Epic Games, in collaboration with NVIDIA and ILMxLAB, gave the first public demonstration of real-time ray tracing in Unreal Engine. Real-time ray tracing is considered to be a holy grail for those creating high-end cinematic imagery, and one that signifies a leap forward in the convergence of film and games. During Epic’s “State of Unreal” opening session at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the three companies presented an experimental cinematic demo using Star Wars characters from The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi built with Unreal Engine 4. The demonstration is powered by NVIDIA’s RTX technology for Volta GPUs, available via Microsoft’s DirectX Ray Tracing API (DXR). An iPad running ARKit is used as a virtual camera to draw focus to fine details in up-close views. Epic built the computer-generated (CG) scene using assets from Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi featuring Captain Phasma, clad in her distinctive armor of salvaged chromium, and two stormtroopers who run into her on an elevator on the First Order ship. In the tech demo, lighting is moved around the scene interactively, as the ray-traced effects including shadows and photorealistic reflections render in real time. The stunning image quality of highly reflective surfaces and soft shadows has never before been achieved at such a high level of image fidelity in Unreal Engine. Next-generation rendering features shown in today’s demo include:
● Textured area lights
● Ray-traced area light shadows
● Ray-traced reflections
● Ray-traced ambient occlusion
● Cinematic depth of field (DOF)
● NVIDIA GameWorks ray tracing denoising ABOUT ILMxLAB ILMxLAB,
Lucasfilm’s Immersive Entertainment division founded in 2015, combines compelling storytelling, technological innovation and world-class production to create truly impactful, immersive entertainment experiences. ILMxLAB develops experiences for virtual reality, augmented/mixed reality, real-time cinema, theme park entertainment and narrative-based experiences for future platforms.