Fellow Scholars, there is a huge
new update for Unreal Engine 5.4, a popular game development platform.
Previously we showcased its extraordinary simulation capabilities, I really
flipped out when seeing those, hopefully you did too. And this new
batch of features is also incredible. It can do animation retargeting, that is,
an animation that you created for a bipedal character can now be transferred to someone
else. Do the animation once, reuse for many characters forever. Loving it. Especially that
moving these characters around just got easier as now you can say that this leg is actually a
leg and should be moved as such. Now this only takes a few clicks. Editing these skeletons
and bones also got easier and more efficient. And there is so much more, I
don’t even know where to start. Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute
Papers with Dr. Károly Zsolnai-Fehér. And here is one of my favorites, something
that you heard about on Two Minute Papers before. You see, we talked about amazing
computer animation papers where we have a database of real people moving around, and
we would like to transfer these movements to computer game characters. The trouble
usually is not with the movement itself, but with the transitions between these movements.
Pulling that off in a manner that looks realistic required plenty of research work,
and now, you know what happened? My favorite thing! The papers coming
alive in the real world around us. Oh yes, Motion matching has existed in Unreal
Engine as an experimental feature, but now it is ready for
production. Absolutely amazing. Now, rendering, or in other words, computing the
image that you see also got many improvements. Things got faster, that’s great, but look at
this…you can add these additional high-frequency details like cracks and bumps to a
piece of geometry during rendering, so you don’t even have to add these
to the geometry itself. You can keep it nice and clean in the editor when
you work with it, but when the player encounters it in the game itself, it gets
tons and tons of more detail. Loving it. Unreal Engine also has improved its super
resolution technique. You know this one, in goes a coarse image that you can compute
quickly, and out comes an image with lots of more detail that would otherwise take
much longer to compute. In practice, lots of people are using it to create a
1080p full HD footage and upscale it to 4K. And now it works better and more
predictably on multiple platforms. Or, if you wish to deform these
characters with a node-based system, that is also easier. The sequencer is now
better too, this looks like a little video editor program but it is for animating
scenes, characters and environments. Now, experimental features include a new mode for creating these really cool 2D
motion graphics with 3D objects. And if you would like to be immersed into these
3D video game worlds as you are working on them, new virtual production tools are also available.
Depth of field calculations, this is everyone’s favorite where the background gets blurred,
hopefully in a physically plausible manner, depending on the distance and the geometry
of the objects. Those are also now better, for instance, on these LED video screens
where the actors just stand in front of them and appear as if they were somewhere
else, in these cases, the results are way better than before. This way, you can mix real
actors with virtual 3D worlds more seamlessly. And these are just some of the new things it can
do. This system is an absolute powerhouse that can already create these incredible simulations, and
everything that you see here, and it gets better. Not a new feature, but something that I have to
show you. Metahuman. A realistic person creator, if you will. This is a culmination of a ton of
papers that we talk about here. For instance, the hair has to be simulated correctly,
often strand by strand. The appearance of skin has to be correct, and deformations to
the skin also have to be simulated correctly. With Metahuman Animator, where we can scan
ourselves, and enter a virtual world as a video game character. And this character
is able to mimic our gestures too. Wow. And note that the best part is that doing
everything that you saw in this video did not require the expertise of a group of
artists, a huge studio with a huge budget, and it did not even require months of work.
It is done right as we’re talking in minutes. And all of you Fellow Scholars can try
it for free. What a time to be alive!
