Dreams : create, share & play [PS4, PS5]

After 2 days:

Amazon.fr -> Currently unavailable.
Amazon.co.uk -> Temporarily out of stock.
Amazon.com -> Usually ships within 1 to 4 weeks.

So much confidence on display. :nope:
 
Not that convinced with that "How does Dreams work" video. Have they spoken with MM? It sounds like the DF explanation was going from the original SDF talk from the reveal. Saying they don't use triangles is no longer true as these were added with the engine rewrite. The mention of dithering coming from splats is also not true.

I was hoping they had spoken with MM and got an engine investigation, because the volume representation is very interesting but they really just glossed over that with some shonky graphics. Modelling is truly bizarre - the other day I wanted to shape a sphere to make it more pointed, and this was best achieved by putting large 'subtraction' geometry miles away and having a high blend. You're basically working with forces rather than volumes, with a force threshold evaluating to a degree of visibility. Splats will vary size and density by force, while the boundary of opaque shapes will be via threshold. Understanding how that force works would be good insight to best modelling practice, which I guess will be the next MM tech talk when we actually get to learn how Dreams works. ;)
 
Isn’t it known now that Dreams has two rendering engines, one using splats and one using tris?
 
splats are what they call flecks in Dreams? I thought everything is from flecks, even skydome (which is somewhat annoying), where they use polygons?
 
Polygons draw the solid objects (looseness at 0%) while flecks are added for the artsyness. The flecks are 'splats' from the earlier talk.

There are always flecks, I've just checked. When the surface is smooth and solid, if you zoom in you'll still see tiny patterns. These have a lot of temporal noise, so I'm guessing the splat drawing is performed over time with random sampling. And it's flecks viewed side on that have the dithering, mostly. On the edge of objects, if you're looking practically parallel along the surface, the flecks are presented thin-side towards you and are prone to this dithering noise. flat on, I don't see so much noise. The motion blur in Dreams can be a bit much at times. This can be set in the camera settings, and by default it's high (though I don't know on what scale), but I think temporal artefacts from fleck drawing might also be to blame. I'll pay attention next time I'm in.
 
Polygons draw the solid objects (looseness at 0%)
I'm not so sure about that... In a stream not long ago one of the devs talked a bit about this but I don't quite remember everything... IIRC, models have a hull made out of flecks (bigger or smaller, depending on the detail), and there was an inner part, which was the SDF. Or something like that.
 
You'll have to ask Chris1515 for a link. I can't find it, but it was in an video interview IIRC and I recall seeing/hearing it. When they were talking about version two of the engine.
 
Thankfully in the general preferences (applicable in all dreams) they have added sliders to some annoying post process effects with notably:

- Camera shacking
- Motion blur (here the default setting and inevitably used in most creations was crazy high as already stated by Shifty. Those madmen at MM).

It's possible you can thank me for the latter as I (politely) asked them exactly that during the Beta. :yes:
 
You'll have to ask Chris1515 for a link. I can't find it, but it was in an video interview IIRC and I recall seeing/hearing it. When they were talking about version two of the engine.
Relatively recent video. Minute 17:00, approx. Voxels (more or less, depending on detail). Hull sculpt + voxels when you're closer. Later, he mentions how they stopped using sphere tracing but got it back, because otherwise the sculpts would have tiny "holes", so they use the sphere traced stuff for the innards of the sculpt. Interesting bits regarding this at 38:00, as well. Also, at 42:00 they explain lighting.

The second part video is quite informative, too.
 
A very interesting aspect of that incredible tool is that they will be able to optimize their engine (notably the performance on each hardware, PS4, Pro and PS5) and all existing dreams will immediately benefit from the improvements.
 
As I understand it, the splats are visually interesting, but aren't enough to create solid surfaces without see-through holes, so they also render a polygon aproximation of the sdf generated through a marching-cube like algo, and I guess they then do finer raytracing of the sdf in the pixel shader of those polys.
Sounds messy as hell.
 
There is a lot of good stuff out there now, but I liked this one too for having game creation elements in it.

 
That's a good example of the limited lighting model (lots of missing shadows) that can't cope, and how RT in PS5 should fix that and very for a very solid looking world.
 
That's a good example of the limited lighting model (lots of missing shadows) that can't cope, and how RT in PS5 should fix that and very for a very solid looking world.
Yes and no?

Yes, the lighting model in Dreams has its limitations (the lack of proper shadows in a distance from the camera is quite noticeable to me, I always spot it right away).

However, in this case the lack of many shadows is because the action takes place in shadowed areas and also it seems that there's an issue with the light chosen by the creator (maybe?), since I've definitely seen sharper shadows in similar environments. Shadows look different if you use the sunlight vs a manually placed light. I've checked this on my own when I tried to light a room (I've barely touched Dreams, TBH, but this is one of the few things I've experimented with) and the difference in the shadows looks massive. Sometimes the shadows "are there", it's just the resolution is so low and the shadow is so blurred that you can't really see it.
 
Sometimes the shadows "are there", it's just the resolution is so low and the shadow is so blurred that you can't really see it.
If they arn't visibly correct, they ain't working right. ;)

upload_2020-2-18_11-49-39.png

Complete lack of shadows (AO) there. Similar to LBP, when the lights are used at their best, the engine looks incredible, but it's clearly wrestling with technical limits and shows how much improvement in tech (hardware and software) we still have to go.

If I were to hazard a guess, the enclosed space of the room is blocking out the spherical lighting of the sky which possibly contributes a large part to the better-lit scenes.

Note : When I said 'limited', I didn't mean in relation to other games but real life and CGI and the end-game for realtime graphics. Dreams is fascinating in making compromises in differently places to traditional engines and getting different results.
 
Back
Top