Content Creation is Getting Very UNREAL

Its now been over year since I wrote an article about Unreal detailing the start of my journey with this incredible program. I can proudly say now that this journey has led me to the path of becoming an educator of the software and I use it very often on live client projects.

I was beyond impressed when I first started but now with the actual release of UE5 now i'm absolutely speechless what is now at our fingertips. Real-time Photorealism is no longer a fanciful theory but an accessible global movement of digital creators pushing the limits of what we thought possible.

I figure its better to show rather than tell when it comes to ground-breaking art so I’ll present some examples of what everyday creators have been able to build since UE5’s release:

A solo developer named ‘Subjectn’ recently built this scarily realistic train station demo with enough grundgy realism to make your brain turn over in it’s skull. Watch it for yourself and try to go to sleep tonight knowing the future of VR horror games is very bright to say the least.

Last year a friendly creator by the name of RYSONE on youtube created one of my personal favourite cyberpunk inspired shorts using beautifully realistic robotics with a pulse-pounding soundscape. Watch it here

?In terms of the professionals who helped make Unreal what it is I can’t skip what the team at Quixel have done with their milestone project: ‘90 Days In Unreal’.

And unreal it is, with a strict deadline their small team managed to produce an enormous array of cinematic worlds and showcased their work in an inspiring compilation. Watch it here:

?If you are remotely into digital art or emerging tech and these examples don’t make you excited for what might come next then I’m not sure how else I could excite you!

The most wonderful part is that it's never been more accessible.

?Whether you are a graphic designer, 3D artist, architectural engineer, car specialist, or fashion designer Unreal caters for all creators and gives you a toolset to make your physical concept to an interactive marvel with ease.

The benefits for myself and for some of my students have been numerous. real-time rendering allows for quick iterations and art direction enabling you to see the final product in immediate fashion.

I’ve already seen the huge impact this had had on the entertainment industry in terms of virtual production workflows on sets such as Lion King and the Mandolorian. The ability to make live iterations on set with an LED screen has allowed these productions to save months of production time and costs that otherwise plague regular film production set ups.

However the greatest impact Unreal will have in the near future is involving the gradual adoption by cgi animation studios like Pixar and Dreamworks for animated feature films.

Not long ago the massive attention films such as the Incredibles and Shrek had recieved was due in part to the frightening amount of money and render time it took just to produce a few seconds of final animation. For example Toy Story 3 which only shipped out in 2010 took a staggering 1084 days of render time to render all the frames needed to complete the feature. 1,038,240 hrs or 117 years. Of course they had these frames render in parallel and used cutting-edge render farms.

Now just imagine how much faster and more smoother the workflow would be if you could eliminate those render times almost entirely? Along with far less computers working in overdrive for months at a time.

This is of course one goal in the long term vision of Epic Games with their engine. While incredibly impressive it is still at present an emerging technology that requires streamlining for a huge number of requirements needed for a full cgi feature film. For example: scenes which require dense simulations such as realistic tsunamis require massive amounts of computing power which is still in the domain of pre-rendering the sequence prior in a dedicated 3D package.

Hence big animation studios have certainly used Unreal as an addition to their pipeline but not yet rushing to replace all their existing software which has served them well for very complex tasks.

This is certainly not to say Unreal Engine won’t be able to achieve these monstrous tasks in the near future. In such examples as the Matrix Demo which dropped recently near indistinguishable from reality human characters is now a real-time reality. This was a task even just for non-realtime rendering 10 years ago might’ve costed millions and months of staff hours for a single character for a cg film.

Metahumans have since disrupted the whole pipeline and made it far easier to create characters for indie projects.

Similarly UE5’s nanite and Lumen solved two of the biggest headaches for anyone trying to create realistic scenes: fast beautiful and accurate lighting paired with the necessity to process high resolution geometry without exploding your CPU.

The way forward looks bright for future of content creation in general with these developments. Unreal Engine has since attracted the creative powers of musicians and streamers who can inexpensively visualize their sound and take their brand global without ever needing to leave the studio. The likes of Deadmau5 and many others have excitedly upskilled in 3D world building to take their creative visions and live performances to the next level. Even music video productions which suffer the same challenges film sets face with locking in physical locations have been eased with the flexibility of virtual production.

Of course these trends can’t ignore the obvious effect this has had on creating the?mass hysteria we now all know as the emerging Metaverse. Subsequently the eco-system around NFTs and the development of what might become Web 3 are correlated with the exciting possibilities Unreal has opened doors for. Infamously this excited a man by the name of Mark Zuckerberg to intensify his entire vision towards the increasingly virtualized development of Meta.

There is endless avenues I can tell you Unreal Engine has had an impact on well beyond the sphere of game development. However it's quite funny that I still have conversations with many tech-literate folk who aren’t even aware of what Unreal Engine even is, and that group includes many gamers who interact with the Engine daily.

This of course excites me more as we are still in the early days of this emerging technology and I’m open to every discussion on how this can help us all make our visions a reality where we can create worlds at the speed of thought.

For anyone interested in Unreal I’m always open for a casual chat, or if you have a project in mind exploring real-time content creation just reach out to me :)