programmatic version of that is HRTFs,

34:00SPEAKERwhich are head-related transfer functions,

34:02SPEAKERI think is what that stands for.

34:04SPEAKERBut basically, they use math to mimic the same thing,

34:06SPEAKERand they do a little bit of delay

34:07SPEAKERon when the sound plays in your left ear

34:10SPEAKERand your right ear, so that your brain interprets that

34:14SPEAKERas it would a sound coming from above and behind you

34:17SPEAKERor whatever, something you can't do

34:19SPEAKERwith just normal stereo separation.

34:23SPEAKERI'm interested to see how the sound field stuff

34:27SPEAKERthat they're talking about,

34:27SPEAKERwhich is the next more complicated version of that,

34:31SPEAKERit's when you use multiple microphones in an array

34:33SPEAKERto capture really accurately your sound stuff.

34:38SPEAKERAnd I'm interested to see what they're doing

34:41SPEAKERwith that as well.

34:42SPEAKERThey didn't really talk about it too much.

34:44SPEAKER- Another thing that stood out to me

34:46SPEAKERis that sequence right at the end

34:48SPEAKERwhere she's basically just running

34:49SPEAKERand flying and gliding through a massive amount

34:51SPEAKERof level design in a very short period of time,

34:53SPEAKERwhich seemed like it had the dual purpose

34:56SPEAKERof saying, look how fast we can stream these complex assets

34:58SPEAKERoff of this insanely fast storage mechanism.

35:01SPEAKERAnd also, here is us scaling all this complex geometry,

35:05SPEAKERand you're not seeing any pop-in, any anything, right?

35:07SPEAKERIt was just like pretty flawless looking.

35:10SPEAKER- I would really love to see the pipeline for,

35:14SPEAKER'cause I think they said that first cave was a scan.

35:17SPEAKER- Yes.

35:18SPEAKER- The one where they paused it.

35:19SPEAKERAnd I'd love to see the timeline for the artists

35:23SPEAKERthat worked on that level and see how much time was spent

35:26SPEAKERwith the scan, cleaning it up and applying textures

35:29SPEAKERand fixing overhangs and holes and stuff like that.

35:32SPEAKER'Cause I know anytime, we did some laser scanning stuff

35:35SPEAKERfor the tested episode of the food show

35:37SPEAKERwhere we went to Adam's Cave.

35:38SPEAKERAnd I know that the folks that did that

35:40SPEAKERspent an incredible amount of time,

35:43SPEAKERboth cleaning up, like cleaning up noise from reflections

35:47SPEAKERand transparency and stuff like that.

35:50SPEAKERBut then also making,

35:55SPEAKERI guess what I'm saying is when you do the 3D scans,

35:58SPEAKERat least with the stuff that I've used,

35:59SPEAKERyou end up with usually a point cloud

36:00SPEAKERthat's just a whole bunch,

36:01SPEAKERit's basically here's all the bounce backs

36:03SPEAKERand here's the colors we got at these different areas.

36:06SPEAKERAnd then you run the point cloud through a tool

36:08SPEAKERthat turns it into a mesh.

36:09SPEAKERAnd the hard part isn't,

36:11SPEAKERthe hard part of that process isn't turn the point cloud

36:13SPEAKERinto a really high resolution mesh.

36:15SPEAKERThe hard part is fix the errors in the scan.

36:18SPEAKER- Right.

36:21SPEAKER- So that you have something that doesn't have holes

36:22SPEAKERand doesn't look, doesn't unfairly represent

36:26SPEAKERthe thing that you're trying to scan and stuff like that.

36:28SPEAKER- If you've ever seen a raw version

36:30SPEAKERof one of those environment scans,

36:31SPEAKERlike it does look a little nightmarish in spots,

36:33SPEAKERlike there are parts where something was obscured

36:35SPEAKERand you just have it, like you said,

36:36SPEAKERa giant gaping hole in it.

36:38SPEAKER- Yeah.

36:38SPEAKER- Things can look smeared.

36:41SPEAKER- Yeah, like it's almost like the landscape version

36:46SPEAKERof the uncanny valley.

36:50SPEAKER'Cause you look at it and your brain is like,

36:52SPEAKERthis is not how rocks look.

36:53SPEAKER- Right, right.

36:54SPEAKERSo like that's kind of a bedroom.

36:55SPEAKERIt's like a nightmarish skewed version of one.

36:58SPEAKER- Well, and also most of the photo,

37:01SPEAKERlike photogrammetry is one of those things

37:02SPEAKERthat is exactly as good as the technology

37:05SPEAKERand effort that you put into creating the source photos.

37:09SPEAKERWe tried to do a photogrammetry scan of Adam's workshop,

37:14SPEAKERwhich is an incredibly noisy,

37:16SPEAKERit's like worst case environment for photogrammetry, right?

37:18SPEAKERThere's a lot of visual noise.

37:20SPEAKERThere's rafters, there's stuff hanging from rafters.

37:22SPEAKERSo there's occlusion everywhere.

37:23SPEAKER- Fair amount of shiny metal, I would bet.

37:25SPEAKER- Tons of shiny metal, tons of glass,

37:28SPEAKERtons of shadows, tons of bright spots.

37:30SPEAKERLike it's not a good, like-

37:32SPEAKER- A lot of high frequency detail in there.

37:34SPEAKER- Yeah, you want like a sound stage,

37:36SPEAKERlike a blank empty black box to do photogrammetry, right?

37:39SPEAKERAnd this is not that.

37:41SPEAKERAnd we spent two or three days collecting photos

37:44SPEAKERand then tried to munch in like the smallest area

37:47SPEAKERand it just couldn't handle it, right?

37:49SPEAKERIt kept crashing the tool we were using.

37:52SPEAKER- But that's a good reality check for me

37:54SPEAKERbecause that was my big final question

37:56SPEAKERcoming out of this demo is-

37:58SPEAKER- Well, that was also with prosumer tools,

38:00SPEAKERnot necessarily like film quality tools.

38:01SPEAKERSo it's possible that there's better tools out there

38:04SPEAKERfor different markets.

38:06SPEAKER- 'Cause there have been,

38:07SPEAKEReven in the past generation of games,

38:08SPEAKERthere's been a couple really impressive examples

38:10SPEAKERof techniques like that.

38:11SPEAKERI want to say that the "Star Wars Battlefront" games

38:13SPEAKERhave used photogrammetry pretty well.

38:16SPEAKER- One of those environments?

38:17SPEAKER- Yes, I think Forza 7,

38:20SPEAKERone of the Forzas, I believe they were touting it

38:22SPEAKERfor some of their environments.

38:24SPEAKER- Oh, I can see that.

38:24SPEAKER- Canyons, rock, it seems like a good technique

38:27SPEAKERthat's well suited to a lot of large, fairly flat rocks.

38:30SPEAKER- So yeah, photogrammetry works best

38:32SPEAKERwhen the objects around you don't move.

38:34SPEAKER- Right.

38:35SPEAKER- Like grass is bad for photogrammetry,

38:37SPEAKERleaves are bad for photogrammetry.

38:39SPEAKER- I mean, that's the kind of thing

38:40SPEAKERyou would want to just generate artificially, right?

38:44SPEAKER- I think so, yeah.

38:45SPEAKER- Combination of art and code or something like that.

38:47SPEAKER- So in order to make the grassy environments,

38:48SPEAKERfirst we plow up, we pave over all the grass.

38:51SPEAKER- That's right.

38:52SPEAKER- And then you cut down all the trees

38:53SPEAKERand then you take your photogrammetry

38:55SPEAKERand then you apply the grass and the trees on top

38:57SPEAKERwith a paintbrush.

38:58SPEAKER- That's the history of human civilizational development,

39:00SPEAKERright? Destroy the natural world in order to recreate it.

39:04SPEAKER- Yes, so the thing I was going to ask though is,

39:06SPEAKERI mean, we're going back to the kind of history

39:08SPEAKERof visual effects again.

39:10SPEAKERAnd this is kind of inverting the example a little bit,

39:12SPEAKERbut like they've been scanning maquettes,

39:15SPEAKERphysical models made out of clay or whatever,

39:17SPEAKERpeople that, because a lot of people can work

39:20SPEAKERa lot faster by hand or get finer detail in some cases,

39:23SPEAKERnot to, I mean, that's not to denigrate

39:26SPEAKERthe discipline of 3D modeling.

39:28SPEAKERObviously you can get a lot of great results with that too.

39:30SPEAKERBut the point is like you can have a sculptor make a model,

39:33SPEAKERscan that in as an incredibly high resolution model

39:35SPEAKERand then turn that into a character in a movie.

39:39SPEAKERThey were doing that like 20 years ago.

39:41SPEAKERLike I've wondered if we,

39:43SPEAKERand I don't know, maybe you can speak to this.

39:44SPEAKERLike, do you think we're ever going to get to the point

39:45SPEAKERwhere maybe at least in some cases where it's appropriate,

39:49SPEAKERyou're not building levels in a computer,

39:52SPEAKERbut you are building sets on a stage

39:54SPEAKERand scanning those in as the basis of your level.

39:56SPEAKERYou know what I mean?

39:58SPEAKER- Wow.

39:58SPEAKER- Because you talk about the amount of art

40:01SPEAKERthat gets outsourced, like some of these environments

40:03SPEAKERwith the insane amounts of discrete art.

40:08SPEAKER- Yeah, even something like those Assassin's Creed,

40:10SPEAKERthe modern Assassin's Creed games

40:12SPEAKERhave just a terrifying amount of art in them.

40:14SPEAKER- Right, and you see how much, even in high budget games,

40:17SPEAKERhow much of that just gets iterated over ad nauseum.

40:19SPEAKERIt's like, oh, there's that church again for the 12th time

40:21SPEAKERand stuff like that.

40:24SPEAKERAnd it makes me wonder in a lot of cases,

40:25SPEAKERit's like, oh, instead of having people model

40:28SPEAKERunique packs of cigarettes and ashtrays and whatever,

40:32SPEAKERcould you see cases where instead

40:34SPEAKERyou are just scanning environments

40:36SPEAKERthat you can set dress probably a lot faster

40:39SPEAKERthan you can generate all that stuff artificially, right?

40:43SPEAKER- So in a world where movie and TV tie-in games

40:51SPEAKERdidn't essentially move mobile five, six years ago,

40:54SPEAKERI could definitely see somebody going into the Iron Man

40:58SPEAKERset for Iron Man 2 and scanning that

41:01SPEAKERand using that as the basis for your world hub

41:05SPEAKERfor the Iron Man 2 game or whatever, right?

41:07SPEAKER- Because you've already spent the budget on that set

41:09SPEAKERand it already exists.

41:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think people are gonna build

41:13SPEAKERphysical environments 'cause it's usually a lot cheaper

41:15SPEAKERto just do it digitally.

41:16SPEAKERThat's why we do a lot of shooting on green screens.

41:18SPEAKERWe're gonna talk about that with the Mandalorian

41:19SPEAKER'cause it is applicable here.

41:22SPEAKERBut what I can see happening is if you go to a prop shop

41:27SPEAKERin LA, you can go to these huge, huge warehouses

41:30SPEAKERwhere they have like 3,000 different packs of cigarettes

41:35SPEAKERfrom the last 50 years.

41:37SPEAKERAnd you can get, if you're making a film set in the '70s,

41:40SPEAKERyou can get a pack of Marlboros from the '70s

41:42SPEAKERand you rent that or buy it or whatever for your shoot.

41:49SPEAKEROr if you're making a 12 Monkeys game

41:52SPEAKERand you need a black hard side Samsonite suitcase

41:55SPEAKERfrom 1993, you can go find the black Samsonite

41:59SPEAKERhard side suitcase from 1993.

42:02SPEAKERWhat I could see is people going through and scanning,

42:04SPEAKERespecially for like, if you're making a Jason Bourne game,

42:07SPEAKERyou go to the hand prop store in LA and you get all,

42:10SPEAKERyou rent all the shit that you need for that game,

42:12SPEAKERlike the actual physical items, and then you scan them

42:16SPEAKERand then you debrand them as needed

42:20SPEAKERto make the legal team happy.

42:22SPEAKERBut you have essentially, you know, the trade dress

42:25SPEAKERof the era specific props for the game you're making.

42:30SPEAKERI totally see that working for props.

42:32SPEAKER- In fact, actually I saw that very idea floated

42:34SPEAKERas a negative on Twitter that this sort of new

42:38SPEAKERemerging model could in fact lead to a lot more people

42:41SPEAKERjust relying on existing asset libraries.

42:42SPEAKERSo you're actually going to see a lot more

42:44SPEAKERof the same art popping up in different places

42:46SPEAKERand that sort of thing.

42:47SPEAKER- I mean, you're always, look this doesn't have anything

42:52SPEAKERto do with asset libraries, right?

42:53SPEAKERThe asset libraries are there, they're available.

42:55SPEAKER- That's true.

42:56SPEAKER- We know, like what's the best game

42:59SPEAKERthat did a bunch of asset flipping?

43:00SPEAKERProbably it's like, I mean, well,

43:04SPEAKERBen and Fadi made Getting Over It,

43:05SPEAKERwhich is about found assets and all that.

43:08SPEAKER- Yeah, that's appropriate thematically.

43:10SPEAKER- Yeah, there's a lot of, but there's a lot of,

43:13SPEAKERthere's a lot of mobile games that use, I mean,

43:17SPEAKERI know I mentioned PUBG a lot, but PUBG used a lot

43:20SPEAKERof assets that are from the Unreal Asset Store

43:23SPEAKERfor like the first map because they didn't have

43:25SPEAKERa huge art team.

43:26SPEAKERIt's, you're always, the asset store is always

43:29SPEAKERgonna be a problem.

43:30SPEAKERYou're not gonna get massive scanned libraries

43:31SPEAKER'cause scanning stuff is expensive

43:33SPEAKERand time consuming enough that it's not like,

43:36SPEAKERit's not like uploading your photos from Flickr

43:39SPEAKERto Getty Images and hoping you're gonna get $3

43:41SPEAKERfor somebody licensing your photo.

43:43SPEAKERIf you spend 40 hours building a fire tower

43:47SPEAKERin Blender or Maya or something and you're not gonna

43:51SPEAKERjust upload it hoping that somebody pays you 50 bucks

43:53SPEAKERfor it 10 times and makes it worth your three days work

43:56SPEAKERor whatever it was.

43:57SPEAKER- Sure, that's probably for the best because you talk

44:00SPEAKERabout all the like kind of ready to go rental prop

44:03SPEAKERand set services in LA and that sort of thing.

44:06SPEAKERIf people were getting to the point where they were just

44:08SPEAKERlike scanning stuff like that in for level design,

44:09SPEAKERthat would lead to the situation where the police station

44:13SPEAKERthat you put in your game turned out to be the same one

44:15SPEAKERthat you saw in that porn.

44:17SPEAKER- Yeah, a couple years ago.

44:19SPEAKERYeah, like you're recording your E3 shows

44:21SPEAKERand somebody's like, I saw this, I recognize this

44:24SPEAKERfrom somewhere I can't tell where.

44:25SPEAKER- Yeah, so let's say whether you're covering E3

44:27SPEAKERor making video game levels, be careful what kind

44:30SPEAKERof studio space you rent and or scan.

44:34SPEAKER- Well, and then the other thing is like,

44:38SPEAKERstyle always matters more than quantity of art, right?

44:44SPEAKERMore art doesn't beat better designed more stylish art ever.

44:48SPEAKERSo like if you have a billion polygons, that's great

44:52SPEAKERbut if the billion polygons look like crap,

44:54SPEAKERI would rather play Wind Waker with a handful of polygons

44:59SPEAKERrunning on a GameCube 20 years ago than whatever

45:03SPEAKERyour giant hyper poly, whatever extravaganza is.

45:07SPEAKER- Totally.

45:08SPEAKER- Okay, so speaking of Unreal,

45:10SPEAKERlet's talk about The Mandalorian.

45:12SPEAKER- Okay.

45:13SPEAKER- I watched the entirety of this show almost

45:15SPEAKERbefore I found out how they shot a lot of the scenes.

45:18SPEAKERAnd when I found out I was blown away.

45:20SPEAKER- So that is fascinating for me to hear

45:21SPEAKERbecause I have not seen any of the show

45:23SPEAKERbut I have watched all of the stuff they've put out

45:25SPEAKERjust about the production of it.

45:27SPEAKERSo I came at it from the other angle of like,

45:29SPEAKERoh, I know how they made that even though I haven't seen it.

45:31SPEAKERSo hearing you say that they fooled you is like,

45:34SPEAKERthat's pretty much the proof in the pudding, right?

45:37SPEAKER- I was, it worked.

45:40SPEAKERI assumed it was all green screen, if not shot on location.

45:44SPEAKERAnd I was very surprised.

45:46SPEAKERSo the thing we're talking about,

45:49SPEAKERso The Mandalorian is Jon Favreau's,

45:52SPEAKERJon Favreau was the executive producer

45:54SPEAKERon a show called The Mandalorian, which is on Disney Plus.

45:58SPEAKERIt's the first Star Wars TV show

45:59SPEAKERand you have to subscribe to the service to get it.

46:02SPEAKERThe neat thing about The Mandalorian is that

46:06SPEAKERinstead of shooting in front of green screens,

46:07SPEAKERwhich they did obviously shoot in front

46:09SPEAKERof some green screens and then composite

46:10SPEAKERin digital stuff on top of that.

46:12SPEAKERBut a lot of like their exterior shots

46:14SPEAKERare shot on a sound stage with an LED video wall,

46:18SPEAKERa high res LED video wall that kind of curves

46:21SPEAKERbehind the circular stage.

46:24SPEAKERAnd then what they do is they motion track the camera lens

46:28SPEAKERand they render the backgrounds live

46:31SPEAKERwhile the actors are performing

46:34SPEAKERand perspective warp those backgrounds.

46:37SPEAKERThey look 3D correct from wherever the camera happens to be.

46:41SPEAKERSo when you're standing off to the side,

46:42SPEAKERthey look, you've seen those chalk drawings

46:44SPEAKERthat like sidewalk artists do where when you're walking up,

46:47SPEAKERit looks like there's a guy standing on the sidewalk

46:48SPEAKERfrom like the exact right spot.

46:50SPEAKERAnd then as you get closer, the guy gets stretched out

46:53SPEAKERuntil he's like 30 feet long on the sidewalk.

46:55SPEAKERIt's like that.

46:56SPEAKERBut they're doing it live using Unreal Engine,

46:59SPEAKERusing the Unreal Engine to render the assets

47:01SPEAKERin the background.

47:02SPEAKER- And because it moves across the wall

47:03SPEAKERfrom the camera's point of view,

47:04SPEAKERit always looks perspective correct, right?

47:06SPEAKER- Yeah, so there's two things happening.

47:08SPEAKERAnytime the camera moves, the wall is rendering

47:11SPEAKERthe perspective from exactly where the camera is.

47:14SPEAKER- Which I assumed requires like an incredibly fine level

47:17SPEAKERof motion tracking.

47:19SPEAKER- I mean, it's what you would use for VR

47:20SPEAKER'cause it's literally the same thing that happens

47:23SPEAKERwhen you wear a Vive and you're, you know,

47:27SPEAKERyou're moving your head left and right.

47:28SPEAKER- Actually, it's funny when you put it that way,

47:30SPEAKERthat sounds incredibly simple, but for whatever reason,

47:31SPEAKERlike applying that to a large camera

47:33SPEAKERthat's like balanced on a guy's shoulder

47:35SPEAKERmakes that seem a lot more difficult for some reason.

47:37SPEAKER- Well, but I mean, just to be clear,

47:39SPEAKERwe do that too for things like virtual sets for,

47:45SPEAKERlike ESPN uses virtual sets for all of their stuff.

47:48SPEAKERSo it's like a huge green screen room

47:50SPEAKERand the camera moves and is tracked

47:51SPEAKERand they're rendering the background

47:53SPEAKERbased on where the camera is.

47:53SPEAKER- I mean, that's probably a camera on a jib

47:55SPEAKERthat's doing pretty predictable,

47:57SPEAKERlike smooth movement movements, right?

47:58SPEAKERAs opposed to a guy with like a handheld rig.

48:01SPEAKER- Well, so they don't, I'm trying to think.

48:03SPEAKERI don't, I guess there were some handheld shots in this.

48:05SPEAKERI don't remember a ton of handheld shots.

48:07SPEAKER- Okay, 'cause in some of the, so there's a lot of,

48:11SPEAKERI guess we'll put this in the show notes.

48:12SPEAKERThere's a fair amount of like behind the scenes footage

48:14SPEAKERthey've put out on this stuff.

48:14SPEAKERAnd at least in a lot of those demos,

48:16SPEAKERthey do show people walking around with cameras

48:18SPEAKERand doing it live, but.

48:20SPEAKER- So there's definitely handheld shots.

48:22SPEAKERA lot of them felt like gimbal or steady cams,

48:25SPEAKERlike gimbal shots or steady cams.

48:26SPEAKERI don't remember a lot of like, you know, like war,

48:30SPEAKERlike war photographer style, like running in shape.

48:33SPEAKERLike I don't remember any clover film business.

48:36SPEAKERYeah, but I mean, but at the same time,

48:39SPEAKERlike with the Vive, you can get the level of resolution

48:42SPEAKERand fidelity and that you would need to do this.

48:46SPEAKERSo it like, even if they,

48:49SPEAKERlike if they have a Vicon set up around the edge

48:51SPEAKERand they have the camera with a Vicon marker on it,

48:53SPEAKERthat's, they're going to get the speed

48:54SPEAKERthat they need probably.

48:57SPEAKERSo the interesting thing,

48:58SPEAKERso Disney Gallery is a series on Disney Plus.

49:01SPEAKERAnd they have, as of yesterday,

49:03SPEAKERwhen I watched it two episodes up about the Mandalorian,

49:07SPEAKERthey just posted the third one yesterday.

49:09SPEAKERAnd they do it like Jon Favreau's old show,

49:14SPEAKERDinner for Five, which was I think an A&E thing

49:18SPEAKERwhere he would get five directors or actors

49:20SPEAKERor DPs or screenwriters,

49:21SPEAKERset them up in an Italian restaurant in LA.

49:23SPEAKERAnd they'd talk about making movie,

49:24SPEAKERlike shop talk about making movies and telling stories

49:27SPEAKERand you know, like movie nonsense.

49:30SPEAKERIf you haven't seen it, it's an all time great.

49:32SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds incredible.

49:33SPEAKERI have to look that up.

49:35SPEAKER- Well, and it was Favreau before Jumanji and Iron Man.

49:39SPEAKERSo it was like after Swingers and Made,

49:42SPEAKERthe other movie he made with Vince Vaughn,

49:44SPEAKERbut before he became like the dude who started the MCU.

49:47SPEAKER- Right.

49:49SPEAKERAnd did like Disney's go-to big budget guy.

49:52SPEAKER- What was before he got the blank check, right?

49:54SPEAKERIt was, you know, Jumanji opened up that door for him

49:57SPEAKERand then, so yeah.

50:00SPEAKERAnyway, highly recommend that.

50:01SPEAKERThe gallery is interesting.

50:02SPEAKERThey don't have a lot of technical details,

50:04SPEAKERbut the upshot is with the screen is it's three technologies.

50:07SPEAKERThey were like, we have these lead walls

50:08SPEAKERthat from a camera's perspective are indistinguishable

50:11SPEAKERfrom the real world, right?

50:13SPEAKERWe have motion tracking either with a traditional mocap setup

50:18SPEAKERor like a vibe type time of flight rig.

50:21SPEAKERThey could tell us the precise position of the camera

50:23SPEAKERat any given instant while the frames are recording.

50:27SPEAKERAnd then we also have this video game engine

50:29SPEAKERthat can render whatever we want

50:31SPEAKERat the resolution the screen has in real time.

50:34SPEAKERSo that when they're shooting,

50:35SPEAKERlike when they're shooting space scenes,

50:37SPEAKERthey build a virtual cockpit set up in front of the thing

50:40SPEAKERand they shake the cockpit on actuators.

50:44SPEAKERThey shake the cameras with motion control rigs,

50:47SPEAKERand then they're projecting the star field

50:48SPEAKERand the other spaceship on the background,

50:50SPEAKERon the screen behind him, perspective warped

50:53SPEAKERso that it looks right.

50:54SPEAKERAnd the upshot is that like when he's turning

50:56SPEAKERand looking at one of the other characters in the spaceship,

50:59SPEAKERlike you see the star field moving behind it.

51:01SPEAKERIt feels really real in a way

51:03SPEAKERthat green screen stuff kind of never does.

51:05SPEAKER- It feels real and it has just like,

51:06SPEAKERI feel like all the in-camera benefits you get from this

51:10SPEAKERare just like one of the coolest things I've ever seen.

51:12SPEAKERLike essentially you're getting the balance,

51:16SPEAKERlike the light reflections,

51:17SPEAKERthe ambiance of the background that you want to have

51:21SPEAKERbecause it's actually there

51:22SPEAKERas opposed to putting it in post, right?

51:23SPEAKERLike the stuff that you would normally add later

51:27SPEAKERis actually present and bleeding into the scene

51:29SPEAKERin an optical way that you're actually capturing.

51:31SPEAKERIt's just the coolest thing.

51:33SPEAKER- The stuff that you notice in bad green screening,

51:35SPEAKERlike light mismatches where the background,

51:38SPEAKERwhere when you do a green screen,

51:40SPEAKERyou light the characters the way you think

51:41SPEAKERyou're gonna want them lit in the background.

51:43SPEAKERAnd then if you change the way that background

51:44SPEAKERwants to be lit, you're stuck and you have to either

51:47SPEAKERlike color grade or something on the footage,

51:50SPEAKERor you have to go in and just deal with what you have

51:55SPEAKERand adjust and you end up with like slight inconsistencies

51:58SPEAKERin how the light works on the green screen background

52:01SPEAKERand the foreground when it's actually shot.

52:03SPEAKERSo this, you don't have any, like I watched this

52:05SPEAKERand I said it on one of the still entitled one,

52:07SPEAKERI'd watched the first episode or two,

52:08SPEAKERbut I was like, this is the best green screen work

52:09SPEAKERI've ever seen.

52:10SPEAKER- Right.

52:11SPEAKER- And then somebody wrote in and was like,

52:12SPEAKERwell, actually it's not green screen work, it's blah, blah.

52:14SPEAKER- Right.

52:15SPEAKER- So it's a lovely technology.

52:19SPEAKERIt let them shoot this much faster

52:21SPEAKERthan they were expecting to.

52:23SPEAKERYou know, they had a mixture.

52:24SPEAKERI think they had five directors who did this.

52:28SPEAKER- And I think they essentially conceived this

52:31SPEAKERfor this show, right?

52:32SPEAKERLike it's not like this technique was not in wide use

52:34SPEAKERprior to this, right?

52:36SPEAKER- This is the first time anybody's used it

52:37SPEAKERthat I'm aware of, yeah.

52:42SPEAKERLet's see.

52:46SPEAKERYeah, so they talk about,

52:49SPEAKERthey have different directors from different backgrounds.

52:50SPEAKERDave Filoni directed an episode or maybe two

52:53SPEAKERand wrote a bunch of them.

52:54SPEAKERHe did Clone Wars.

52:55SPEAKER- He's mostly out of animation.

52:57SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, Clone Wars and Rebels.

52:59SPEAKERAnd he's basically like the keeper of the lore

53:02SPEAKERat Lucasfilm now, right?

53:03SPEAKERLike he's the George Lucas when George,

53:06SPEAKERnow that there's no George.

53:07SPEAKER- Right, instead of flannel shirts, you've got cowboy hats.

53:12SPEAKER- Exactly.

53:13SPEAKERTaika Waititi who directed Thor Ragnarok

53:15SPEAKERand What We Do in the Shadows

53:17SPEAKERand Hunt for the Wilderpeople directed an episode

53:20SPEAKERand is a character.

53:22SPEAKERDeborah Chow who did a bunch of TV,

53:28SPEAKERlike she's a TV background.

53:32SPEAKERAnd--

53:33SPEAKER- I think he's with Bryce Howard.

53:35SPEAKER- Directed what is my favorite episode.

53:39SPEAKERAnd she's like, she directs plays.

53:41SPEAKERLike that's what she directed up until this point.

53:43SPEAKERAnd then Rick, Femi, you directed another episode,

53:47SPEAKERthe heist episode.

53:48SPEAKERSo like this kind of felt like an anthology at first.

53:52SPEAKEREach director brings in a different feel

53:54SPEAKERand a different vibe,

53:55SPEAKERbut the key is how they use this technology.

53:58SPEAKERAnd it was really, really fascinating to see.

54:02SPEAKERSo I would highly recommend watching it

54:06SPEAKERif you have Disney Plus.

54:07SPEAKERI enjoyed it.

54:08SPEAKER- The one place where this breaks down for me a little bit,

54:10SPEAKERI mean, I'm not saying it breaks down

54:11SPEAKERbecause obviously the technique works,

54:13SPEAKERbut mentally there's a disconnect for me

54:15SPEAKERis when you mentioned the led walls

54:18SPEAKERlooking indistinguishable from reality to cameras.

54:21SPEAKERThat's the part that's hard for me to wrap my head around.

54:23SPEAKERLike the tangential benefits of this are obvious.

54:25SPEAKERLike you get the ambient lighting on actors,

54:26SPEAKERyou get like actors seeing what the set's gonna look like

54:29SPEAKERwhile they're performing,

54:30SPEAKERwhich is helpful for just putting themselves

54:31SPEAKERin the right head space or whatever.

54:32SPEAKERBut for whatever reason,

54:34SPEAKERthe part where you're pointing a camera at a screen

54:38SPEAKERand it looks real is hard for me to process

54:41SPEAKERbecause like maybe it's the background I come from,

54:44SPEAKERbut typically shooting video off of screens

54:46SPEAKERis like the worst possible thing you can do.

54:48SPEAKER- Well, so if you're, but when you control,

54:51SPEAKERso it's different shooting video off a screen at a trade show

54:54SPEAKERwhere you can't control how bright the screen is

54:56SPEAKERand all that stuff.

54:57SPEAKER- I know these are super high resolution.

54:58SPEAKERYou've got total control over what's coming out of them

55:00SPEAKERand what's on them.

55:02SPEAKERIt's just something about,

55:04SPEAKERit's something about what is at the end of the day,

55:06SPEAKERa 2D surface being made to depict a 3D reality

55:10SPEAKERis like, there's just, it's just,

55:11SPEAKERI mean, obviously it works, like I said.

55:13SPEAKER- Well, so, okay, there's two parts of it.

55:16SPEAKEROne is that it's like,

55:17SPEAKERthis isn't like an LED wall, like on a jumbotron.

55:20SPEAKERThese are the micro LEDs that are really, really small.

55:23SPEAKERAnd it's, we talked about it

55:24SPEAKERwhen we talked about future of display technology,

55:27SPEAKER'cause they're basically like,

55:29SPEAKERwhen you buy these panels,

55:33SPEAKERthey're basically just really, really,

55:35SPEAKERreally tightly packed RGB LEDs.

55:38SPEAKERThe other side of it

55:41SPEAKERis that they are controlling the lighting

55:42SPEAKERand they're controlling the lighting on the people.

55:44SPEAKERSo they're lighting the people to match the wall

55:46SPEAKERor they have some software in the pipeline somewhere

55:48SPEAKERthat adjusts, that lets the DP and the lighting folks

55:52SPEAKERadjust the actual amount of lumens coming out of the wall.

55:56SPEAKER- Right.

55:57SPEAKER- So that like when they're on the desert scene,

56:00SPEAKERwhen they're on the not Tatooine, Tatooine,

56:02SPEAKERthey don't blow out all the,

56:05SPEAKERthey're obviously not blowing out all the cameras

56:06SPEAKERand they probably just light to match the scene,

56:08SPEAKERwhich I guess. - Sure, sure.

56:09SPEAKER- Also, you know, honestly, at the end of the day,

56:11SPEAKERa matte painting is also a 2D surface

56:13SPEAKERthat is shot as reality. - Yeah.

56:15SPEAKER- So like, it's really, this is really nothing,

56:17SPEAKERbut an incredibly high-tech and dynamic matte painting.

56:20SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, one of the things I read,

56:23SPEAKERI feel like I read it in a Cinefix article

56:24SPEAKERor something when I was sitting at the tested shop one day,

56:26SPEAKERwaiting to shoot something,

56:28SPEAKERis like, they had situations

56:31SPEAKERwhere they were shooting something and they were like,

56:32SPEAKERyou know, I don't like where this Mesa is

56:34SPEAKERin the background with this shot.

56:35SPEAKERAnd they were like, well, can we, should we move Pedro,

56:38SPEAKERthe guy who plays the Mandalorian,

56:39SPEAKERso he's in a different frame.

56:40SPEAKERAnd they're like, no, let's just move the Mesa.

56:42SPEAKER- Yeah, they showed a little bit of that

56:43SPEAKERin one of the videos they put out.

56:45SPEAKER- They opened up Unreal Ed and they just grabbed the Mesa

56:47SPEAKERand picked it up and moved it like three inches

56:49SPEAKERto the right. - Rearrange this environment.

56:51SPEAKER- Yeah.

56:52SPEAKER- Yeah, they were talking about how fast

56:53SPEAKERthey can shoot different setups in the same day,

56:55SPEAKERjust going from scene to scene,

56:56SPEAKER'cause at some point you're basically just having to like,

56:58SPEAKERspread a different color of dust across the floor

57:01SPEAKERor whatever. - Well, and I mean,

57:02SPEAKERit's interesting 'cause it does,

57:05SPEAKERlike, it's not the same as like,

57:07SPEAKERmoving to a different sound stage

57:08SPEAKERwith a different set of props and stuff on it, right?

57:10SPEAKERLike, you're, this works because for this kind of TV show,

57:14SPEAKERit's shot like a Western and there's a lot of,

57:16SPEAKERlike, a guy standing out in front of a scenery,

57:20SPEAKERin front of a backdrop, you know, looking at the scenery

57:24SPEAKERor like, deciding where he's gonna go next.

57:27SPEAKERAnd there's a lot of like, quiet, introspective,

57:28SPEAKERthoughtful shots that are just these gorgeous,

57:31SPEAKERgorgeous backgrounds.

57:32SPEAKERSo it, like, it feels a little bit less honest

57:36SPEAKERnow that I know it's all just running it on real.

57:39SPEAKERBut it works and it feels, I mean,

57:42SPEAKERI guess it's no less honest than the fact

57:43SPEAKERthat they didn't fly the X-Wings and the TIE Fighters

57:46SPEAKERto make "Star Wars," right?

57:47SPEAKERThose are just, you know, motion control cameras.

57:50SPEAKERThey did present this as like a next technological,

57:57SPEAKERlike, the next leap.

57:59SPEAKERYou know, "Star Wars" always presents technological leaps.

58:02SPEAKERAnd then they were presenting this as this is the,

58:05SPEAKERthis is the next big one.

58:06SPEAKER- Yeah, like, some of that is, well,

58:08SPEAKERall of it is very well-deserved, I should say.

58:10SPEAKERBut I did start to say some of that

58:12SPEAKERis a little marketing-driven, I feel like.

58:13SPEAKERLike, it's good for the "Star Wars" brand

58:15SPEAKERfor them to say every, like, every 20 years

58:18SPEAKERthey have pushed film forward again.

58:19SPEAKERBut like, but that did-

58:20SPEAKER- I think that's fair.

58:21SPEAKER- Yeah, like I said, it is deserved.

58:23SPEAKERBut it did occur to me watching this.

58:24SPEAKERI was like, I was like, okay, this is kind of,

58:26SPEAKERthis is the motion control of this era, right?

58:29SPEAKER- Yeah, like, if you look at this-

58:29SPEAKER- Like, they developed that for the original "Star Wars"

58:31SPEAKERand then, like, digital sets and digital characters

58:34SPEAKERwas the thing for the prequels, and now there's this-

58:36SPEAKER- Well, and digital shooting.

58:38SPEAKERLike, they didn't shoot, you know, they shot those movies.

58:41SPEAKERI don't think they shot "Phantom Menace" on-

58:43SPEAKER- "Phantom Menace" was shot on 35 millimeter, but-

58:45SPEAKER- Yeah, it was on film.

58:46SPEAKERBut the other two were shot digitally.

58:48SPEAKER- "Attack of the Clones" was shot at 1080p,

58:49SPEAKERif you can believe it.

58:51SPEAKER- I mean, that isn't surprising.

58:52SPEAKER- 'Cause they were on, like, a prototype version

58:54SPEAKERof whatever Sony camera they used for that thing.

58:56SPEAKERLiterally, the source stock footage for that movie is 1080p.

59:02SPEAKER- I mean, look, it's fine.

59:03SPEAKERWe don't ever have to see that again,

59:04SPEAKERso we can just move on.

59:05SPEAKERThe sand gets everywhere, Brad.

59:06SPEAKER- That's true.

59:08SPEAKER- But, so the upshot on "The Mandalorian"

59:11SPEAKERis that they did manage to get a really cinematic feel

59:15SPEAKERon what seems like a pretty standard TV production timeline.

59:19SPEAKERLike, it feels, each of those episodes,

59:21SPEAKERthey're, like, an hour long,

59:22SPEAKERand each one feels like a little movie that you're watching

59:26SPEAKERthat just is set in, like, this weird offshoot corner

59:30SPEAKERof "Star Wars" that is, for me,

59:33SPEAKERthe most interesting thing I've seen in "Star Wars"

59:34SPEAKERsince probably "The Last Jedi."

59:35SPEAKER- Yeah, so, I was trying to think.

59:38SPEAKERI had a couple other quick questions.

59:39SPEAKERI don't think they put any info out about this,

59:41SPEAKERbut what do you think their little, kind of,

59:42SPEAKERreal-time render farm looks like in that situation?

59:46SPEAKER- I'm sure it's a shitload of GPUs

59:48SPEAKERand some, like, 64-core workstation.

59:50SPEAKER- Yeah, or even multiple workst--

59:52SPEAKERI don't know if that's--

59:53SPEAKER- Did they say what resolution it was?

59:55SPEAKERI mean, you can figure out from fill rates, probably.

59:56SPEAKER- That's the thing I would love to hear.

59:58SPEAKERI would love to see some stats on all that stuff.

1:00:00SPEAKER- The thing, I wanna go back and rewatch it,

1:00:02SPEAKER'cause I haven't watched it.

1:00:03SPEAKERMaybe we could do this as a patron benefit

1:00:05SPEAKERand do a six-months of rewatch of "Mandalorian,"

1:00:11SPEAKERtalk about each episode or something, but it's...

1:00:16SPEAKERI wanna know, like, I don't remember how much Boca

1:00:18SPEAKERand stuff they did on those background shots,

1:00:22SPEAKERand I'm curious if they did it in Unreal

1:00:24SPEAKERor if they did it in camera.

1:00:25SPEAKER- Sure, that's a shot, right.

1:00:28SPEAKEROr maybe they both could work in tandem.

1:00:30SPEAKERThat's an interesting point.

1:00:31SPEAKERI didn't even think about that.

1:00:32SPEAKERIt did make me wonder if, do you think there are

1:00:34SPEAKERsome kind of focus or depth of field limitations on this?

1:00:38SPEAKERYou can't focus in too tightly on those backgrounds

1:00:40SPEAKERwithout them starting to show the seams?

1:00:43SPEAKERI don't know.

1:00:44SPEAKER- I mean, I hope that one of these episodes

1:00:47SPEAKERof this gallery show ends up having the DP

1:00:51SPEAKERand the lighting people talking about how the tech works

1:00:55SPEAKERand how they work with the tech,

1:00:56SPEAKER'cause I feel like this is definitely a situation

1:00:59SPEAKERwith the motion control, with the digital actors,

1:01:00SPEAKERwhere they had to figure out entirely new ways

1:01:03SPEAKERof doing stuff that has been essentially unchanged

1:01:06SPEAKERsince clay glights went out of vogue in the '60s, right?

1:01:12SPEAKERSince we got kinos and floods and stuff that are bright

1:01:17SPEAKERwithout potentially burning down the sound stage,

1:01:21SPEAKERI'm very curious how they adapted to this new tech.

1:01:27SPEAKER- Yeah, that stuff would be fascinating to hear about.

1:01:28SPEAKERI don't know what it says about me that 90% of the time

1:01:30SPEAKERI would rather watch behind the scenes stuff like that

1:01:33SPEAKERthan the actual production.

1:01:35SPEAKER- I think that's, look, you like to know how stuff works.

1:01:37SPEAKER- Yes. - That's why we do

1:01:38SPEAKERthis podcast. - Absolutely.

1:01:39SPEAKER- We like to know how stuff works.

1:01:40SPEAKER- Absolutely, last question in that vein

1:01:42SPEAKERabout this thing real quick.

1:01:44SPEAKERDo you think they are recording the lighting data,

1:01:46SPEAKERlike the ambient lighting data from specific shots,

1:01:49SPEAKERlike the shots that end up in the final product,

1:01:51SPEAKERso they can use that lighting data on the CG

1:01:55SPEAKERthat does get produced in post-production?

1:01:57SPEAKER- Yeah, that happens in every,

1:01:59SPEAKERanytime that there's gonna be CG in a shot, they do that.

1:02:01SPEAKER- Right, but what I mean is now they're doing it

1:02:03SPEAKERprogrammatically instead of with physical lights,

1:02:07SPEAKERthey're telling Unreal Engine what to do.

1:02:09SPEAKER- Well, but they still have to light the characters, right?

1:02:14SPEAKER- Yeah, but a lot of that lighting is coming

1:02:17SPEAKERfrom the screens at this point, or some of it is,

1:02:19SPEAKERlike some of the lighting that gives a lot of character

1:02:21SPEAKERin terms of colorization, right?

1:02:23SPEAKER- So the backlighting is, the stuff that's coming

1:02:26SPEAKERfrom the scene is, but undoubtedly,

1:02:29SPEAKERthey have a really dynamic set of lights

1:02:31SPEAKERthat they can probably control on the fly

1:02:34SPEAKERand maybe even programmatically.

1:02:36SPEAKER'Cause like, it's not just the scene,

1:02:38SPEAKERit's not just the scene backdrops,

1:02:39SPEAKERit's not just like the landscapes and stuff.

1:02:42SPEAKERThey literally shot the space fight scenes,

1:02:44SPEAKERlike with the cockpit shots in front of this thing, right?

1:02:48SPEAKERThey're using it for all sorts of stuff

1:02:49SPEAKERin all kinds of days, times of day and night,

1:02:52SPEAKERand it's really fascinating.

1:02:54SPEAKERNow, the weird thing is, with this,

1:02:58SPEAKERif you wanna, if like you're on the set

1:03:00SPEAKERand you wanna change the way a building looks or something,

1:03:03SPEAKERyou have to actually have the digital artists there

1:03:05SPEAKERand ready to go.

1:03:06SPEAKER- Right.

1:03:07SPEAKER- Presumably the ones who worked on it.

1:03:09SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:03:10SPEAKER- Because it's not like they can do it in post now, right?

1:03:14SPEAKER- Right, it's like, hey, could you break a few

1:03:15SPEAKERof these windows out for me for the next shot?

1:03:17SPEAKER- Yeah, or hey, we wanted to have the door

1:03:20SPEAKERon the other side of this building,

1:03:21SPEAKERso it would be facing this way,

1:03:22SPEAKERor can you rotate the build, like it's easy

1:03:25SPEAKERto pick up the building and rotate it 90 degrees

1:03:27SPEAKERand put it back down.

1:03:28SPEAKERIt's not easy to tear out the door

1:03:30SPEAKERand put another door in its place or something like that.

1:03:32SPEAKER- Right, right.

1:03:35SPEAKER- So yeah, and like if there's a physical,

1:03:38SPEAKERlike if it's a situation where they're building

1:03:39SPEAKERa physical building for like the characters to walk in

1:03:43SPEAKERand then still have the scenery in the background

1:03:45SPEAKERshowing through the screen in the background

1:03:46SPEAKERshowing through the windows,

1:03:48SPEAKERthen that's a whole other challenge as well.

1:03:52SPEAKER- It's fascinating.

1:03:53SPEAKERI will watch everything that people make about this.

1:03:55SPEAKERI wanna find that Cinefix article,

1:03:58SPEAKERwhich is almost certainly paywalled.

1:04:01SPEAKERBut yeah, this is magical.

1:04:04SPEAKER- Totally, a lot of interesting stuff happening

1:04:06SPEAKERin real-time computer graphics these days.

1:04:08SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:04:09SPEAKER- Also, I have this hunch that if Epic ever stops having

1:04:12SPEAKERthe biggest video game in the world,

1:04:14SPEAKERthey're probably still gonna be okay,

1:04:16SPEAKER'cause this Unreal Engine thing seems to be going places.

1:04:19SPEAKER- It turns out I never in a million years when I played

1:04:23SPEAKERthe first Unreal would have thought,

1:04:25SPEAKERoh, at some point I'm gonna watch a Star Wars

1:04:26SPEAKERthat they made almost like a significant portion

1:04:29SPEAKERof it in this engine.

1:04:29SPEAKER- Don't even open that can of worms

1:04:31SPEAKERbecause I was extremely on the Quake side of that debate

1:04:35SPEAKERback in the day.

1:04:36SPEAKER- Me too.

1:04:37SPEAKER- When it came down to engines,

1:04:38SPEAKERI preferred playing shooters in.

1:04:42SPEAKERSo I think things who have turned out this way

1:04:44SPEAKERis pretty surprising in retrospect.

1:04:46SPEAKER- There you go, there you go.

1:04:48SPEAKERI think that's as good a place as any to wrap it up.

1:04:50SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:04:51SPEAKER- As always, we would like to thank all of our patrons

1:04:55SPEAKERwho support the show every week.

1:04:56SPEAKERThere are--

1:04:57SPEAKER- Thank you so much.

1:04:58SPEAKER- I think there are more than 500 now,

1:05:00SPEAKER567 patrons right now.

1:05:02SPEAKERSo thank you all.

1:05:02SPEAKER- Thank you, yeah.

1:05:04SPEAKER- Yeah, we really appreciate your contributions.

1:05:07SPEAKERAnd a special thank you to our executive producer patrons,

1:05:12SPEAKERDavid Allen, Andrew Cotton and Jacob Chappell.

1:05:15SPEAKERThank you guys so much.

1:05:16SPEAKER- Yes.

1:05:17SPEAKER- Hey, we've had...

1:05:19SPEAKEROkay, so patron Discord time.

1:05:23SPEAKER- Oh boy.

1:05:26SPEAKER- I worked on Home Assistant this week.

1:05:28SPEAKERThat was my project for the week.

1:05:29SPEAKER- Okay, yes, I saw that one.

1:05:30SPEAKERYou sounded like you were having a real good time with that.

1:05:33SPEAKER- So normally my approach for that kind of project,

1:05:40SPEAKERlike I'm doing something that's complicated,

1:05:42SPEAKERI usually take the hard part,

1:05:44SPEAKERthe hardest thing that I have to have

1:05:46SPEAKERfor me to be able to use it and start with that

1:05:49SPEAKERand then go progressively easier.

1:05:51SPEAKERMight've been a mistake this time,

1:05:53SPEAKERbut I can't get Siri to work with.

1:05:55SPEAKERI can't get it to connect to Siri at all,

1:05:57SPEAKERto the HomeKit stuff.

1:05:58SPEAKERSo it won't, like HomeKit won't work.

1:06:02SPEAKERHomeKit won't connect to Home Assistant,

1:06:03SPEAKERwhich means I can't use Siri to control lights.

1:06:06SPEAKERAnd if I can't use Siri to control lights,

1:06:07SPEAKERI'm out on Home Assistant entirely.

1:06:10SPEAKER- What you're saying is it requires an incredible amount

1:06:13SPEAKERof manual labor in order to automate.

1:06:16SPEAKER- I think what I'm going to do,

1:06:19SPEAKERI think what I'm going to do is put it on a Raspberry Pi

1:06:22SPEAKERto see if it's the FreeNAS/BSD implementation.

1:06:24SPEAKER- Oh my God, don't even get me started.

1:06:26SPEAKERThat is a whole episode and it's so...

1:06:29SPEAKER- Some BSD, like it could be the way BSD

1:06:31SPEAKERis Vnetting the jail that Home Assistant lives in.

1:06:35SPEAKER- Well, that could probably be worked around.

1:06:37SPEAKER- Yeah, like, but the problem is right now-

1:06:40SPEAKER- That's just a platform idiosyncrasy.

1:06:41SPEAKER- Well, but Apple doesn't give it,

1:06:44SPEAKERApple's error messages are garbage as well established.

1:06:47SPEAKER- Sure.

1:06:47SPEAKER- The Home Assistant error message is not,

1:06:53SPEAKERit's just failing quietly no matter what debug setting

1:06:56SPEAKERI put it on.

1:06:57SPEAKER- It's always a good time.

1:06:58SPEAKER- Yeah, so like, I don't know what the hell I'm gonna do,

1:07:00SPEAKERbut the Discord has been incredibly helpful.

1:07:03SPEAKERSo thanks to everybody in the Discord,

1:07:04SPEAKERthey answered questions.

1:07:06SPEAKERYou guys had a fascinating question yesterday or today.

1:07:09SPEAKERI've got a conversation about,

1:07:12SPEAKERwell, you talked about the Unreal Engine stuff.

1:07:14SPEAKERThere's so many.

1:07:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, your programming chat

1:07:17SPEAKERhas been really, really interesting.

1:07:19SPEAKERI think people are trying to get you to start programming.

1:07:21SPEAKER- I'm pretty close, honestly, I've been doing enough,

1:07:23SPEAKERI've been doing enough PowerShell

1:07:25SPEAKERand now getting into some Bash scripting that like,

1:07:27SPEAKERit's not, it's pretty, it's kind of a top skip

1:07:29SPEAKERand jump away from there, right?

1:07:31SPEAKER- Do you have a GitHub account yet?

1:07:32SPEAKER- I might, yeah, I've got like three.

1:07:35SPEAKER- Have you pushed?

1:07:36SPEAKER- No, I have not forked anything yet.

1:07:38SPEAKER- You haven't made a new branch off master.

1:07:40SPEAKER- I will say, well, I shouldn't get into this.

1:07:42SPEAKERI have an idea, basically, I've been thinking for a while.

1:07:46SPEAKERIn fact, you know, I fed that question to Fitz

1:07:48SPEAKERthrough you last week about like,

1:07:49SPEAKERhey, what about a middle aged dude

1:07:52SPEAKERwho's kind of interested in coding a little bit?

1:07:54SPEAKERI have a need.

1:07:56SPEAKER- Yeah, I have identified your world.

1:07:58SPEAKER- I have identified a need in my daily workflow.

1:08:01SPEAKERI'm like, you know what, I wish I could do X.

1:08:04SPEAKERAnd I looked around and I was like,

1:08:05SPEAKERI can't find a good little thing

1:08:06SPEAKERthat just does X and nothing else.

1:08:09SPEAKER- This is where it begins.

1:08:09SPEAKER- What if I just made it?

1:08:11SPEAKERSo I'm not gonna say what it is

1:08:12SPEAKER'cause it's very likely beyond me,

1:08:14SPEAKERbut I'm gonna look into it.

1:08:16SPEAKER- You're never gonna know it's beyond you

1:08:17SPEAKERif you don't try it though.

1:08:18SPEAKER- I'm gonna look into it.

1:08:19SPEAKER- There you go, that sounds awesome.

1:08:21SPEAKER- We'll see where that goes.

1:08:21SPEAKERAnd yeah, people are incredibly,

1:08:23SPEAKERnot only insanely knowledgeable,

1:08:27SPEAKERlike there's like just an astonishing level

1:08:29SPEAKERof expertise on there,

1:08:30SPEAKERbut they're also just very gracious with their time

1:08:32SPEAKERand very helpful and friendly.

1:08:34SPEAKERWell, it's just been a super fun time.

1:08:36SPEAKER- It's been a really like supportive, incredible community.

1:08:40SPEAKERLike people are having a hard time with stuff.

1:08:43SPEAKERPeople come in and like, you know,

1:08:45SPEAKERgive them a light rah-rah and all that.

1:08:48SPEAKERIt's been really neat.

1:08:51SPEAKERLike I said, I say this every week,

1:08:52SPEAKERbut I learned something almost every day in the Discord.

1:08:54SPEAKER- Absolutely.

1:08:55SPEAKER- And you can get access by subscribing to the Patreon

1:08:58SPEAKERby going to patreon.com/techpod.

1:09:02SPEAKERAnd that'll do it, I guess.

1:09:04SPEAKERI'm glad your nose is doing better, Brad.

1:09:06SPEAKER- It's getting there.

1:09:07SPEAKER- You sound much better than you did last week

1:09:08SPEAKERwhen I talked to you before the fifth show.

1:09:10SPEAKER- Yes, that was, well, I still had gauze strapped to my face

1:09:13SPEAKERat that point, so I'm definitely doing better.

1:09:16SPEAKER- I think Fitz is on to come back.

1:09:18SPEAKERI don't think any of us expected

1:09:21SPEAKERthe source management conversation

1:09:23SPEAKERto be the thing that the Patreon went hog on.

1:09:27SPEAKER- You know what, there are a lot of Git users

1:09:29SPEAKERin software development these days.

1:09:30SPEAKERAnd so when there are strong opinions about Git,

1:09:33SPEAKERI'm not surprised that some people

1:09:34SPEAKERend up agreeing with them.

1:09:36SPEAKER- Yeah, we'll have to have somebody come in

1:09:37SPEAKERand talk about Emacs and VI next time.

1:09:40SPEAKER- I literally had the Emacs and VI conversation

1:09:43SPEAKERwith Vinny about three hours

1:09:44SPEAKERbefore we recorded this podcast.

1:09:46SPEAKER- Look, the answer is nano.

1:09:47SPEAKERJust load it.

1:09:48SPEAKER- That's exactly what I told him.

1:09:49SPEAKER- Package install nano.

1:09:50SPEAKER- You know what, here's how great

1:09:51SPEAKERand how gracious that Discord is,

1:09:53SPEAKERis that I went on there the other day

1:09:54SPEAKERbecause they were also having this conversation

1:09:56SPEAKERand I expressed my insecurity about mostly using nano.

1:09:59SPEAKERAnd somebody was like, "You know what?

1:10:00SPEAKEREditor shaming is bullshit, just use what you like."

1:10:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, and--

1:10:04SPEAKER- I was like, "Okay, sure."

1:10:05SPEAKER- Well, and like, yeah, VI and Emacs are for programmers.

1:10:09SPEAKERNano is for people who need to edit console files

1:10:11SPEAKERis the way I look at it.

1:10:12SPEAKER- Pretty much.

1:10:13SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:10:14SPEAKERSee you next week, dude.

1:10:15SPEAKER- All right, thanks for having me.

1:10:16SPEAKER- Bye everybody, thanks for listening.

1:10:17SPEAKER(upbeat music)

1:10:39SPEAKER(upbeat music)