Dear Creatives, you must learn the Unreal Engine now!

This a real-time 3D image in a videogame engine..yup its getting scarily close to the real darn thing.

The walls between reality and the pixel world are crashing down and for creatives there is nothing to fear but ( quoting Coach Carter) 'to become powerful beyond measure'. I draw this to the attention of the curious collective; not just filmmakers, but the potential this has for all kinds of artists with an unrelenting desire to expand their skill set and create without limits.

Filmmakers: Meet Unreal Engine 4

Now without fan-boying too much, I am going nuts over how much this game engine by Epic Games has and will further revolutionize the nature of film-making..oh and yes its completely free to use for personal and commercial projects.

Jaw-dropping real-time cinematic realism is now available with the technology now catering heavily towards giving filmmakers the ability to create sets on the fly without needing high-end hardware. Coupled with it is a massive free library of highly detailed world-building assets from Quixel Megascans.

The director can now develop a landscape or interior, set cameras and lighting conditions saving huge amounts of time and money in pre and post production without needing to leave the studio.

These beautiful scenes from Andrew Hamilton's 'Memories of Australia' and Quixel's 'Rebirth' above are examples of the ever-evolving capabilities of Unreal. I just found out the engine was used extensively in creating unique sets for The Mandolorian also.

What is real-time rendering?

Though the concept seems obvious; (generating scenes in the present with no delay), it's still a process the film industry is just wrapping its massive head around.

The common expectation is that complex VFX scenes are rendered out endlessly in a network of supercomputers. Famously it was said many years back in the creation of the first Disney's Incredibles film the best tech at the time took nearly a month to process 5 seconds of a particular finalized render footage...

Laughably With the tech as it now we have far more advanced looking real-time imagery coming out of simple online games on handheld devices. Now with a real-time film engine like Unreal if a director wants that rock on the hill to be a slight violet colour instead of blue she can correct it right then and there to their eccentric tastes. Hence no angry calls to a VFX studio art director on the other side of the country to fix a minor detail and then send it back.

What will this mean for user-generated content?

Without a doubt as Epic Games is about to make quantum leaps with photo-realism even further with the 2021 release of Unreal Engine 5, Great disruption will inevitably occur to the way we create and experience films, creating further efficiency and god-like customizability of on-screen worlds on the fly.

No longer will tight production schedules fall victim to factors like undesirable weather and lighting conditions as creators have full control over these factors as though 'playing a game' if you will. However, at times a real gritty environment is more desirable like in the famous one-takes of films such as 1917 which was more so a race against time to capture the perfect lighting than escaping a barrage of enemy fire.

Personal film making and potential for education will far exceed what was thought possible as hardware to process this software is also becoming cheaper and more user friendly.

The recent tech demo for UE5 not only bolsters enough graphics potential to have you burned at the stake for witchcraft if you showed it to people in the 80's, it's shown to possess the ability to process a ridiculous amount of scene data without pushing the hardware too far.

Power to the user

It is my conviction to learn as much as I can about Unreal though originally coming from a graphic design background. My reason being is that this kind of tech will end the widespread isolation of skills due to market segmentation and the limitations placed on an artist's confidence and variety to learn new skills as a result.

Unreal is encouraging an eco system where artists from all fields will be able collaborate and add to a story as equal experts in the creation of worlds at godspeed. Quixel's Jakob Keudel recently released an extraordinary world he created which anyone can freely hop into and edit at their own pace to learn his process, however from personal experience a decent computer is recommended!

The Impact

Another massive trend people scarcely realize is most of what we see in product and real estate catalogues we take for real images are actually highly photo-real 3D renders. The Unreal engine generates these scenes with ease and very little set up time hence it is a favorite for Archviz presenters and some architectural firms.

What could this mean for other creative industries in the near future, marketing especially? Ever more engaging content creation with lightspeed automation at no cost and finally indistinguishable from real life. Though I think the latter is a topic for another scary discussion I'll write later.

Next steps

Anyone in film or TV or just curious in general dive right in ASAP.

I am basic user of it at the moment but learning as much as I can so I can implement it for client music videos in the future. To get started I found Ryan Manning's basics tutorial to be the best starting point. He opens up with all the tutorials and learning resources available for Unreal.

And in closing I say to my fellow creators: its time to break down our self imposed creative silos and make the future of collaboration 'unreal'.