2021 Year in Review | Inside Unreal

hey folks boy did unreal engine developers shine at this year's the game awards with over a dozen new ue games revealed and a total of 9 awards presented to unreal developers including it takes 2 for game of the year help us celebrate all the great games at the show by heading over to the unreal engine feed for a full recap and in the spirit of looking back we're thankful to have been able to accelerate the incredible work of over 1600 teams and creators through epic mega grants from dinosaur survival games and medical imaging tools to metaverse ready fashion design platforms and feature films this group of recipients are shepherding some amazing projects explore more about them on the feed wrap up your gear with brand new courses from unreal engine learn how to render movies create sandbox style games build audio driven designs and develop mixed reality experiences for hololens 2 ready to get started then dash on over to the unreal online learning portal and if you're looking to explore blueprints with a focus on non-gaming experiences our latest webinar demonstrates a multitude of interactive elements for just that visit the unreal engine youtube channel to watch it now upcoming action adventure the gunk is both a metaphoric examination of modern society's struggle with conservation and a chance for the development team that made a name for itself with the popular steam world games to stretch its wings check out our dev interview with image and form games's team to discover how the gunk was born and then shaped by the team's previous titles creating the next generation of pop stars we like the sound of that the teams at lulu ar and silver spoon animation are proving that virtual avatars can reinvent entertainment and change the lives of rising talents thanks to their work on fox's new singing competition alter ego watch our spotlight to see how mocap is helping these rising stars take the stage you wouldn't want to miss this quixo mega scans trees is now in early access the brand new asset type was designed to accelerate your photorealistic environments head over to the unreal engine marketplace to download the first pack and read more about mega scans trees on qixel's blog autodesk has recently released their unreal live link for maya plugin making it easier than ever to stream animation data from maya to unreal in real time the plugin enables the ability to work on character assets right in maya and see previews of your work reflected in context in unreal visit their website to learn more in our first community spotlight take a stroll into this lovely autumn scene from jose luis rivelta garcia visit their art station page to see reference shots materials and more enjoy the latest installment in treehouse digital series of scary tales when a shy teen reveals a secret well to three friends they get a terrifying reminder to always be careful what you wish for watch the complete short film and their brand new behind the scenes video on treehouse digital's youtube channel from developer oregon shanghai reveal the secrets of the fantastical hand-drawn world of in-garden in after image venture through vast landscapes and ruins while meeting mysterious colossal beings and roaming spirits in the fast-paced arpg wish list after image on steam thanks for watching this week's news in community spotlight and it's the last one of 2021 from the unreal engine team we wish you a wonderful holiday and a happy new year so [Music] hi and welcome to inside unreal a weekly show where we learn explore and celebrate everything unreal i'm your host amanda and boy do i have a slew of incredible guests with me today so first of all welcome thank you so much for joining us uh so today we have tim sweeney our very own ceo and founder thank you for joining um we have jeff technical director on special projects galen for our senior evangelist on quixl and simon senior director for eos thank you all so much for coming uh you know 2021 has been a an incredible year we've seen a lot of advancement in digital humans a lot of next-gen dev virtual production animation uh just been really really stellar and so we're excited to dive in and talk about a lot of the uh incredible accomplishments internally and externally for for the year so again thank you all for joining and we know anything you'd like to add before we dive right in other than jeff's amazing mug [Laughter] so yeah we started started the year off with a sneak peek for meta-human creator so that was done in february and then we were able to release it to the community in april so the you know is an incredible cloud-streamed app uh the best part is we can see the community creating real-time digital humans in under an hour not you know this this pipeline which used to take many many hours if not days uh is now super fast and this is only possible due to the r d efforts from three lateral and cubic motion and teaming up with those great teams and so we hope you all have taken advantage of them we've seen tons of community projects oftentimes in our community spotlights that have taken advantage of them uh aaron sims creative used them in the eye which was a a short film that was premiered in short short nightmares um also in use for sign language by cara technology as interpreters for various videos and streams um so that's been really really amazing and um i know jeff you were you all leveraged them quite heavily in the matrix awakens which we'll dig into the project specifics a little later but could you speak to how the meta humans actually populated uh the city there yeah absolutely um i mean we would not have the resources to populate the city without using the metahuman tool honestly um so so we use it in two ways really the um the the first way is actually just making the pedestrians in the city you know we wanted a city that was full of life and had a lot of people walking around and we leaned heavily on the metahuman tool to do that so we took we took a lot of meshes out of the metahuman tool you know exported a bunch of heads a bunch of the outfits put in a couple custom outfits and then made like a like a pieces parts mix and match um a human assembler to get a lot of variety within the city um so the med human tool was was a godsend for that um and the second part was the the main character i don't know if you recognize the main character but the io the the girl you play in the sandbox um so she is actually played by aydah the meta human we released in the spring um so we gave her you know gave her a custom hairdo um we had a new costume that was designed by um the costume designer for the matrix actually kim barrett so she gave us a great design on that and we gave her a new outfit but um but that's actually the ada metahuman from the spring and we're really excited to see how that held up against you know keanu reeves and carrie anne moss um in some of those shots and and we were we were super excited to see that that the the quality and the fidelity of the meta humans held up super well uh you know against actual likenesses of actual humans yeah and we've we haven't necessarily designed the tool to be like the central characters to people's projects but we have seen people use them as this way right it's it's not meant to replace that it's meant to be an augment so that you can have realistic digital humans in your projects whether it's in the backgrounds or filling up scenes or anything but you know they can still very much serve as a a central part of your short films or games if you want them to and i think that that speaks to the capability and the extensibility of that as a tool um and the best part is go ahead i'll say that we animated her with super traditional pipelines also you know the same the same stereo head mounted rigs we use for for other characters the same mocap um you know by by an actress uh was mapped onto this artificial character and looked great when they come right out ready to you know they're rigged once you export them from uh meta human creator and then it's ready to just toss your animation on then and run with them so it's really really awesome anybody want to add anything about metahuman creator before we we move on well i just point out it the real aim with this and a lot of the other things that we're doing with epic is to put triple a quality game development within reach of everybody uh and you know in just a few years ago you had to have a multi-100 person team um that would cost over a hundred thousand dollars to build characters of this quality one uh one at a time right the aim is to make it possible for anybody to use this quality of characters without having to have any sort of budget for it at all um between the libraries of massive amounts of high quality quicksole digital models um you know scaling up to film and television quality scaling down to nanite and scaling down to low end android smartphone platforms to metahuman for humans putting game development within reach of everybody is a key goal awesome yeah and with that you know moving beyond metahuman creator we actually got to put unreal engine 5 in early access this year so we announced dewey five last year but it was super exciting to actually put it in the hands of the community this year along with the absolutely gorgeous sample valley of the agent um if you haven't had the chance be sure to watch the ue5 early access insider and real series it details a number of the major features lumen nanite world permission a partition sorry metasounds you name it they go on but uh galen you actually worked on valley of the ancient what was it like collaborating on such a major project yeah i mean it was it was a truly special project to be a part of we have just such an amazing team here at epic and being able to collaborate with so many different product owners to get this off the ground was it was a true feat and it was one of the first projects that we've really ever done uh that was actually fully remote um so at least for a project that i've been attached to here so um we actually started uh the scouting process because we actually went and sourced all this data from moab uh utah um and with travel restrictions and things being a little dicey we actually uh we we brought it was pretty much just me and then two other guys here that were based in the states and we're not scanners so we actually went and sourced all the data for this and then had you know our amazing team on the back end go and process all the data um for force in a really really short period of time so that we could actually start production basically january like right when we got back from our winter break um and i mean it was it was a really challenging project in a lot of different ways right scope you know kind of went up and down and you know kind of did the whole you know kind of normal thing for projects that we do and uh ultimately i think we landed on something that was really compelling right like kind of tying all these different engine features together and um being able to kind of have like an interesting narrative that tied back to you know the demo that we did just a year previous to that right and uh lumen in the land of nanite so featuring echo again is just really awesome you know she's just a really cool character and um it was great to kind of have her be inside of this world too um and just kind of tie all these engine features together so and i mean the coolest thing to me obviously you know that we're a couple months removed from the project is it was definitely like a stealth release right we put it out there we we did the the mic drop moment where at the end it's like oh and by the way you can download this today right um i think that was a really cool moment for the community um and i think that uh the coolest thing is like literally sign onto our station within like 24 to 48 hours after the release and seen people post environments using unreal engine 5 early access like that blew my mind which is i know something that we should have expected but it was something that like for me like sign on to our station every day like i'm a literal like every everyday art station user to see that i mean it was just it was so cool um and again we just have such a talented team here so uh i think that we created something pretty special what do you think were some of the biggest takeaways like you know having to establish that pipeline what's you know having to go through that ourselves and seeing the remote setup what do you think are the biggest takeaways for our teams and then and how that benefits the community yeah i mean i think that the thing that maybe a lot of people maybe they realize is maybe they don't you know but um you know these projects that we do internally here they serve so many purposes for us outside of just creating a really cool video at the end of the day right i think that the thing that i'm honestly the most proud of is are a lot of the intangibles associated with this project i know i've said this a lot internally to like a lot of the team but i think that just being able to walk away with like this mountain of jira tickets that we just totally slashed i think that's that's amazing right to be able to sort of look at how far the engine has come just in a short period of time and i mean these projects like help us step on all those rakes which is really pretty cool right like in a weird way um and the amount i think that the team has learned you know just in working on these types of projects you know and working in a very volatile tool base or code base rather it's just one of those things that i mean it takes a really special crew and so um yeah it was pretty awesome to have an end result like we did so yeah i just want to jump in and say thank you for for your rake stepping because uh uh i was working on the the matrix demo at the time and uh and this project went first and and a lot of the pain for us on this so that was that was amazing huge help yeah i mean and even you know reverbs are sorry the lumen in the land of nanite demo um you know from a year ago right like that was kind of the building blocks of like how we kind of set up like some of these other demos in mind right and we wanted to keep expanding the scope of those things right so um you know the the scale of these demos i think is one of those things that is pretty impressive as well just in that we've created something that's much larger than i think we ever anticipated the first kickoff meeting i i mean when we were talking about doing this project i mean it was a much smaller demo in fact like it was more of like a beautiful corner we were looking to basically like create like this beautiful frame where it was like we could say something marketing speak-wise it was like hey what you're seeing in this one frame has more triangles than like the entire island of fortnite and all the gears of war games combined you know something like that right we could say that because it was true and it was accurate right um but then it was kind of expanding like oh why don't we do you know like 16 square kilometers or something like that and so so we did scaled it up a little a little bit yeah you know since folks can actually download and explore the the sample project in there what do you what are some of the best um like learnings or takeaways they can get from actually getting hands-on and digging into that demo well yeah i mean i think that what the coolest thing is about being able to download these projects is that it really demystifies the process right like we really want to make it so that there is that open and transparent nature to these projects and that we not only create these learning materials you can go and you know see it on our on our youtube channels and twitch and everything like that but also being able to literally peek like under the hood and see what's going on inside these projects i mean i think that that's really special right because i can say like for me personally sort of in growing up in this industry and like learning one of the most important things for me was opening projects or samples or you know tutorials or whatever it was that were way more complicated or scaled up you know from like a level of complexity than what i was able to sort of achieve at that time and it really was something that helped me a lot in sort of looking at projects again where i was learning constantly by saying well why why are those two nodes plugged in when i'm opening the material or what what are these different things mean right and so i would encourage any person who's you know looking to learn the engine right it's just like don't be intimidated by these projects i know that they're massive right like they can be a little intimidating but the fact is is like if you go and you just take a look and see like how we did these things i think that you'll find that it is a lot more accessible than maybe like these kind of beautiful frames that we're looking at kind of actually let on you know and we're releasing so many different training materials and tools that really make the lives of artists and just creators in general just a lot easier than it was 5 10 15 years ago so it's an exciting time i think to be in the industry absolutely and we've been excited here just to see some you know big names already jump on board you know ninja theory is using unreal engine 5 which they you know had an outstanding gameplay reveal at the game awards if you haven't seen it please go watch that it is so so stunning um the coalition plans to leverage ue5 and we're already seeing tons of great like you mentioned community projects we have a little sizzle we can show um that is just some of the really incredible stuff coming out of the community uh black myth wukong's an absolute standout um i think that's one of the things i'm really most looking forward to is seeing you know as we refine these tools and get them really ready to be in the hands of everyone uh what what we're gonna see in the community and out in the wild and uh the variety of projects and scenes that will be you know coming to light that wouldn't have been possible previously or would have been very challenging to do previously um i don't know tim i want to yeah i'll echo that oh sorry sorry go ahead i was just going to say that ninja theory trailer just blew my mind like i i was so so impressed by that the audio in that game too is so cool like it's just amazing so can't wait the next generation um tim yeah i wanted to ask you what do you what will unreal engine 5 mean for developers and creators as you know it comes to a full release and and we get to see it well it means a lot of things for a lot of different people um first of all the team has put a lot of work into polishing the tools and the unreal editor to make it easier to use and more approachable and have more of the engine automatically work without having to go in and tweak settings so ease of use is a big part of it massive scalability is another part that you can start uh you know with a small project and build something to you know grow into a project of any size uh i think the most magical part of the graphics pipeline now the fact that lighting and geometry just work you know you don't have to worry about level of detail anymore you just build your billion polygon mesh and making it run fast at every distance and every platform is the engine's problem which it solves really quite well and that you no longer have to you know fool around with placing all these you know photographically unrealistically unrealistic lights in different locations to get the lighting look you want um you can do exactly uh what happens in the real world or you do exactly what a lighting designer would do on a movie set and place lights you want including area lights and have your scene magically come to life with all the indirect illumination of them and the the content libraries are another big part of it you know the fact that you don't have to build everything yourself there's the unreal engine marketplace and quicksole for a vast set of assets from independent creators and from epic and medihuman technology for creating an infinite number of humans just being able to rely on a massive source of content at the highest levels of fidelity is the another another key part of it and it's proven yeah the other thing that hasn't gotten a whole lot of news coverage is that unreal engine 5 is powering uh fortnite chapter 3. it's live now um and have the biggest thing in the in the team the biggest obstacle to a team adopting a new version of the unreal engine is not wanting to uh not wanting to try to use it before epic itself has released a game and because we released a game now you can you know count on every every feature working to a really high degree of professional quality awesome thank you well speaking of you know what ue5 is hopefully capable of and seeing what its uh potential is you know here let's show the the teaser for the matrix awakens um we released this brand new technical demo during the game awards um on december 9th and not only were we thrilled for all the impressive unreal titles on display uh devs took unreal devs took home nine awards including game of the year so shout out to the it takes two team uh but it was an opportunity for you know us to showcase yeah what's coming and i don't know about you all but i was definitely on the edge of my seat uh during the show seeing all this content go live um so jeff as the technical director on the project will you kind of give an overview of it and like what our goals were when setting out to build uh the matrix awakens sure um for the record i was absolutely on the edge of my seat literally when that countdown was approaching zero um yeah when we uh when we set out like like the special projects team you know like was was talking about you know we do a lot of um a lot of internal projects to you know prove to ourselves that the engine is is capable and good and and ready for prime time and and we knew you know coming out of the loom in the land of nanite demo that we wanted to do something big we wanted to take you e5 and and push it as far as possible and really show what the next generation could be or what we think the next generation can be you know what this what this generation of hardware can do um so we knew we wanted to do something large we want to do something open world um we wanted to uh you know move forward on tech like nana and lumen we uh you know we chose a city environment um you know we had a couple rocks demos we thought let's try something a little more you know a little more man-made let's put different stresses on those systems and um and fairly early on you know we knew we had a partner in warner brothers in the wachowskis um to use the matrix ip and so this idea you know let's make a city um came about really really naturally um yeah so another another big push here was um coming out of uh the land of nanite we um so we finished that right at the end of code like literally the last day like you know we put the stamp on the build and i left the office and haven't been back since like that was right that's not what happened um so we knew that we had we'd been denied this opportunity to put that in people's hands you know we want to take the gdc and sig graph and those kind of things to show you that it's real and and we couldn't do that so we said okay you know let's let's let's go all the way with this one let's put this in consumers hands and that really raises the bar in terms of development complexity in terms of the robustness of the systems you know we can't run on a dev kit you know we have to have it in memory um you know we knew we wanted to target next-gen hardware including the series s so that put a lot of pressure on the team just to make sure that not only you know is it sparkly and looks good on screen but we can ship it in a real product and that's what we did at the end of the day yeah that's it's awesome i mean you know i know galen you're talking about scaling up and and matrix awakens did just that right we're talking 16 kilometers square there's i have there's crazy stats on it like seven million instant assets 7 000 buildings 40 over 45 000 cars nearly 30 000 lamp posts like it's incredible the amount of detail and just real-life world you were able to put into the city we really took this idea of scale to heart like you know just early on and we talked about the we decided we want to do a big city um you know we did it 16 you know square kilometers and really there was no artificial constraint on that we just kind of inflated and said yeah that's enough to prove what we want to prove um you know we could have gone bigger with that and other teams i'm sure will go much much bigger um but we wanted to scale you know lumen i'm sorry nanite makes this um gives us incredible opportunity to scale in detail like as you look across the city it's equivalent detail all the way across like the you know it's the same the same high fidelity at the very top of a building as it is you know at the at the base level on the other side of the city and as you fly around the city you know it's it's it's real and it's all real and it's all there um uh in terms of populating the city we you know i talked about this a little bit before but we built this um it's called mass ai the system called mass ai which is this really highly scalable ai system and uh and that helped us achieve those super high numbers you know we built a traffic system and you know to make sure all the cars follow the stoplights and all that and the crowd uses the crosswalk properly and the club stays on the side properly um so so that i think was a huge accomplishment yeah that that team that team was awesome um honestly just building this content was a big challenge like we don't have a massive team on special projects uh so we leaned a lot into uh proceduralism we partnered with side effects and the houdini tool to help us out with um with generating the city uh so we had a really nice pipeline that we could turn around really really quickly um actually regenerating the city and importing it was i think a couple of minutes process the the biggest the slowest part of the process was saving the file um so that was really cool um and we regenerated the city i think within a week of content lock so so we were pushing that right up to the edge um and that was that enabled us to do this right we didn't have an art team to go in there and handcraft all this stuff um and i think that the results are not wonderful there um and the last part of this is just the tools to author all this like you know i've got a beefy dev machine and i can't load that entire city and edit it um but the world uh you know the open world team and the world partition tools and the one file for actor tools for collaboration uh you know really stepped it up and and gave us the tools we needed to to make this you know to be able to load the parts of the city you want and move this trash can here and move this fire hydrant there and uh and those were super important in terms of scale not just what's on the screen but in terms of how you how you edit it and how you interact with it that's yeah that's incredible and so now and i think the most exciting part is you know we're getting to battle test these tools now but eventually it's something that other creators will will get to use and you can and leverage them to make their own large worlds and and interactive experiences and and things like that so um yeah absolutely pass that along yeah yeah yeah i mean it was fun to get to use all these you know like a lot of what unreal has been doing and pushing is this idea of empowering creators like tim mentioned earlier and and getting to use the medi-human stuff getting to use you know the quick sole content like they went and did some scans for us and we used some of their off-the-shelf content um lumen i mean it's amazing like in the city when you're when you're driving around the city um there's one light in that scene and it's the sun the directional light i think there's a skylight too but it's not really the real light um and um but like the holy cow right that just works like you can be underneath and overpass completely and indirect and it looks great yeah that's incredible um yeah my one my favorite bits about the demo there is the um near the end one of our rendering programmers danny wright he uh he's like i wonder what it looks like when we turn off the sun so he just turned off the sun and it was amazing like he posted pictures and said we have to put this in the demo somewhere so that sounds like yes within the demo somewhere that's super cool um so when you go into that night mode in the uh in the demo it's literally that entire scene is being lit by the emissives from the the lights and the car headlights and the windows like there's just no light in that scene and it looks great and um you know we didn't go in there an art directed or anything special you know i'm sure we could tweak some settings and make it look even even better but uh the fact that it held up with just that sort of like it literally just works in every sense of the word so i thought that was super that's crazy yeah um so again you were talking about like learning resources and stuff so um and we've announced this in a couple of different places but well we're going to be releasing the city also uh with ue5 when it comes out in the spring um so all this content all these vehicles all these buildings um you know the code and the blueprints we use to build it uh we're gonna release as much of that as possible so you know we're going to take it apart and learn from it and build their own stuff um really excited to see what the community does with all this yeah it'll be really really incredible and when you can go and download you can experience the um current demo on playstation 5 and xbox um and you can actually after watching the internet or the more cinematic and interactive elements you can wander the city and explore it and toggle some of these features so if you want to get into more of the like technical demo pieces of it you can um i know yeah you have the day and night cycles what are some of the other um instances yeah you can there's some um some modes you can mess with the simulation sizes so you can you can kind of turn on the visualization mode so you can pull the camera way back and actually see um the the mass ai stuff at work you can see that it's not it's not just a bubble around the camera like we're actually simulating you know 35 000 pedestrians in the whole city um you can um there's an easter egg for the the night mode there's the you can rotate the sun um that's what i'm missing oh you can turn the matrix filter on and off if you want to see kind of a clean clean image you know get rid of the chromatic combination and the film grain and stuff we had that on to make it look filmic and matrixy but you know if you want to see what the engine is producing you know raw um i think it looks pretty awesome in that mode um there's a photo mode to play with so you can fly around and you know get get in tight and on someone's uh someone's eyeball and take portraits and um so yeah it's a lot of little toys also some nanite view modes you can you can see um a little bit of what nanite's doing under the hood all the triangles these all those triangles yeah we're joking that there's going to be a world shortage of triangles earlier due to the matrix awakens so bust out your pickaxes pick axes and find some more for us uh let's see and then yeah um well yeah it's just an incredible project and congrats to you and all all the folks that worked on a project it's it's really incredible and um yeah we can't wait to be able to share some of those assets with the the community uh next year um any any additional points you want to make on the matrix before we head on i just want to say thanks to the team i mean the the team that worked on this was super amazing um you know our partners and collaborators you know warner brothers and and chowski and john gata um super great to work with you know we had some help from the coalition they they were you know super professional and helped us a ton um so the list is too long to name but yeah but everyone we collaborated with was was amazing so thank you thank you yeah and you can see the full if you go to unreal engine.com wake up you can actually see a couple of the articles we have we give a shout out to a lot of the the our partners that worked on it and um we've actually what released some lighting uh presets in metahuman creator if you want to make them look like they're set in the matrix world so definitely check those out if you haven't yet and the there's a roughly 10 minute video on our youtube channel if you haven't seen the experience yet and want to take a look at it we definitely encourage you to do so all right so kind of on the coattails of this with the matrix awakens and seeing it you know we're seeing the demand for real-time production tools absolutely skyrocket you know over 30 recent major studio film and television projects are using ue to accelerate their production we're talking projects shang chi and the legend of the 10 rings dune obviously the matrix resurrections uh mandalorian ted lasso they've all used ue in some part of their pipeline but whether it's from previz or location scouting to in-camera vfx um you know doesn't have to be the full production but we're seeing these tools leveraged in significant ways um i just want to give a shout out to some of the incredible studios behind these heavy hitting projects frame store digital domain dnag ilm halon pixamondo weta we're always excited to see what these teams are doing and you know our partners help us make our tools better right we see their needs and what they're trying to accomplish and that forces and pushes us to improve our own tools and and on their behalf so um with in 2021 we released 427 and that was a really big update for us to put the hands of these um or put these tools in the hands of creators everywhere featuring you know loads of vp updates um i'm sure you all leveraged a ton of them but uh you know easily easy setup for in display with 3d volumes multi-gpu support enhanced virtual camera systems for multi-user editing and so that's a great way for remote teams to actually collaborate and work together and one of the things we did to really put these tools to the test we partnered with the filmmakers collective bullet and created our own short film uh shot entirely on ant studios led stage in la california so this is the 427 in camera vfx test film um galen you actually got to work on it right so uh what was the process like or what do you feel like some of the biggest boons to creators looking in getting into film and television creation can use these tools yeah i mean it's it's pretty awesome i mean the tech has come such a long way like jeff and i both worked on the first virtual production demo that we did um you know i guess that would have been two or three it's you guys it was two years ago now yeah um yeah yeah i guess that's so weird um but yeah i mean the tech has come such a long way like even just since we did that demo um and you know the stage at nant is so impressive i mean it's just a massive space um and you can see it here in this video it's just it's crazy um i think that you know for us you know working on this demo one of the things that we really want to do is obviously you know increase the visual fidelity of what we achieved you know from the previous demo um and obviously gpu light baker and you know lightmaster lightmass2 and all these different things you know that we were showing uh you know with this demo i think ultimately it really came together at the end here right and obviously being able to kind of partner with andrew hamilton you know in his amazing scene in the australia demo that he put out i mean there's just so much amazing tech that kind of went into this right and again you know like we improved the tool set as a result of this demo right i think that's the thing that i keep coming back to with these types of projects is that you know we actually go through and use the tools and we say all right well this isn't super intuitive like how can we make it better right then we go back to the product owners and make it so that it is something that is a way more digestible experience like for for actual creators um and so yeah i mean ultimately i think that again this is just another project you know that just bringing so many talented people from epic together to create something i mean it's it's it's truly an honor you know to be able to work on these types of projects and we have a lot more virtual production projects that we're working on behind the scenes um and we're really excited to kind of show more of what we're doing and um a lot more interactivity a lot more kind of exciting things that we're seeing actually on sets you know like for for productions that are shooting right now and trying to you know support those types of feature requests as well so lots more to come it's exciting and this and just to be clear like this whole thing was shot or at least produced in like four days right well so the uh i don't know exactly how long the shoot was like as far as like what we're seeing here what was captured on this part you know leading up to it right like there was there was a lot of work as far as figuring out the environment specifically and you know obviously the tool set of getting 427 into a place like at least internally where we could actually make it and functional and be able to shoot on on the day or on the week rather that we wanted to actually produce the actual final result um so i mean there was a lot of work that kind of went into it on the front end for sure um and honestly you know as you can see here everyone is you know taking proper precautions covid wise and everything like that there was so much logistically that the team had to figure out in order to kind of make that a safe environment as well and so i don't want to understate that as well because again like we were learning you know like everybody else is right now and yeah in this situation we find ourselves in so um you know for us to be able to sidestep and navigate through all these issues together as a team i mean it was just it was a massive team lift to be able to get something like this off the ground so massive shout out to the team in la and everyone else that came out you know to be able to make this possible so these are the type of projects that really excite me because so so many different efforts over the years like come home and come together you know like the the amount of different pieces you know just you see the rendering but the stage control and the compositing and the collaborative tools and all this to be able to get some people on a stage and and realize their creative vision in a short period of time um this is the stuff that really inspires me and folks can like download this project right so the in-camera vfx production test project is actually available on the marketplace and there's a complimentary tutorial series on the uh our youtube channel and as you mentioned andrew hamilton's australia assets those are also available in the marketplace so you know not only do you have these tools you also have these assets and resources and so we really hope that you'll dive in and and make the most of these tools and share with us what you're making um you know in that in the vein of virtual production and and doing uh test projects to push it we also the community also has access to the slay animation sample project that was created in conjunction with mold 3d studios a veteran vfx or veteran art and vfx team slay was an exercise for them to explore virtual production workflows explicitly for animation and if you missed it last week they had joined us on inside and reel to discuss their workflow from uh concept to final pixel so it's just been really cool to see this evolution of you know here we do sample projects or tests projects internally for us that then can turn into you know real tool changes and real world changes with our partners and then um then we move on to like developing programs for uh different teams so um for example we have the unreal fellowship and this program is designed to help get film and tv artists and age and educators develop a strong command of virtual production and so they go through 30 days of intensive training and at this point we've had over 450 students from 21 different countries uh have now gone through the program so and these projects are absolutely stellar like they they make something in a month and have often times come totally fresh into unreal engine are making some really outstanding um short films uh so what you're seeing here is the fellowship 2021 student showcase you can see the complete films on vimeo um galen you helped support some of the fellowship sessions didn't you [Music] yeah and i mean i just like to underline that the diversity of you know the people that you know kind of came to like this event specifically right because it's super impressive to be able to have um sorry about that it's super impressive to be able to have um you know such a wide group of people that come to this event right because it's not just you know necessarily students right that are out of university right you even have people that are you know full-on you know worked in the vfx industry for a long period of time and are actually looking to kind of level up their own skills and i think that that's something that's really amazing right is like people come in with a massive amount of experience you know and say hey you know i've worked on you know 20 years of you know amazing high-end visual effects films or whatever it is right and they're eager to learn and they're they're really excited to sort of have this paradigm shift of working in real time right and i think that's one of the most exciting parts is being able to bring in what's otherwise you know just the games industry right like being able to diversify the talent pool into like all these different industries that that we're able to be in right um it makes for just a really exciting conversation most of the time right because i feel like at least i can say this for me personally and probably some of the other instructors it's like it's like i feel like i learned a lot from the people that were there as well right and i think that's one of the coolest things about it oh yeah i think we're you know as more people use real-time tools it's you know the game devs have a lot they can teach about the tools or about development and design to uh film and television creators you know they can bring different perspectives or you know like hey here's storytelling techniques or that to game devs you know uh architects can bring designs and building structures to games that maybe they wouldn't have explored before and so just list like knowledge share when you bring these different industries and these different these folks from different backgrounds together is amazing and it's like how do how do we keep pushing folks to collaborate and share from all these different industries because i think that's so important to really bringing new and fresh and creative ideas uh to the forefront of you know the development and and whatnot so um and on that note with storytelling we had uh we excitedly got to partner with tribeca to help push the boundaries of storytelling in film through virtual production programs uh or it was called writing in unreal and if you haven't seen it there are a number of sessions at tribeca film.com unreal where we speak with industry experts on um this new pipeline for filmmaking and how to approach storytelling in real time experiences so definitely encourage you to check that out they're really really awesome so i think it's just an exciting time for real-time tools and uh the transformation of all this so um so speaking about sort of like cross collaborations um 2021 was featured a lot of incredible crossovers for our teams even at epic so we had the innovative fashion house valenciaga they wowed the world with afterworld the age of tomorrow a game to built to showcase their fall collection and then they took another major leap they were the first high fashion label to drop in fortnite with a set of digital outfits inspired by real life balenciaga silhouettes which is just crazy right so it's like we've been in games we've been in film and television and architecture um and now we're getting into fashion and that's crossing coming full circle back into fortnight in the game world so a lot of scan data and cad data models were absolutely vital to cr recreating like accurate digital versions of uh these outfits um beyond fashion or driving partnerships with automotive creators you know ferrari introduced its 296 gtb hybrid sports car in far fortnight oh gosh making history as the game's first highly realistic drivable vehicle so um and we have walkthroughs of a lot of these things so if you want to if you go to unreal engine.com and look at these spotlights you can see how a lot of these projects were made and put together so definitely do it's really fascinating technology and we were also excited to see the ue team a new unreal engine content on display during short nightmares we mentioned earlier the i from aaron sims creative featuring tethusen which is available for download on the marketplace and we will be monsters a short film created by animation and vfx house plastic wax so there's just a lot of really really fun and exciting collaborations across various industries tim i wanted to talk to you what do you think all these collaborations mean for the future what what is bringing all these together uh signal for our industries and real-time technology well you know right now it looks kind of like a variety show right there's all these crazy things happening on the rail from games to film uh to fashion to automotive and architecture and everything else but they're all part of a much larger trend which is the metaverse it's really starting to happen and we're seeing large parts of it coming together you know now in real time more and more of it every few weeks um and yeah there's a lot of hype around this uh there's reading about the metaverse of uh of fruit because like some fruit there's a real trend here underneath it all right and that is between fortnite and roblox and minecraft there's one third of a billion users who are engaging in these um you know real-time 3d social entertainment experiences which uh you arrange for everything from games like fortnite battle royale to roblox experiences that uh you really can't even call a game it's more like just a way of hanging out with your friends and doing interesting stuff together but um what it's going to do is it's going to bring all these separate businesses together on the foundation of real-time 3d assets and so the car the digital car that ferrari builds uh before they started before they've manufactured the first one while they're still in the design phase and prototyping it um you know will evolve throughout their development process and their marketing process and then before it comes to uh you know rhodes it's going to come to come to the metaverse um and same for every film and television product that's based on um you know real-time 3d production is a perfect opportunity uh to in parallel with the the linear content they're building um to build awesome real-time experiences you can participate in i think that's that's going to be really exciting and bring all these industries together in real-time 3d and it's going to be an awesome opportunity for all game developers because you know we're seeing a new family of platforms emerge previously you had to choose if you're going to build a game are you voting it for mobile platforms or console platforms or maybe pc now you have another major choice which is to start building content for the metaverse and this is one of the major areas we're working on and kind of building out the entire foundation of capabilities to get there everything everything from the tools to an economy um so that game developers can earn a living in this space um you know that is hopefully uh at some point in the near future more attractive than the living one could earn outside of uh outside of the metaverse trying to build an app for uh for the traditional stores and uh it's kind of a uniting trend right it's going to bring all these different industries together into a medium that's unlike anything that's existed previously and i think we can help it on it i hope for it being a much more positive experience than the things that we we live with today and technology and social you know uh you go to facebook and you're seeing all kinds of controversy in politics because the algorithm curates uh by engagement and negative content is engaging whereas when you're in fortnight um or you're in roblox you're generally hanging out with your friends you're on voice chat or text chat and you're having a good time with people you know and you're encountering strangers but it's always you know in a in a distant way in which you you're not constantly bombarded with all the all the negatives of the real world out there so it can be incredibly positive it can also transcend you know the pervasive advertising and annoyances that just in the online world now right instead of running an ad where you just have to watch some video for a period of time drop your awesome new consumer product into the metaverse uh as a drivable car um it's not an advertisement but builds brand awareness and it's super fun um and all these crossovers are going to be i think building a much more interesting foundation for the future of uh social than we've than we've had in the past and so we're doing a lot along these lines a little bit more every month and we just wish we could do it faster excellent thank you so much as part of that you know and empowering all kinds of uh developers beyond even unreal engine developers you know fortnight's a great way for us to bring features into gaming and now we're sort of decoupling that and building services on it so you know epic online services has had a big year uh simon what's happened since we last spoken and heard about eos oh a lot um like you know working back like you know he started building epic light services in 2019 with the intent of of making the cross-play capabilities be built for fortnite available for all games you know empower all developers to achieve similar results um so it's it's this whole set of free online services for game developments any developer can use them to ship their game across platforms you know with one set of services um before diving in more like um rajan made a great video summarizing what's available today if you could play that hi my name is rajin kishna and i'm a technical account manager here at epic games today we're taking a look at epic online services and how its free services can help you power your game with cross-platform functionality for authentication multiplayer voice chat and much more we built these services so you can add these features into your game without having to worry about infrastructure cost or building out these services yourself epic online services can roughly be divided into three sets of services game services to cover multiplayer progression and game operations epic account services which provide epic account identity friends and presence management and store services to manage epic game store transactions game services can be used with any identity provider for example discord google steam and of course epic while epic account services and store services are linked to an epic account you can use as little or as many of these services as you'd like and as mentioned you can use game services without using epic account services and vice versa so if you'd like to use epic online services peer-to-peer networking with your own matchmaking solution you certainly can right so let's see um you know and something an important thing to keep in mind is that these services are totally free for any developer so that includes folks developing on unity lumber yard godot any other engine yeah that's for sure um like for example far guys you know unity game been working closely with them you know make sure the integration experience truly works on the engine is optimal for their workflows part of that work included a plugin for unity which was developed to their partner play everywhere released publicly just a couple of months ago similarly for unreal we have an initial plug-in for oss you know for which much more is on the way as well all other engines you know the csdk is available so we really focus on you know making making this work on all engines for all developers it's all free um we as a company we truly believe in in openness and and democratizing the cross-play capabilities you know for all developers so this means free self-service and you know a few self-service services that you can integrate with basically any major account system an open id provider um some of these services also represents significant cost savings for developers for example this just this summer we launched cross-platform voice chat for free we also made easy enter cheat available through epic online services and and this is rooted in a belief of you know for cross-play to succeed you know we as an industry we we need to be able to connect players with you know empathy where voice that is great we need to keep our communities equal and fair across our platforms so we also rolled out services like moderation sanctions on many of these type of services for example moderations and sanctions we work closely with partners a great example is inner slots with among us they were just awesome partners to help us validate these services with a massive number of players and as we move closer to an open metaverse for epic we strongly believe it needs to be a safe and an enjoyable space for everyone you know and also all ages that's where super awesome also comes in with git's web services which provides an online parental consent toolkit that aims to make it easy for developers and for parents to manage authentication and verification this is available today as well for free you can sign up through the developer portal and with everything we do we want to make sure we're inclusive to as many platforms as possible it's probably an incomplete list but you know we cover pc mac linux all console platforms with playstation xbox nintendo as well as ios android um oculus and recently we also released support for steam deck specifically with easy enter cheat and this is all in the spirit of you know by supporting as many platforms as possible it gets us closer to achieving a goal of you know delivering an awesome player experience where there's no barriers to playing with friends you know that really starts with obvious which is being built at the moment but like you know we need to give players the ability to sign into any platform from any device have a ui that's easy to connect to with friends you know easy to integrate for developers consistent for players you know so players can play with friends regardless of platform um your or ethos is really your your friends should not be determined by the the hardware or the platform they are on but rather by the the games they love you know the moments they want to share together um how you want to spend time and we believe epic online services could be you know could be very well one of the components that helps the industry unlock the next billion of players you know connecting friends keeping them engaged just better experiences yeah absolutely love that and uh you mentioned so you mentioned actually the open metaverse what does open look like in the metaverse great question um i think we're just at the beginning of this um it's really a long term goal right like as just as a few foundational principles we want to get this right like um you know openness and and privacy are closely related in our minds like you know we we want to see an open social infrastructure for games right and for epic it's not a data harvesting strategy it's it's not done with the purpose of gathering user and developer information it's truly done with the purpose of building great software building great service services so other people can make their games better and contribute to this metaverse contribute to these virtual worlds that are all connected you know we need an ecosystem that that's without gatekeepers we need interoperability we need data standards um we need governance frameworks we need you know basically an infrastructure to connect an endless amount of virtual worlds you know send people on adventures that are never ending with friends truly engaging truly fun um you know developers and players need control of their data everything needs to be interconnected it's it's a lot to look forward to it's a lot to build i think it's it's not necessarily a 2022 thing but um we're we're on a journey and we'll get there we're on our own adventure marching that way uh that's right yeah so even though we can't do it all at once we're going to be making as many uh threads of progress uh towards us as we can um and you know one of the things that happening in the next year we hope to do it this year but coming next year is opening up the unreal editor tools um and this new versus scripting language um to the entire community to build fortnite content um you know with the hope that uh if our experiments work here that uh that could be a standards track uh programming language foundation for the metaverse um you know that we'd eventually launched as uh as an open source uh framework that other engines could adopt as well as roblox said with their uh their their scripting language um there's a lot to do there but you know i think we need to make progress on all fronts rather than waiting for the ultimate standard to solve all the problems at once there's gonna be a lot of work in the area of the economy right because to have an open economy it's actually quite complex right fortnight spending occurs in the item shop when people buy cosmetics but fortnight players engage with the game because of all these great fortnight creative experiences people play and so you need an economic foundation when you move to an open metaverse in which there's revenue sharing between all of these different creators of value who are participating to this together in this economy um they're going to need to be very technical standards for file formats and interoperability um and they're going to need to be content and rating standards because the metaverse needs to be a safe place and we need to before you go into a world you really want to know what's in there um and whether you're going into a you know safe space for any audience or mature themed place or whatever and you know there's a lot of foundational work to do there to to build all of this on a with the level of quality that you've come to expect from modern games fantastic um how do you feel or what role does eos specifically play in helping to build this this open metaverse simon oh you know one of the key parts of this is players being able to talk to each other and you know be able to really easily connect with their friends and right now before eos came along everything was very siloed you had xbox live uh the xbox platform playstation network locked the playstation platform um and steam and nintendo had one um you know in our aim initially with fortnite and then with the larger eos initiative for all developers has been to connect players across all these platforms this isn't an effort to create another world garden we want to interconnect our services our voice chat and our friends network with uh every other platform partner who's willing i think you know there's a real opportunity for that and everybody's recognizing that um the power of connecting all of these separate audiences uh you know if you find 100 million users here and 100 million users there then pretty soon you put them together and you find you have a lot of users um i think that's what we can do uh yeah by having all the ecosystem operators in the industry try to find ways to to work together this is just one step and it's kind of an example of the incremental nature of the metaverse voice chat across uh games and platforms isn't the metaverse but it's a key component um you know in establishing standards there to the future software stack that will power the metaverse and there are dozens of those components and we're going to build each of them in parallel and they're going to come online at different times and some will work and some won't and we're just kind of to learn along the way and refine it but the epic online services initiative is really an effort to transcend the platform boundaries and the ecosystem boundaries that currently adjust there and that we're really excited about that and proud of of what's being done there to can put the whole gaming world on a more solid foundation all right thank you so on on talking about growth and uh you know bringing more people into the ecosystem we wanted to welcome uh some various teams to the epic family we had a number of folks join us this year and we wanted to make sure to give them a shout out so earlier this year we had rad game tools join us bringing a suite of fantastic cross-platform data compression solutions um help you know they help make games smaller levels load faster um and bank video which is a performance based uh video codec so these are both now built into ue as of 427 so make sure you're leveraging those tools we're really excited to have them join and we certainly make use of their tools and hope you do too we've had game studios join us so the tonic games group for fall guys and just recently harmonix joined us which is a exciting opportunity you know makers of rock band and various musical experiences um also had capturing reality join us they are the creators of reality capture the state of the art photograph photogrammatic software for 3d scans um galen you've worked with a lot of their tools haven't you yeah i mean this is a this is a huge win for us specifically with the inside the qixel organization right because i i mean there's no secret right that you know capturing reality is the industry standard as far as you know actually processing photogrammetry data and you know to have them part of the family now is just such a huge win for the team um i mean the fact that uh we're able to like literally help influence you know pipeline and the decisions that they're making you know sort of working together now collaboratively uh you know as far as like you know hey we're looking to do these different things you know as far as processing um how can we work together you know to sort of make a better product you know uh i think that again it just really speaks to like building sort of like this big bigger team right that is able to kind of collaborate and stress test the tools and do all these different things i mean that's massive for us so um so yeah definitely love having the capture and reality team uh here at epic i think that we'll have some really really exciting announcements in the coming months so stay tuned [Laughter] um yeah so uh we've also had art stations join the family um with you know hoping to bring expanded tools and resources and connections to the creative community with that partnership we've reduced art station marketplace fees and they had announced when they joined us that their educational streaming platform art station learning would be free for the remainder of 2021 but they've just announced uh that art station learning will remain free so make sure to take advantage of that loads of great learning resources and tutorials there um we also had sketchfab join the team wonderful group of folks definitely want to make their offerings more profitable for creators so they also reduce their store fees and we're looking at ways to collaborate and be able to just show off all the incredible 3d content that's being made by creators around the world so big shout out to those teams we're super excited to have them part of the epic family and continue growing and seeing what else we can build together um let's see next uh we do want to give a shout out for the epic mega grand so we have a sizzle that was um just released uh earlier this week and so you know epic mega grants has always been about supporting developers and creators in a way that fosters innovation and success and so we really want to make sure that we can lift up everyone we're really excited to share that we've supported more than 1600 creators and teams across 89 countries so we've had nearly 400 new recipients benefiting from the program this year and there are all kinds of projects right you're talking medical training simulation we're talking really innovative game ideas full feature films small teams in various parts of the world just doing incredible stuff all kinds of stuff it's i just love seeing what our epic vagrants recipients are capable of and it's it's just an extension of you know the community and and what else they're um they're building and so don't have a lot more to add to the mega grants unless anyone else would like to all right well we'll keep moving but definitely go watch the full video and check out the the list that we just put out on our blog um you can see more details about some of the most recent announcements for each of those projects and they are definitely worth looking through we also wanted to give a shout out to our marketplace creators so this year we continued to release free content there's now over 700 free products on the marketplace and we cannot thank our marketplace creators enough for the amazing content they continue to generate and that then empowers the broader community with we love giving the monthly content away we also released a few special collections this year there was the downtown west modular pack we saw actual game assets from city of brass and the vagrant um we mentioned earlier the rural australia set and to thusun created by aaron sims we also have wind walker echo if you want to animate her and put her in your scenes like she's on the marketplace the slay animation sample project and the marketplace has just continued to grow so thank you all it's up 40 in the last year which is super exciting um so we just love seeing that continued growth within the community and also kind of on that note just a couple of days ago a brand new qixel mega scans pack appeared on the marketplace which is part of a larger recent announcement galen yeah i mean this is this is huge for us i mean trees are by far and away like the most requested asset type in the library that we've ever had and this this goes back years i mean like literally for as long as i've been here and even before that it's like winter trees gonna be in the library um trees are one of the most complicated asset types by far as far as creating 3d content i mean it takes so much work to actually get trees to actually look realistic first of all but also capturing them in such a way that is scientific based and you know creating parametric growth patterns and all these different things that we're looking to do specifically like with trees is something that has finally culminated in this release that we put out yesterday so um they're on the marketplace they're free for unreal engine users uh it's a small pack it's just the european black alder pack so um you think we have around 20 different models right there um but they're ready to use you can start dropping them into your projects today um and the thing that's so cool about them in my mind honestly is just that they come with so much control right so if you go in and start well actually we have a whole breakdown video so i won't get too into the weeds of that but like there's so much control that you can have you know as far as like changing the seasons of the tree so like the health of the actual trees you know the leaves themselves and the colors all these different things um so the team has worked incredibly hard so massive shout out to the apex team internally to be able to bring this to the community uh we cannot wait to see what people do with it so yeah so we dropped a link to that in chat if you haven't played with them go try it out and definitely give us your feedback you know um they are in early access so this is meant to be experimented with played with and a time for iteration so do let us know how you find those tools working for you those are really major beats for 2021 anything you would like to comment on or look what should folks look forward to the most in 2022 and in the future well unreal engine 5 launching is going to be a big thing with the official release and going into the regular uh update cycle um and uh you know we we launched fortnight on our neural engine five uh fortnite chapter three with the aim of getting it working and getting it out as opposed to taking advantage of radical new features at scale and so it's going to be quite a lot of interesting technology to experiment with um in the in the land of fortnite development there that the team will have to grapple with um the other thing is uh these tools we've been working on the honorable editor for fortnite and verus which we'd hope to ship this year the team's been working so hard on that it's just amazing amazing effort but what we don't have is a ready version of it and so that's going to be coming next year um and a lot of exciting uh things will come out of that there are many uh many other interesting and exciting things that will happen uh that we can't even talk about yet so it's gonna be another great year and uh a really exciting one for the world of 3d awesome thank you so much um thank you all for joining in today i know we're getting to the end of the year but it's always it's always really nice to look back and see just how far we've come in a year and um i know what pulling up the run of the show it's like wait that happened yet that happened this year wait are you sure and so time is weird yeah it is it really is but we really appreciate you taking the time to join us today thank you to the community um for joining us for being along on this journey with us and making all kinds of incredible projects it has been absolutely a pleasure to see your games your short films um your visualizations everything you've been working on we cannot like state enough how much we're always sharing projects internally and just being like oh my gosh did you see what this person did or that person did please keep it up you are constantly in a source of inspiration for our teams and it's why we do what we do so with that we want to leave you and wish you a wonderful holiday a happy new year and we will see you next january thank you all so much for joining us so all the best everyone [Music] you

Channel: Unreal Engine

Views: 15,107

Keywords: Unreal Engine, Epic Games, UE4, Unreal, Game Engine, Game Dev, Game Development, early access, game feature, game features, plugin

Id: yUuRZ8BJqbg

Length: 78min 15sec (4695 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021