During the recent GDC 2019 Game Developers Conference, Epic Games held several technology demonstrations of the capabilities of new versions of the Unreal Engine. In addition to the fabulously beautiful Troll, which focused on real-time ray tracing technology, and a new demonstration of the Chaos physics and destruction system (later NVIDIA published a longer version of it), a photorealistic Rebirth short film from the Quixel team was shown.
Recall: Rebirth, despite the excellent level of photorealism, was executed in real time on the Unreal Engine 4.21. Now Quixel decided to talk about it in more detail. The demo uses the Megascans 2D and 3D physics-based assets library and was prepared by three artists who spent a month capturing various objects, regions and natural environments in Iceland.
According to the developers, the project is running on just one GeForce GTX 1080 Ti video card at more than 60 frames / s (obviously, at a resolution of 1920 Γ 1080). The following video demonstrates performance captured directly from the system screen inside the game engine - the fully compiled demo is much faster:
In the video, Quixel's Joe Garth shows that it's not just about realistic pictures: the whole environment created can be used in full-fledged interactive entertainment. The laws of physics act on the stones, you can interact with them in real time, change the color and density of the fog, post-processing effects like chromatic aberration or graininess, adjust fully dynamic lighting right there in the engine.
All this allowed the team to dramatically speed up the creation of the short, without waiting for the traditional ray-traced rendering pipeline to render the picture. The usual version of the Unreal Engine 4 and the huge library of Megascans objects optimized for games and VR allowed us to achieve quite impressive results relatively quickly.
Quixel includes artists from the gaming industry, visual effects and architectural visualization specialists, and photogrammetry. The team also promised to release a series of tutorial videos over the summer (apparently on their YouTube channel) in which Joe Garth will show you step by step how to create such photorealistic interactive worlds.
Source: 3dnews.ru