Most people understand the power of computer special effects. Most of them watch movies in theaters, and the special effects team creates fictional but lifelike 3D scenes, but such technology is rarely seen in current games, but with the “Unreal Engine 5” (Unreal Engine 5) ; UE5), the 3D environment where players can’t tell whether it is a game or a reality may have already been realized.
Recently, 3D environment designer Lorenzo Drago revealed his finished product using UE5 game engine in ARTSTATION. In the film, he successfully created the scene inside the Etsuchu Gate Station in Toyama City, Japan. You would think he was taking pictures in reality.
However, this is the 3D working picture, you can1:13) at the moment of day and night switching, it turns out that everything is an illusory scene.
According to Drago’s description, he did all the modeling, texturing, lighting and animation in this scene, while the leaves were scanned and constructed through Quixel Megascans, and then the dynamic indirect lighting technology “Lumen” was used for light and shadow adjustment. It is one of the new core technologies of the UE5 engine.
Drago emphasized that he did not use another new technology of the UE5 engine, “Nanite”, which is a system that can virtualize micro-polygon geometric objects, allowing designers to directly add high-poly models made by ZBrush into the 3D environment. However, Drago was not used for this work, so the models in the film were created using a standard low-poly workflow.
To emphasize the realism, Drago uses the scale of the simulated camera lens and adjusts other modeling parameters, plus uses VR live tracking to simulate the effect of hand-held camera and flashlight during filming.
Of course, the UE5 engine is the signature engine of Epic Games, and it is also regarded by many manufacturers as the next-generation engine foundation for building the metaverse. Sony invested in Epic Games for the first time in 2020 with an investment amount of 250 million US dollars. This is Sony’s first investment. 3 investments, the total investment amount is currently 1.45 billion US dollars, holding 4.9% stake in Epic Games。