Is This the Future of Unreal Engine 4?

[Raevenlord]

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.

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Cranky5150]

Unreal 4 is a strong enigine for sure. It would be great to see someone tap into the full capabilities of it..

 

[xkm1948]

It is also a top notch engine for implementing VR.

How Carbon Studios Used UE4 to Make VR Magic with ‘The Wizards’

Game and Level Designer Jakub Pander discusses the ways in which Unreal Engine 4 helped the team create ‘The Wizards’, which recently arrived in Early Access.

www.unrealengine.com

 

[Mysteoa]

The Gymnasium picture looks real to me.

 

[ARF]

The Gymnasium picture looks real to me.

Why do they always put images of scenes which you probably will never see in a game ?

 

[bug]

Why do they always put images of scenes which you probably will never see in a game ?

Because the engine can be used for something other than games maybe? Think simulations. Of anything.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Everything is...too...perfect. I'd say they're 90% to photo-realism. From 10 feet away though, probably couldn't tell it's not a photo.

 

[Minus Infinity]

Because the engine can be used for something other than games maybe? Think simulations. Of anything.

Also many of the architecture programs use rendering for final product, they would snap this up in a heartbeat, the level of realism is superb. Showing a client how the interior of the house would look at different times of the day would be big advantage to them.

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.

 

[my_name_is_earl]

If you want to play something like that, you'll probably need an RTX 3080 Ti to get that result. We all cringe on how much it might cost. Med to low settings for everyone.

 

[Aoyagi]

The future? It's the current state of it. Moody colours and film grain are not the exactly highest technological achievement.

 

[SamWarrick]

Because the engine can be used for something other than games maybe? Think simulations. Of anything.

School shootings?

 

[CheapMeat]

We're getting very close to photo-realism but one thing that "takes me out" of the immersion is just how glossy/shiny everything is, like everything, including the furniture has been waxed. It's always telling my brain that it's still not quite "real". If that's what is getting aimed for. Plus most objects, if multiple, seem to be "too perfect", like copy paste perfection. Not that it's bad or anything.

 

[Chrispy_]

As someone working for the graphics modelling industry, I can confidently say that rendering engines outperform the cost of actually modelling things in them.

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.

 

[Octopuss]

That's renders? What the hell, I can't tell, really

 

[bug]

We're getting very close to photo-realism but one thing that "takes me out" of the immersion is just how glossy/shiny everything is, like everything, including the furniture has been waxed. It's always telling my brain that it's still not quite "real". If that's what is getting aimed for. Plus most objects, if multiple, seem to be "too perfect", like copy paste perfection. Not that it's bad or anything.

It takes a while till programmers harness the artistic part. But it will get there.
I mean, it's not like ray tracing itself makes things glossy. Tweak a parameter here and there and it will look just fine.

 

[Chrispy_]

We're getting very close to photo-realism but one thing that "takes me out" of the immersion is just how glossy/shiny everything is, like everything, including the furniture has been waxed. It's always telling my brain that it's still not quite "real". If that's what is getting aimed for. Plus most objects, if multiple, seem to be "too perfect", like copy paste perfection. Not that it's bad or anything.

"Too perfect" is why you're in uncanny valley. Even flat surfaces should be slightly uneven to mimic real life and nothing is ever that clean in reality. Also, despite the raytracing, it's simplified raytracing with a denoise filter.

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.

 

[R-T-B]

Everything is...too...perfect.

I dunno. I can practically smell the good ol' high school bleachers, and it ain't perfect.