Epic Games explains how the UE5 tech demo achieves unprecedented photorealistic heights
Do you want to see how interactive storytelling and entertainment built with Unreal Engine 5 might appear in the future? The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is a new tech demo that shows what’s possible when UE5 and the power of new consoles are combined.
Image credits: Sony PlayStation
Members of the original The Matrix movie team, including Lana Wachowski, James McTeigue, and John Gaeta, collaborated with Epic Games and partners to produce the demo, which is half cinematic and part playable.
The Matrix Awakens gameplay
The vehicle chase in the demo was scripted using Sequencer. Crew members drove cars throughout the virtual metropolis to capture exciting shots, and they were able to use the simulated universe to explore alternative creative options for the cinematic content. This method was similar to how live-action filmmakers explore a city for the ideal streets to tell their story—but without the physical limitations of the actual world.
Built for next-gen consoles
The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience is built to take advantage of all of the next-gen console’s features, including the super-fast SSD drive, CPU, GPU, and console ray tracing.
To accomplish that, they’ve created a massive 16-kilometer-square open-world city composed of 7,000 structures consisting of a large number of modular parts, each of which is made up of millions of triangles and enhanced with props, signage, debris, and more. There are 1,248 simulated crossroads, 45,073 parked cars (38,146 of which are drivable), 260 kilometers of roadways, and 512 kilometers of sidewalks.
This massive, dynamic setting is extraordinarily detailed, sophisticated, and photorealistic. It’s made up of billions of polygons that are streamed by Nanite, UE5’s virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and processed by the PS5 and Xbox Series’s strong CPU and GPU to produce a staggering amount of detail and visual fidelity. A sophisticated procedural audio-generating engine mimics the sounds of a busy city, boosting the impression of being there in the environment.
As a result, you’ll be able to interact with a strong, immersive, and photorealistic interactive experience. You may walk around the city, get in a car, or hover about with a drone’s eye perspective, all while being surrounded by believable characters and driveable vehicles.
Unreal Engine 5 in-game features
The demo sets a new standard for interactive material, making it both richer and more engaging. That’s because The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience’s open-world setting is a living, breathing city.
Its characters and traffic are participants in a global simulation that is constantly reviewed, not only generated randomly based on where the player is looking. In other words, they exist whether or not you are looking at them. As a result, the people and vehicles in the experience behave in a far more realistic manner.
The world also feels “real” in a way that previous interactive experiences haven’t, thanks to new UE5 technologies that dynamically process everything in real-time rather than serving up pre-computed images, as has been the case in the past.
Lumen is an example of this—this strong global illumination lighting system brings the fidelity of indirect lighting, such as reflections from mirrored or wet surfaces, closer to the physical world than it has ever been before. Because Lumen renders in real-time, you may instantaneously change the lighting in the experience simply changing the sun to any angle. There’s also an experimental night mode to find concealed within the experience.
Tens of thousands of ultra-realistic artificial characters inhabit the city, driven by a sophisticated AI system, to give the impression of a living, breathing metropolis.
In the screenshot above, the hero character IO is seen with the Control Rig being used to tweak the character animation in Unreal Engine 5. This image is intriguing for game developers because it displays the object being manipulated in the context of a live environment. It demonstrates how you can make interactive experiences more natural and fluid by altering things like character animation in the city while it’s running in real-time and at final quality.
The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience showcases what the next generation of interactive experiences will have to offer: large open environments, increasingly exciting action, and graphical realism that rivals that of cinematic content.
How to test it by yourself?
The demo is available for free on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X | S.
Got a chance to play it? Leave a review.
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