Monday, May 4th 2020
Is This the Future of Unreal Engine 4?
The folks over at Dekogon Studios, a game art outsourcing studio, have published on their ArtStation account some Unreal Engine 4 renders to showcase their creative vision and technological mastering of Epic's acclaimed engine. Being one of the more commonly used game development engines due to its rendering quality, ease of use and pipeline flexibility, Unreal Engine is one of the benchmarks for visual quality in the gaming world. These renders from Dekogon Studios using the latest version of Unreal Engine and employing raytracing are absolutely beautiful and incredibly, richly detailed.
While we don't know how many frames per second a modern graphics card could generate at this level of detail (or if it would take seconds to generate a single frame), one can always dream of gaming in environments with the same quality as the showcased basketball court or science classroom (FEAR 2, anyone?). Other environments are slightly less impressive and seem to have taken slightly less attention, but I myself can pretty much see this level of detail on my next Life is Strange or Detroit: Become Human. So, games development studios... Make it happen, please! Look after the break for some videos showcasing these beautiful environments.
Sources:
Dekogon @ ArtStation, via DSO Gaming
While we don't know how many frames per second a modern graphics card could generate at this level of detail (or if it would take seconds to generate a single frame), one can always dream of gaming in environments with the same quality as the showcased basketball court or science classroom (FEAR 2, anyone?). Other environments are slightly less impressive and seem to have taken slightly less attention, but I myself can pretty much see this level of detail on my next Life is Strange or Detroit: Become Human. So, games development studios... Make it happen, please! Look after the break for some videos showcasing these beautiful environments.
16 Comments on Is This the Future of Unreal Engine 4?
www.unrealengine.com/en-US/developer-interviews/how-carbon-studios-used-ue4-to-make-vr-magic-with-the-wizards
These look really amazing, only give away is the lack of dirt and lived in feel, especially the train. I’ve never been on a clean train carriage in my life LOL.
Decade-old engines could come close to this level of detail, provided you threw enough man-hours at creating the content for it. Games and animations in general are currently all compromises where the desired image quality is weighed against the man hours of work to achieve it, and then scaled down to some affordable middle-ground.
We're seeing improvements to real-world object capture and dynamic/automatic content creation. That's the cool stuff that will make our games prettier. The rendering engine really is only a tiny part of the end result.
I mean, it's not like ray tracing itself makes things glossy. Tweak a parameter here and there and it will look just fine.
For the same reason, simplified raytracing with a denoise filter looks too clean and uniform. Actual shadows and lighting are far more complex which adds to the noise and we need that distortion of noise to highlight surface imperfections.
So perfect geometry and smooth raytracing gives us this creepy 99% believable, overly-perfect result that is clearly fake.