CARY – Remember the old commercial line “Is it real or is it Memorex?” regarding tape vs. live audio? Well, fast forward to 2018. Epic Games is pushing ever closer to producing computer generated imagery – special effects – to film-like quality.
Is that a real Porsche 911 Speedster or CGI? See photo above. You decide.
Yes, there’s more to Epic than its widly popular game Fortnite that is a global sensation and has made the privately held company worth several billion dollars.
What might this advance add to the bottom line?
The Cary-based company took another step toward what it calls “photorealism” earlier this week, demonstrating remarkable high-quality CG video of a Porsche in collaboration with the car maker and high-end computer chip manufacturer Nvidia in what they call “The Speed of Light.”
Epic used its latest version of the widely used game development engine Unreal while Nvidia provided Quadro RTX graphic cards for the project.
The emerging technology produced what Hollywood news site Variety called a “stunning realistic concept video” with emerging technology known aas real-time ray tracing, The technology adds reflections, shadows, area lighting and more to cobble together a more realistic version of what film would capture.
“The Porsche 911 Speedster Concept is the first car to be visualized with interactive real-time ray tracing,” Francios Antoine of Epic Games explained in a statement. “In concert with Nvidia we’re accelerating the adoption of real-time ray tracing across many industries.”
“When you see the quality of the cinematic, it’s remarkable to note that no baking or lightmaps were required. There is no precomputed lighting—it’s all fully dynamic for both objects and light,” he added.
Watch the video:
“NVIDIA RTX technology is purpose-built to provide a generational leap in the quality of real-time computer graphics, and ‘The Speed of Light’ perfectly demonstrates that we are delivering on our promises,” said Tony Tamasi, senior vie president of Content and Technology at NVIDIA. “With Unreal Engine it’s possible to create physically-accurate, realistic scenes that feature a level of fidelity and detail we’ve previously only been able to imagine.”
Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told WRAL TechWire in March of 2017 that the latest version of the game engine, Unreal Engine 4, would open the way for significant advances in computer generated graphics.
“The big effort in UE4 was to create an engine that was capable of photorealism using photogrammetry at the core of it, physically-based rendering and these other advanced automates that try to simulate actual reality, as opposed to some scionized version of computer graphics,” he explained.
Read more at:
Epic Games’ press announcement
Epic Games, Porsche, Nvidia Showcase Graphics ‘Indistinguishable From Reality’
