An oldy but still impressive. Project spotlight relied on a proxy vehicle covered in tracking markers called the Blackbird, which was developed by visual effects studio The Mill.
An early example of unreal engine pushing the boundaries into VFX production. The benefits being to film a car commercial without the actual final car in the frame, ‘The Human Race’ was also imagined as an augmented reality experience where users could change vehicle characteristics themselves (such as the make or colour).
This was a high profile convergence of skills and industries (game engines and VFX) which will only benefit the production pipeline and immediacy of feedback and response.
There will be many more to come until real-time and it's relative newness and acceptance in the VFX industry will just be the norm.
Siron - real-time character performance
Epic games collaborating with 3Laterial, Cubic Motion, Tencent and Vicon to have live capturing of human performance driving a digital avatar.
Final results are below which are pretty impressive. Some nuances in the face and particularly around the mouth which give a hint of uncanny valley but generally this is a massive leap forward in real-time driven performance.
Unreal real-time ray tracing
First public demo of real time ray tracing using unreal. Announced at GDC 2018 and showing a massive jump in quality for real time rendering. A fantastic step forward in the convergence of games and films and all the skill sets required. Great to see and looking pretty amazing!!
Next-generation rendering features shown in today’s demo include:
- Textured area lights
- Ray-traced area light shadows
- Ray-traced reflections
- Ray-traced ambient occlusion
- Cinematic depth of field (DOF)
- NVIDIA GameWorks ray tracing denoising
UE4 Rendering - Animated series Zafari
This looks like a really great use of the unreal engine to produce animation content. Zafari is an upcoming TV series which is using UE4 as part of the animation pipeline. I hope this is really the start of many more projects that take advantages of the quality you can get from these amazing third party engines.