Unreal Engine 5.2 electrifies GDC 2023 attendees with photorealistic visuals

[Jimmy2x]

Why it matters: Epic Games released exciting new footage showcasing Unreal 5.2 during this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The demo, called Electric Dreams, features a Rivian EV crawling offroad in exceptional detail. The presentation also touched on several other technologies, including Metahuman, Epic's framework for creating lifelike characters for use in Unreal-based projects.

The annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) is a forum for developers, graphic artists, and other industry professionals to solve challenges, exchange ideas, and showcase new technologies in the game development industry. Epic Games provided this year's conference-goers with a deeper look into the company's Unreal Engine 5.2, and based on the feedback, the Epic team did not disappoint.

Epic's Vice President of Engineering, Nick Penwarden, introduced and presented the Electric Dreams demo and several of Unreal Engine 5.2's new features. The demonstration centers on a Rivian R1T off-roading through a foliage and water-rich environment created using chaos physics, real-time fluid simulation, and rendering tools such as Lumen and Nanite. The result is a highly detailed model comprising 71 million polygons rendered in real-time.

Epic also introduced Substrate, a new material framework that provides a fantastic range of surface appearances, expansive parameter space, and performance that scales according to complexity and budget.

Epic's presentation also featured an impressive demonstration of the company's Metahuman Animator framework, which enables artists to create photorealistic, lifelike characters in real time. Epic designed Metahuman Animator so anyone can pick up and use the tool, regardless of their animation experience, and deliver triple-A quality results. Live performances can be captured and transferred to Metahuman using studio-grade equipment or a high-quality smartphone.

The Metahuman presentation featured Melina Juergens, known for her role in Ninja Theory's Hellblade franchise, recording a live performance via an iPhone. Metahuman's ability to instantly translate Juergens' voice inputs, expressions, and movements as a highly lifelike digital likeness was definitely uncanny valley material.

However, it shows how far realistic human animation has come, particularly in motion-capturing efficiency. Metahuman significantly reduces turn-around time, turning what Juergens described as a weeks-to-months-long process into a real-time capture session. The demonstration showcased other Metahuman performance capture capabilities, including applying different Metahuman character visuals over the same initial capture, further streamlining the ability to create multiple photorealistic characters.

Epic didn't have a launch date for Metahuman Animator. However, Epic has alluded to its availability in the coming months. Users interested in Unreal Engine 5.2 can find the preview available via the Epic Games Store or GitHub.

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[Uncle Al]

Very impressive, I only wish there were a way to get this upgraded on older games .....

 

[McMurdeR]

Very impressive, I only wish there were a way to get this upgraded on older games .....

Its called "Remastered Edition". They even remaster the remasters. I'm looking at you, Last of us!

Right you are though, the demo was an eye opener.

 

[Arbie]

Too bad he habitually inflects upwards? So that all statements sound like questions? I wonder when we'll be rid of Valley-speak? It's painful to hear?

 

[bviktor]

We've been hearing the "photorealistic" mantra for decades now. It's getting old, and I'm yet to see an actual game that's "photorealistic".

 

[Thatsdisgusting]

Shows us the cg demo - only 1080p max, lol.

That's right. 25 years of "photorealistics", bright future of games and VR "like in Matrix".
25 years later, we have metaverse with metazuckey and DLSS.

 

[redhat]

Tom Clancy's The Division trailer was also ultra realistic but the game was......

 

[takaozo]

If a 13900 and a 4090 can deliver real time 1080p frames like this then UE5 is really good. Now imagine what a rendering farm can do. We come a log way but still not there yet.

 

[DSirius]

Behind the scenes, photorealistic visuals are a challenging dilemma for gaming industry.
This dilemma resumes like this:
1. Let's make the game as realistic as we can and hardware and sofware allow us (Unreal Engine for example).
2. We have to be careful to not make games too "realistic" because it will bite us hard.

And this is because of the danger of making too difficult for people (at least for some of them) to discern the real life and photorealistic games.
If this line is too blurred, for some people, (especially those with violent tendencies and those who have some mental affections), it will be hard to not do the things they do in games in real life too.
Or some of them may use photorealistic games as an excuse for their criminal behavior tendencies being triggered by these photorealistic games.
And this is a way dangerous path which gaming industry may bring to the society.
Some may argue that movies are realistic, and they are not so dangerous. Just that there is a big difference between movies and video games.
1. When people watch movies, they cannot intervene or change anything inside the movie.
Thus, they are spectators, and are aware that they are spectators from the start.
2. When people play games they become active, and can intervene, make decisions and change the outcomes, they are not spectators anymore, they have the power to shape the game accordingly with their skills or choices.

So gaming industry definitely must implement some elements to not make games too "photo"realistic to the point where it is too difficult to make the distinction from real world.
Otherwise, governs will intervene and regulate them, and I am sure that the gaming industry will have a hard time in making and selling their games from that point.
See gambling and loot boxes controversy which already determined some governs (EU) to punish and regulate the casino games "called" gambling and loot boxes games.
As for photorealistic games, I am sure that the controversy will be exponentially more dangerous.

 

[brucek]

Hardware vendors must be thrilled the "need" for more powerful hardware is continuing to escalate.

Tastes vary, but I prefer my games at least somewhat un-lifelike, possibly even "cartoony". Real life has a lot of extra detail and extra clutter that to me can just end up obscuring more important game play details. And I definitely don't enjoy any sensation that feels like injuring an actual human.

 

[RudyBob]

I'm turning my refrigerator into a GPU

 

[Darth Shiv]

Shows us the cg demo - only 1080p max, lol.

That's right. 25 years of "photorealistics", bright future of games and VR "like in Matrix".
25 years later, we have metaverse with metazuckey and DLSS.

Metaverse...is anyone taking that seriously?

 

[Hooda Thunkett]

Metaverse...is anyone taking that seriously?

Outside of Meta? Nope.

 

[takaozo]

I'm turning my refrigerator into a GPU

Only if a beer dispenser can be fitted, then I will think about converting mine.

 

[Raytrace3D]

Its called "Remastered Edition". They even remaster the remasters. I'm looking at you, Last of us!

Right you are though, the demo was an eye opener.

I would love them to remake the original Unreal.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Hardware vendors must be thrilled the "need" for more powerful hardware is continuing to escalate.

Tastes vary, but I prefer my games at least somewhat un-lifelike, possibly even "cartoony". Real life has a lot of extra detail and extra clutter that to me can just end up obscuring more important game play details. And I definitely don't enjoy any sensation that feels like injuring an actual human.

Less realistic graphics age far better then realistic ones do. Art style is always superior to graphical fidelity.

HiFi rush is one of the best looking games I've seen in years and it wouldnt look out of place on the gamecube.

 

[kira setsu]

I dont know why devs are so bent on chasing photorealism, its boring, plus all that work and if the game doesnt sell well enough...the studio is dead or bad off enough so a big dog like microsoft or something eats em.

I'd rather play a game with decent enough graphics that'll age well paired with a bunch of features and things to do rather than a snapshot of current life with no content, well I guess thats nintendo lol.

 

[TheBigFatClown]

I thought we played videogames to get away from real life? I'm all for graphical fidelity but it doesn't have to model real life exactly. That's not necessarily fun.

 

[Bamda]

I dont know why devs are so bent on chasing photorealism, its boring, plus all that work and if the game doesnt sell well enough...the studio is dead or bad off enough so a big dog like microsoft or something eats em.

I'd rather play a game with decent enough graphics that'll age well paired with a bunch of features and things to do rather than a snapshot of current life with no content, well I guess thats nintendo lol.

That is going to be my new character name; Nintendo Lo. LOL

 

[Hodor]

We've been hearing the "photorealistic" mantra for decades now. It's getting old, and I'm yet to see an actual game that's "photorealistic".

I've seen movies with photorealistic CGI. And it's really hard to tell what's real and what's not. When it comes to graphics. But almost all of them, even the rich Hollywood studios, fall on something else - physics. The objects and living creatures don't behave they would in real life. Cars don't tumble and bounce properly, airplanes don't respect the laws of aerodynamics, particles don't behave like in real life, etc. Even the best and the biggest fail the physics exam.

 

[Hodor]

Besides, this update is not so much about realism. I've seen manually designed maps that look better than this. This update is about speed of design. How to create big maps, that look good, in a very short time.

Designers wrongly think this tech will make their lives easier by enabling them to produce more with less effort, giving them more time to breathe. Just like workers 150 years ago thought that steam machine will make them more productive, so they'll earn more money for less effort.

It didn't happen. What happened is that boss just required them to increase productivity, since now it was easier to produce. The effort, the number of work hours and the salary was the same. The productivity increased. The money went into the boss pockets. But after a while the competition got the same productivity. So in the end, work hours, effort and money staid the same, but the products got fancier and better.

So, games will become richer in details, with bigger maps, with more maps, but designers will still work like horses.