JAMES TOMLINSON: Crossover between games and films
is shortening all the time.
ROEL COUCKE: The two industries are quite different,
but they are merging together.
HUW EVANS: That kind of idea of taking the real-time game engine,
pushing out final quality renders, for us at DNEG was super exciting.
DAN GLASS: The size and detail of assets, the richness and quality
of lighting that comes out of Unreal nowadays is insane.
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The scene in our movie with the Dojo, it's a homage to the first film.
But this time, Lana wanted to have the Dojo itself on a small lake
that sits in a wooded environment.
And it felt a great opportunity with Unreal
to build a simulation environment.
HUW EVANS: Just from a story point of view,
it's an artificial construct that Neo's
entering so we could create our own matrix
within a matrix of visual effects.
We can use this game engine within our VFX pipeline
which is quite exciting to us.
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Lana worked with Epic to help create that environment.
It was sort of structured as three separate lakes with the two bridges
joining them together surrounded by forest of beautiful autumnal trees.
ROEL COUCKE: The challenge there was it's in the middle of a lake,
so we knew we would have to make sure that we
are able to achieve the reflections exactly like how we wanted it to.
And make sure we sell the water because that
was such an essential element of the environment.
QUENTIN MARMIER: From a pure technical rendering standpoint,
that's fairly difficult to do, especially with game engine.
But thanks to the ray tracing that we were
able to use within Unreal Engine, we are now able to do that
and to a quality level that matches what's required for movies.
And all of this is just happening in real time.
So once you create your environment, it is done.
It just works.
ROEL COUCKE: What you see in the final image
for the sequence is mostly all coming directly from Unreal.
So that is quite a unique thing to say because traditionally we
would definitely use Unreal for previs and post-vis,
but this was the first time where I truly wanted to say,
what you see in the final film is coming from the Unreal Engine.
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HUW EVANS: In rendered VFX, were so used
to seeing things take hours, sometimes days, to render.
But having that in real time and being
able to see it at a really decent quality still blows my mind.
JAMES TOMLINSON: You want to tweak a light in a scene?
You want to change the sun angle for a specific shot?
You get that instant feedback.
You don't have to press a button, hit render and wait for 25 minutes.
Instant results.
Everyone's happy.
HUW EVANS: Being able to spend more time artistically
rather than being constrained by the technical side of things,
I think that is a huge benefit to Unreal and real-time workflows.
JAMES TOMLINSON: One lighting artist or one environment artist
might submit two, maybe three, shots if they're lucky.
With the Unreal Engine, and the Render Queue integrated
into our pipeline, we had the ability to submit over a dozen
on a daily basis.
ROEL COUCKE: The Movie Render Queue really surprised us
from the point of view where we could leverage the engine in ways that we
didn't think were possible.
So for example, we had to separate the volumetric into its own render.
So traditionally with the Movie Render Queue
that's not possible as a preset.
So we made a preset through a game mode
that triggers Blueprint logic that would
modify the scene in such a way where all the assets turned black.
And that gave us purely the volumetric
that was written into an EXR for the compositing department
so they can fully control how much or how little fog
they want within their shot.
And this was all seamless for the artist.
DAN GLASS: It was exciting to be part of helping shift
and develop the Unreal tool towards production moviemaking.
HUW EVANS: I'd like to think that we helped bring things
into visual effects that weren't necessarily thought of
or weren't necessarily there.
ROEL COUCKE: What you can actually see in the present day
is the public release of the latest version
that people have access to has a lot of the features
that we originally asked for.
So it's definitely great to see and it will only
help films moving forward.
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