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Alex Evans at Umbra Ignite 2015: Learning From Failure

Media Molecule

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  • Recommended by 7 people: 7 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2017 to 2026.
  • Presented by Alex Evans
  • May be out of date. Uploaded 11 years ago, in an area where tools change fast.

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

67K views11 years ago7 recommendations

Graphics and audioGame developmentRenderingBuilding a game engineUnity, Unreal and Godot

Alex Evans recounts the technical journey and failures of developing the unique signed-distance-field and splat-based renderer for the game Dreams.

Alex went to Helsinki recently and presented his Siggraph 2015 talk to the good folks there. Listen as Alex discusses the journey - including the failures - of 'finding' the Dreams engine. Read more: mediamolecule.com/blog/article/siggraph_2015 Find out more about Dreams at: dreams.mediamolecule.com Follow us on twitter: twitter.com/mediamolecule

Why it's here

7 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as an inspiring and deeply technical talk on innovative rendering techniques and engine development.

stephomion Hacker News • Recommends

On “A 3D sculpting web application”

(dev behind sculptgl, but I didn't make the HN story) Nice project! sculptgl is based on polygons (tris/quads only, and using webgl for rendering). As for the other project it was just as a quick and dirty experiments :). link link On Unity there is Clayxel and more recently Mudbun, both based on implicit surfaces. And obviously, the Dreams presentation which is an inspirational must see link to this video
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Impossibleon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Making WebGL Dance: How, Where, and What to Draw (2013)”

…ene 2015 ( link ). Definitely check out all of these resources. If you're more interested in signed distance fields outside of the shadertoy\demo scene use cases there are a lot of interesting resources out there written by people using them in more complex contexts. Alex Evans (Media Molecule) Dreams talk is awesome. You can see the talk here ( link to this video ) and read the slides here ( link ). link covers how to generate meshes. With modern hardware with ballot\shuffle there are probably more efficient ways to do this in a compute shader now, but the talk is still good. Epic games siggraph presentation ( link ) is a good explanation of how UE4 uses signed distance fields for ambient occl…
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Mr_Pon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: What is your favourite tech talk?”

Alex Evan's talk on developing the renderer for Dreams: He's given several versions of this talk (including the Advancements in Real-time Rendering course at Siggraph), but here's one available online: link to this video
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veli_jozaon Hacker News • Recommends

On “How Voxels Became ‘The Next Big Thing’”

…led world generation) but it's then serialized (sampled) as data with specific voxel size, that you can easily manipulate. Edit: another, IMO far more impressive approach is Media Molecules' upcoming Dreams software that uses constructive solid geometry and sparse distance fields to describe and manipulate 3d geometry. Here's a detailed tech talk: link to this video…
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jmiskovicon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Metaballs and Marching Squares”

…latest technical marvel that uses this tech is Media Molecules Dreams. With SDFs they made rich modelling tools (constructive solid geometry) that produce geometry for physics and painting-style renderer, all running on PS4. The Learning From Failure talk 2 was quite inspiring on lengths they went to achieve their artistic goals. 1 link 2 link to this video…
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rsp1984on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Raymarching Distance Fields (2008-2020 compilation)”

I was actually looking for some resources on this but couldn't find much. Do you have any pointers? I saw Alex Evan's excellent talk from 5 years ago 1, which sparked my interest. 1 link to this video
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turtledragonflyon Hacker News • Recommends

On “I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]”

The Dreams team made a nice talk at SIGGRAPH 2015, if you want to check it out: * Slides (good notes): link * video: link to this video
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haxiomicon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Neural Geometric Level of Detail: Real-Time Rendering with Implicit 3D Surfaces”

Does anyone have an impression of how it compares to Alex Evan's SDF engine0 used in Dreams? Is it primarily a space compression? I've been looking out for anything outside of media molecule that can come close to it's detail-representation and performance A big part of the secret sauce there seems to be what he called a Compute Shader of Doom used to optimize the brush strokes into the SDF - I'd love to know that shader works! 0 link to this video
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dwallinon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Trilinear point splatting for real-time radiance field rendering”

…e have largely been built FOR games and leveraged elsewhere. Rebuilding the rendering stack around an entirely new technology is a tall order that will take a long time to pay off. That being said, the technology is promising in a number of ways. You even have games like Dreams (2020), which was built using custom splat rendering to great effect ( link to this video ).…
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woctordhoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing”

There're already games fully using SDF rendering, such as Dreams 0. It even made a SIGGRAPH talk 1. 0 link 1 link to this video
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pixelpoeton Hacker News • Mentions

On “AMD and Sony's PS6 chipset aims to rethink the current graphics pipeline”

…rasterisation has enjoyed for decades, it's going to be possible for much smaller teams to deliver realistic and creative (see e.g. Dreams0) visuals with far less engineering effort. Some nice recent examples of this are Teardown1 and Tiny Glade2. It's even more inevitable from today's point of view than it was back in the 90s :) 0 Dreams: link to this video 1 Teardown: link 2 Tiny Glade: link…
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