Image: Epic Games
Videogame or real life? These new Unreal Engine 5 tech demos are almost indistinguishable from the real thing.
Epic Games took to this week’s Game Developers Conference to show off a bunch of updates and next-gen tech demos for its highly-popular game engine Unreal Engine 5. One of these tech demos was for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, showcasing the sequel’s jaw-droppingly good facial animation technology.
Here’s the video:
Developer Ninja Theory (now under the Xbox Game Studios umbrella) is using Unreal Engine 5 to bring its action-adventure sequel Hellblade 2 to life. Previous gameplay trailers for the game have been pretty gorgeous to look at, but this tech demo specifically hones in on its engine's ability to convert real-life performance capture into photorealistic facial animation in-game.
In an earlier part of Epic’s presentation, the company demonstrated how an actor’s performance can be captured using a simple device like an iPhone camera, before being turned into in-game facial animation using Unreal Engine 5’s MetaHuman technology. This feature allows the engine to convert simple performance footage into expressive and detailed facial animation on a virtual 3D model, easing the burden of animators who would’ve had to do it themselves.
In the video above, we see Melina Juergens, who plays series protagonist Senua, perform a short monologue while in character using more complicated motion capture equipment. Obviously, this yields better results as seen in the wide range of expressions Juergens demonstrates as Senua in these short 60 seconds. Hellblade 2 doesn’t have a release date, but we could hear more about it in Xbox’s June games showcase.
Epic also showed off a demo for Unreal Engine 5.2, which featured some pretty impressive procedural worldbuilding and foliage rendering. The tech demo centers on a pristine forest environment filled with lush greenery and babbling brooks, all to showcase the incredibly detailed visuals this engine is capable of putting out.
We also saw a demonstration for Unreal Engine 5’s new Substrate feature, which allows developers to seamlessly swap the materials that make up an object with ease, while retaining its photorealistic quality. Epic showed this off by swapping a car’s metallic paint job with a crystalline opal material, which reflected light differently depending on whether or not the truck was covered in dirt.
Epic also demonstrated procedural tools that will allow developers to create huge open-world environments easily, just by allowing them to move objects around and quickly populate spaces intelligently and automatically. All in all, an impressive showcase for what is shaping up to be the best game engine available for smaller game developers.