At the GDC 2019 Game Developers Conference, during the State of Unreal presentation, the Quixel team, known for their expertise in the field of photogrammetry, presented their short film Rebirth, in which they showed an excellent level of photorealism on the Unreal Engine 4.21. It is worth saying that the demo was prepared by just three artists and uses a library of Megascans 2D and 3D assets created from physical objects.
To prepare for the project, Quixel spent a month scanning communities in Iceland in freezing rain and thunderstorms, returning with more than a thousand scans. They captured a wide range of regions and natural environments, which were then used to create the short film.
The result was a real-time, cinematic demo of Rebirth, less than two minutes long, set in a futuristic alien environment. The Megascans library provided standardized materials, which simplified production by eliminating the need to create assets from scratch. And the high accuracy of scanning, based on physical data, made it possible to achieve photorealistic results.
Quixel includes artists from the gaming industry, visual effects specialists and architectural rendering specialists. The team was tasked with proving that the Unreal Engine allows multiple industries to come together and use a real-time pipeline. To bring the project to life, partners such as Beauty & the Bit, SideFX and Ember Lab were involved in the work.
With Unreal Engine 4.21 at the heart of the pipeline, Quixel artists were able to change the scene in real time without the need for pre-rendering or post-processing. The team also created a physical camera that was capable of capturing motion, enhancing the sense of realism in virtual reality. All post-processing and color correction was done directly inside Unreal.
Source: 3dnews.ru