Alex Evans at Umbra Ignite 2015: Learning From Failure

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.
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[@rockleesmile]

You guys are actually geniuses in artistry, programming skill and perseverance.

[@ThaRemo]

I keep coming back to this talk every now and then to get inspired. I was so blown away the first time I came across it a few years ago. I've gained some experience in related techniques but this stuff is still out of my reach, I hope to get there one day!

[@monkeyrobotsinc.9875]

I was inspired by how he kept saying f*ck and sh!t.

[@TheACDrummer]

Wow.. just... Wow.. I've always been amazed by Mm's artistry but.. I didn't know you guys where so good on the techy side of things!! I love all this stuff! I'm waiting on a studio to dig in all this untapped potential since like.. FOR EVER!! Didn't expect to find it in Mm!! I'm so glad to see the work you are doing! I'm supporting you guys till the end of the line!!

[@gracefulPainter]

Utterly incredible. I'd buy a PS4 just for this.

[@kapilbusawah7169]

Then buy one . Game's going to be released soon so best prep yourself how to use the console now

[@MikeCampo]

2 years later... :P

[@MikeCampo]

Vercusgames that's neat. Can you please share the names of some open source projects using this tech? Thanks

[@PayneSculptures]

Did the splat engine + Distance fields go open source? I'd love to try this on a PC in VR. I"m so sad this game still hasn't come out.

[@jzilla1234]

@@MikeCampo I'm in the beta here to find out how the fuck this magic works behind the scenes.

[@SuperemeRed]

Some of the stuff I've seen coming out of Dreams is mindbogglingly awesome. This engine is a true work of art.

[@sologiochigrandiosi]

I love how these guys keep their works so creative and colorful, Media Molecule keep up the great work!

[@Storm23PS3]

This man is smart...like...really smart. Can't wait to play this game =)

[@monkeyrobotsinc.9875]

Yeah he's got a big head. that's kewl.

[@TheOli123440]

Really interesting stuff! This game is going to be revolutionary.... both from a technical and conceptual standpoint. I cannot wait for the game to release! :D

[@NotAlwaysWhatYouExpect]

Awesome video! I don't understand a lot of what's being discussed, but I got the gist of it. Amazing work, everyone. Media Molecule is my favorite game studio.

[@subtenk0]

This was awesome to view. Thanks for sharing Media Molecule!

[@JoshMarshain]

Were almost there Alex, finally

[@javkattavkjr.3601]

Threw up in school so Im home early, SO glad I caught this!!!

[@nokbient]

+Eli Smith Ahhhh, school. Here's hoping you threw up on the annoying kid.

[@nokbient]

+Eli Smith Ahhhh, school. Here's hoping you threw up on the annoying kid.

[@javkattavkjr.3601]

nokbient Sophomore year just started, and no, but I almost threw up on my exgirlfriend who the teacher made me sit next to for the rest of the year

[@jzilla1234]

Sony really struck gold with media molecule

[@sensemusicofficial]

brilliant alex :) i love to see the human side of the creation of dreams.. i think it really shows when you actually use it too to be creative.. that was my experience

[@jeremybot]

That talk was like a time-warp. Before I realized it, the 30 minutes were up. Nice work. So much glorious/gorgeous stuff shared.

[@Thomason1005]

oh wow, each of these approaches is awesomely crazy new. i will look ata afew of these mentioned papers! and i am amazed about the final solution. what a thing! gotta try this! id love to test around with these engines!

[@elyas5]

that was truly inspirational. and you are very honest thank you for sharing.

[@TrinidadJamesWoods]

I wish I understood more of what he is talking about. Regardless, it's fascinating to listen to him describe the process.

[@mofunVR]

Wuuup so interesting! Nice to hear the demoscene roots of the speaker 😄

[@kanewaterworth3711]

Wow this explains stuff I had no clue about running around making things in Dreams and wondering why we have a whole big production pipeline in game dev.

[@Jotakyy]

Loved LBP and MM and now i will love dreams :)

[@Jack_Wolfe]

I just love seeing this crazy stuff.

[@williamcole960]

Goooood LORD. As if I didn't already recognize the creative genius of this game :0

[@dejayrezme8617]

Amazing technique and great talk. Looks absolutely stunning. Is anybody working on a renderer or engine like this for PC? This opens up so many creative avenues.

[@myname6300]

Let people built levels for PSVR with this engine, and let people be able to save and transfer save files to each other without forcing it to be saved on an online server. This way officially you will still host the good ones, but the private exchange save files can bypass censorship. If you force censor then nobody would want to spend time to make things on this for ever. On the contrary if you leave a back door for non censored files, word of mouth will spread on amazing or bizarre levels that can't be officially hosted. Ideally being able to exchange and save files to a thumb stick and to PS4. Which means people can host save files and organize them on their own. Leave an opening then this will boost content for PSVR for ever and ever.

[@spookadoota4075]

LittleBigPlanet did pretty well with censorship, and horror and shooters were posted there. I can't imagine their will be so much more than that that would make nobody ever create for the game.

[@WatashiwaToyotaHondadesudesu]

pretty kewl stuff

[@solo-ion3633]

Ever since I heard about the 'edit' system, I've wondered is there a way to optimise the edits? Say you've made a whole bunch of edits and some of them are no longer having an influence on the final result, or only having a very minimal influence. Can these redundant edits be cleared to free up resources?

[@AspartameBoy]

Fascinating!

[@paulofalca0]

So Awesome!

[@LieutenantAwesom3]

I'm hooked

[@corypalmer5495]

I’m still mad about this, Sony totally held Media Molecule back. Media Molecule should bring Alex back and make this into an actual game engine instead of a kids game. Like what is Sony even doing? And then Unreal Engine 5 totally rips off their work, which isn’t even as good as this, and they get praised for it. Yeah no, Mm needs to make this into a game engine to profit off of, just make it so game developers can create more realistic looking visuals instead of the more abstract approach if they want to. I would hate to see all this hard work go to waste, like absolutely not. I don’t even think Dreams should have been a game tbh. The story mode they made could have just served as a demo to showcase it. And what’s even crazier is that Disney plagiarized their story to make “Soul” smh like what is this clownery going on right now?!

[@lewisnorth1188]

Just curious, how did UE5 rip off Dreams? And also how was Art's dream even remotely similar to soul? Apart from the jazz setting

[@corypalmer5495]

@@lewisnorth1188 UE5 is just the splat engine with triangles.

[@lewisnorth1188]

@@corypalmer5495 in what way?

[@katanagirl1214]

Fascinating presentation, learning what the goal of the game was from the beginning and how you got there! The thing that has been holding me back from the game, though, is the "painterly" textures of the engine. I've been a fan of LittleBigPlanet, but that game tends to be "cartoonish" and I have a popit full of stickers and decorations of stuff I don't use. The thing I do like about LBP is the different materials. I'm not a real artist, but I like to create realistic scenes and that has always been a challenge in LBP. A dream is surrealistic, and that is what you are going for, but what if you want realism? Can your game engine be used to create realistic textures? When you do a sparse dot field like you have, there really isn't texture as I understand it. Your sculpting material is like smooth sticker panel. Could you add textures to it, or make it less fluffy? I've seen some of your videos where you paint the object, but painting the object with texture makes it look like old PS2 graphics where columns had dark stripes instead of indentations for the shape of the object and is not visually appealing. I hope you can answer those questions in future videos/live streams.

[@MediaMolecule]

+katanagirl1 Thanks for watching and for your comment! It's really important to us in Dreams that the creations of our community can really reflect the individual creativity of each player so not everything will look the same. Our Media Molecule style is quite painterly, but our tools will be really flexible to achieve all kinds of looks. Hopefully you've seen some of our live streams where we've shown quite a bit of character/environment variety so far :)

[@katanagirl1214]

Thanks for your reply! In LBP you enabled creators to make things that were beyond what I think you as developers had even envisioned! I'm glad to hear that will continue! I am not a true artist, but I hope I will be able to use your tools to create with Dreams! I'm eagerly awaiting the unveiling of your logic tools!

[@AspartameBoy]

katanagirl1 the great artists use oil to transcend reality.

[@RedSoakedSponge]

did he mention that this was going to be used with Playstation VR? it would feel like properly sculpting if you were wearing that. would be incredible!

[@nobillygreen]

+RedSoakedSponge nothing has been announced officially, but Alex was asked awhile back if it was going to be on Playstation VR (Project Morpheus at the time) and he said "[One of the lead developers for Playstation VR] is now on our team, so you do the math", which was a not so subtle way of saying YES, it will be on it.

[@RedSoakedSponge]

Noah Bilgrien thanks for the info man :)

[@chucktrier]

This is so inspiring. You made me wanna do a sign distance field renderer! Would you consider making your incredible modeling tool available in vr? I think the large scale modeling could bring something amazing to the table. If you don't I will write something like that myself. Thanks

[@MediaMolecule]

That's awesome to hear Peter thank you! We're definitely hoping to bring Dreams to VR in the future. We're so excited by the possibilities in VR, but for the moment we're concentrating on making the best experience we can for the PlayStation 4. Thanks for your support :)

[@mangahead1987]

*throws autodesk suite 2014 in bin* voxels you say.......

[@S0oo]

Gonna be fun when the PS5 comes out and he needs an engine for Dreams 2 :P

[@monkeyrobotsinc.9875]

How about update dreams 1 ram usage via a ps5 upgrade.

[@satellite964]

Wow.

[@watboutdekidsbro_2430]

big brains

[@kanewaterworth3711]

so they did all this stuff by 2 oct 2015. Why was the Beta so long? Is there a list of things after the Beta?

[@lewisnorth1188]

They talked about it in a livestream, basically there was an issue where you could see lights through the voxels that were supposed to be opaque, so they ended up combining the splats engine with the bricks engine and kind of getting the best of both. Also there was still most of the game/tools programming left to do, as well as other aspects of the engine

[@henri-fillipbauer6579]

this sounds like some kind of acid trip.

[@Scoobeh73]

I only know basic game design, a lot of this sounded like jibber jabber to me. But god damn, this was interesting.

[@fireburn95rs]

Sweeet!

[@Hanekoba]

I want it but... I'm not that creative...

[@Rhodochrone]

+Hanekoba Get it to play the stuff people make then

[@Hanekoba]

+Quinn Barnett Good point

[@stephanedubedat5538]

So much talent wasted on nothingness as Dream will not have a PC port and die in darkness

[@ASTERisk44946]

I know they said they were wanting a stylized fuzzy cloudy look but with how much time they spent tring that they couldve made polygons work no doubt with there geniuse and they could've made it for pc plus now with all the developments and things they've learned they could just release a dreams 2 but for some reason that I can and never will understand is this will never happen sadly and for that dreams will never be taken seriously. By other pro development teams which leads dreamshapers in the dust. I personally love dreams and develop on it alot but every time I try to get a real game dev to play my games they just say dreams isn't a game engine and call me a wannabe developer and I hate it when they say that but I also can't blame them for thinking that dreams is just another roblox game engine or mine craft engine none of them look past the flaws to see the greater picture and for that I'm sorry but I will be leaving dreams soon after My next 3 games which will be done by january of 2023 and if dreams ever comes to pc or gets a new mega update for ps5 then I won't be planning on coming back anytime soon

[@thomasduffy795]

u guys should have bleeped that bit when Alex said 'that f*cker on the screen' because u guys are a kid friendly type of channel just saying, no hate love you guys

[@natfailsyoutube8163]

Bleeping is literally censorship, sure you might know what he means (and the kids probably do too, especially if they are even remotely old enough to be interested in a talk like this), but then you've gone and removed the emotion and honesty from the words, and in it's place you've got this distracting almost comical tone that breaks the talk and not only do you still hear "fuck" or "fucker" but now it's called out - and everyone listening has to run through the thought process of your comment - for a moment we all get distracted and have to consider if that word was used appropriately (spoiler: I think it was) Let's be adults, we can use language like that when it is appropriate, because it just language and because it was appropriate for communicating the very understandable emotion of months of work not working out.

[@dreadthefeds]

Dirtydrags They're not strictly for children man, I doubt there are and kids too small to hear that who are interested and focused enough to watch this presentation on graphics to even get that far in the video.

[@chronokoks]

Why does he call polys, vertices and UV's bullshit?? Kind of smuggy considering the visual fidelity they were able to bring in the early days of low computational days, where even many voxel attempts looked as pixelated crap (Comanche anyone? Or even much later Outcast) or were unpractical for asset creation and etc - you just couldn't fiddle with voxel models containing hundreds of thousands of voxels due to memory limitations and etc.. sure procedural voxels could (early demos showing smooth procedural voxel terrain) get smooth but they were.. PROCEDURAL, not real and not so artist driven, not really editable directly.. wanna see why voxels always failed to stand as the primary 3d data storage and rendering method? Just zoom on the fucking model like a person would come close to an asset in a FPS game ...2d bitmap pixelated bullshit galore! Hard edged continuous poly-edges plus texture filtering to the rescue!

[@coole8]

He didn't say there were outright bad, he said that it's much harder to work with due to the way they work with the type of art styles they wanted to go for. The distance field stuff is much simpler for an artist to comprehend as it's not about pushing, pulling and extruding of vertices, edges and polygons; it's now about adding simple shapes together in sequence and blending them to make stuff. What he in particular was struggling with is marrying the ease of use the distance fields gave him when making stuff, with the abilities that polygons give you, the conversion of these distance field models to polygons is what he hated, because, frankly, it's immensely hard to turn distance fielded geometry into polygons (as he indicated through all the various bugs and failures the techniques he presented.) Thats my interpretation at least.