‘Fortnite’ maker Epic Games kicked off its Unreal Fest event on Tuesday with the debut of Unreal Engine 5.5 and previews for new features of the wildly popular video game building tool. Unreal Engine is used to produce not only AAA game titles, but also big-budget VFX-heavy shows like “The Mandalorian” and Tim Miller’s upcoming Amazon animated video game-focused anthology TV series “Secret Level.” Unreal Engine is Epic’s pride and joy, and the service is adding more features to make it an attractive production tool for Hollywood.
Top of mind for Epic today was Unreal’s new experimental ‘MegaLights’, which lets you use “orders of magnitude more lights than ever before – all movable, dynamic, with realistic area shadows and the ability to illuminate volumetric fog.”
“When I started at Epic 10 and a half years ago, there was a big void between how you would create content for a game versus a movie,” said Kim Libreri, chief technology officer of Epic Games (the VFX company). mastermind behind ‘The Matrix’ franchise) narrated Variety in an interview after Epic’s presentation from Seattle. “Films usually don’t worry so much about polygon budgets or triangle budgets or texture budgets or lighting budgets, because as long as your pixel is rendered the morning after, people were used to that. It was fine. And when people wanted to use real-time technology, where they could see the results right before their eyes and make changes, the problem used to be that you had to work with a lot of limitations. The resolution of the actual meshes, the surfaces of the objects had to be low, the amount of light – you could put three or four lights in a scene, and that was it. With MegaLights you can literally stage 1,000 lights. You don’t have to worry about it. Unreal Engine does all the calculations and you get a beautiful looking image.”
Libreri brought directors Miller (“Deadpool,” “Love, Death + Robots”) and Wes Ball (“Maze Runner,” “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”) onstage during the Unreal Fest panel to talk about their early adoption of Unreal Engine in filmmaking. Miller explained how he used the tool for his new Amazon series, “Secret Level,” which features famous video game IP in all episodes and was created using some of that game’s actual builds in Unreal Engine.
Miller praised the benefits of Unreal’s new technology Varietysaying, “If I had to say it in shorthand for Hollywood people, I would say this, the saying every director knows: you make your movie in preparation. And the tools they add to Unreal so you can preview your movie, watch entire scenes, build entire sequences of scenes at a high-quality level – because the whole team sees everything. Everyone thinks: we just watch it and everyone does their thing. But in fact, the previs becomes a blueprint for the film in a way that people can always refer to it, and always refer to it, almost like gospel. So the better Previs looks, the more thought out the scene is, the better everyone can continue their work to reach the live-action world. So the fact that Unreal gives you these tools, and it looks good, gets people excited about the shooting sequence, or whatever you’re doing.
Elsewhere during the Unreal presentation, Epic unveiled a partnership with Paramount to bring its “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” universe to Epic’s “Fortnite” and allow players to build their own games with the IP using Unreal Editor for Fortnite.
“On the UEFN side, the fact that Paramount is allowing people to take a famous movie IP and have experiences now is quite interesting. It is the beginning of IPs going to all destinations and actually being part of a community,” Libreri said.
Epic’s UEFN chief Saxs Persson has laid out the goals for how this intersection between Hollywood and Unreal – which isn’t about making movies or TV shows, but gives consumers the ability to experience their content in games on their own terms – will improve the will affect larger creator economies.
“Similar to photorealistic, real-time for everyone on Unreal Engine, we’re trying to expand what it means to be a creator, and then what tools you have access to,” Persson said. “There’s no reason why when you’re just out of school, like you’re just sitting there working on Unreal, you should be able to make something that looks just as good and just as impactful. But the other side of the coin is that the inspiration you get from IP is undeniable. People love to make fan creations. And the partnership with Paramount is all about giving access to ‘Turtles,’ giving access to make the game. You want to create and publish a ‘Turtles’ game, and have people play it and enjoy commercial success – that whole thing, with a one-click agreement, being available to anyone who’s a creator in ‘Fortnite’ is transformative about how we should think about fan creations and how to get acquainted with new IP.
When it comes to keeping IP alive and continuing to evolve in new ways, Miller’s ‘Secret Level’ is a special case for one title in particular: Sony’s ‘Concord,’ a short-lived PlayStation Live Services game that was recently discontinued shortly after release. launched due to poor sales. The only remaining new content tied to the game that fans will see is what’s in Miller’s series when it drops on Amazon’s Prime Video on December 10.
“I hope people see something about the game that sparks some renewed interest because the team were really good people to work with and we had a lot of fun,” Miller said. “It’s funny because people wonder, why are they putting that in there? And I would say, we started this three years ago and the team has been great. And at that time they didn’t have that – especially the games that are new, that haven’t been released yet, and there are a few [other than ‘Concord’]– we start before them, and sometimes they take our models and use them in the game.
While Unreal Engine 5.5 is just out in previews, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney already teased plans for Unreal 6 during the company’s presentation on Tuesday. And with even more on the horizon, Miller has high hopes for what the Epic team can implement that will bridge the gap between the Hollywood and gaming VFX communities in the future.
“We’re pretty comparable to a lot of the tools you can get with non-real-time rendering, if we’re just talking about visual effects and animation,” Miller said. “I think maybe we need something more, another level of iteration, another level of reality, to be able to integrate the unreal content, digital people, whatever, with live action. There are still small ways to go. And as much as I want to say we’re on the other side of the uncanny valley, we’re not. I would say we are on the slopes of the other side and climbing up, but we are not over it yet. So any tools that we can continue to develop that bridge the gap between digital and human, so that people’s brains don’t say something is wrong, the better.”