‘Secret Level’ Director Tim Miller and Epic Games Execs Talk Hollywood’s Relationship With Unreal Engine as Version 5.5 Launches
“Fortnite” creator Epic Games kicked off its Unreal Fest event Tuesday with the debut of Unreal Engine 5.5 and previews for new features of the massively popular video-game-building tool. Used to produce not only AAA game titles, but also big-budget VFX-heavy shows like “The Mandalorian” and Tim Miller’s upcoming Amazon animated video game-focused anthology TV series “Secret Level,” Unreal Engine is Epic’s pride and joy and the service is adding more features to make it an attractive production tool for Hollywood.
Top of mind for Epic today was Unreal’s new experimental “MegaLights,” which “enables you to use orders of magnitude more lights than ever before—all movable, dynamic, with realistic area shadows and the ability to light volumetric fog.
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“When I started at Epic 10 and a half years ago, there was a big void between the way you would create content for a game versus a movie,” Epic Games chief technology officer Kim Libreri (the VFX mastermind behind “The Matrix” franchise) told Variety in an interview after Epic’s presentation out of Seattle. “Movies tend to not worry about polygon budgets or triangle budgets that much, or texture budgets or lighting budgets, because as long as yor pixel generated by the morning after, people were used to that. It was fine. And if people wanted to take advantage of real-time technology, where they can see the results right in front of their eyes and make modifications, the problem used to be you’d have to work with a bunch of constraints. The resolution of the actual meshes, the surfaces of the objects had to be low, the amount of lights– you could put three or four lights in a scene, and that was it. MegaLights will allow you to literally put 1,000 lights in the scene. You don’t have to worry about it. Unreal Engine does all the calculations, and you get a beautiful looking image.”
Libreri brought directors Miller (“Deadpool,” “Love, Death + Robots”) and Wes Ball (“Maze Runner,” “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”) on stage during the Unreal Fest panel to talk about their early adoption of Unreal Engine in filmmaking. Miller broke down how he’s used the tool for his new Amazon series, “Secret Level,” which features famous video game IP across its episodes and was made using some of those game’s actual builds in Unreal Engine.
Miller touted the benefits of Unreal’s new tech to Variety, saying: “If I was to put it in shorthand for Hollywood folks, I would say this, the saying that every director knows: you make your movie in prep. And the tools that they’re adding to Unreal to allow you to preview your movie, to preview whole scenes, to build whole sequences of scenes at a level that is high quality — because the whole team sees everything. Everybody thinks, we’ll just previs it and everybody will do their thing. But in fact, the previs becomes a blueprint for the film in a way that people can always refer to it, and always do refer to it, almost as gospel. So the better that previs looks, the better the scene is thought through, the more everybody can get on with their jobs of making it into the live-action world. So the fact that Unreal gives you these tools, and it looks good, gets people excited about the sequence of shots, or whatever it is you’re doing.”
Elsewhere during the Unreal presentation, Epic revealed a partnership with Paramount to bring its “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” universe into Epic’s “Fortnite” and allow players to build their own games featuring the IP using Unreal Editor for Fortnite.
“On the UEFN side, the fact that Paramount is allowing people to take a famous movie IP and be able to make experiences now is pretty interesting. It’s the beginning of IPs going to all destinations and actually engage in a community,” Libreri said.
Epic’s UEFN chief Saxs Persson broke down the goals for how this intersection between Hollywood and Unreal — which is not about making movies or TV shows, but allowing consumers to experience their content in games on their own terms — will affect the larger creator economy.
“Similar to if you can have photorealistic, real time for everyone on Unreal Engine, we’re trying to broaden what it means to be a creator, and then what tools you have access to,” Persson said. “There’s no reason if you are straight out of school, like you’re just sitting there and working on Unreal, you should be able to make something that looks just as good and just as impactful. But the other side of the coin is that the inspiration you get from IP is undeniable. People love making fan creations. And the collaboration with Paramount is all about giving access to ‘Turtles,’ giving access to make the game. You want to make a ‘Turtles’ game, and publish it, and for people to play it and enjoy commercial success — that whole thing, with a single-click agreement, being available to anyone that is a creator in ‘Fortnite’ is transformative to how we should think about fan creations and how you make lore in new IP.”
When it comes to keeping IP alive and continuing to evolve in new ways, Miller’s “Secret Level” is a special case for one title in particular: Sony’s “Concord,” a short-lived PlayStation live services game that was recently shutdown soon after its launch due to poor sales. Now, the only remaining new content tied to the game that fans will get to see is what’s featured in Miller’s series when it drops Dec. 10 on Amazon’s Prime Video.
“I would hope that people see something about the game that sparked some re-interest, because the team were really good folks to work with and we had a really good time,” Miller said. “It’s funny because people go, why are they putting that in there? And I would go, well, we started three years ago on this and the team was great. And at that time they didn’t have — particularly the games that are new, that haven’t been released, and there’s a few [other than ‘Concord’]– we start earlier than them, and sometimes they take our models and use them in the game.”
While Unreal Engine 5.5 is just out in previews, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney was already teasing plans for Unreal 6 during the company’s presentation Tuesday. And with more to come on the horizon, Miller has high hopes for what the Epic team can implement that will bridge the gap between the Hollywood and gaming VFX communities moving forward.
“We’re pretty close to parity with a lot of the tools that you can get with non-real-time rendering, if we’re just talking about visual effects and animation where,” Miller said. “I think we need maybe just a little more, another level of iteration, another level of reality, to be able to integrate the Unreal content, digital humans, whatever, with live action. There’s still little ways to go. And as much as I want to say that we’re across the uncanny valley, we’re not. I would say that we’re on the slopes of the other side and climbing upward, but we’re not across it yet. So any tools that we can continue to develop that get across the digital/human divide so people’s brains aren’t saying, something’s not right, the better.”
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