Unreal Engine
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2023
10:57 · 9.2M views · Dec 10, 2021
Epic's Unreal Engine 5 tech demo set in the Matrix universe, with Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. It moves from a cinematic to a playable car chase through a large detailed city, with a behind-the-scenes look at the rendering at the end.
Cited as an impressive real-time rendering showcase, with Nanite and a huge photorealistic city, that rivals film CGI.
6 comments from Hacker News
No, but it is a full time job. It's getting much more complicated. Here's an hour long talk on how Unreal Engine 5's Nanite works.[1] This is a huge breakthrough in level of detail theory. Things that used to be O(N) are now O(1). With enough pre-computation, rendering cost does not go up with scene size. See this demo.[2] You can download the demo for Xbox X/S and PlayStation 5, and soon, in source form for PCs. Explore 16 square kilometers of photorealistic city in which you can see a close-up view of anything. The format of assets in memory for Nanite becomes far more complicated. GPUs need a redesign again; UE5 has to do more of the rendering on the CPUs than they'd like. What they need to do is simple but not well suited to current GPU designs. It's such a huge win this approach will take over, despite that. New game engines will need to have something comparable. Maybe using the same format. Epic doesn't seem to be making patent claims, and the code for all this is in the Unreal Engine 5 download. (Basic concept of how this works: A mesh becomes a hierarchy of meshes, allowing zoom in and out of on level of detail. The approach to subdivision is seamless. You divide the mesh into cells of about 20 triangles. Then, each cell is cut by one or two new long edges across the cell. These become the boundaries of a simpler cell with about half as many triangles, but no new vertices. The lower-resolution cell has no more edges than the higher-resolution cell. There's a neat gra
It the demo video (play through) they say it was rendered in real time right at the beginning. Also down in the corner which console its being rendered on,shows up from time to time. so I’m assuming it’s not faked. It looks quite good. Not reality but the cityscape is pretty close.. The fun part is the end where they show the some of the secret sauce of how it was rendered. this video
> ...but also poorly made. This. Linked video [0] is entirely CGI generated in real time , and it looks better than the CGI in most modern Hollywood blockbuster movies, which can spend 10 minutes rendering each frame if they need to. I'm not a gamer but people familiar with modern video games probably already know this. There's no excuse for the lack of quality in modern movie CGI other than "we refuse to pay what good CGI artists are worth." [0] this video
Keanu looked insanely good at the beginning of the white room scene, but then I realized it was real footage when they switched to the uncanny-valley-esque version at 1:41… this video
Has anyone tried the Unreal Engine's "The Matrix Awakens" * tech demo on the PS5 or XBoxen? The settings menu looks like this. Another recent homage to the late 90s. 1. this video