Yeah it’s creepy, but I do love the tech. It’s artist-friendly, way faster at rendering, and you can make it interactive fast.
Unreal Engine was first developed by Epic Games a long time ago. Well, it’s first generation was at least. It was actually an engine built for a game titled “Unreal”… so now you know where the name comes from. The game was a bit like Quake, but a slightly more modernized contemporary, and really started to push the gaming world toward more and more fantastic visuals.
Eventually, with a few blockbuster games under their belts, Epic design a game called Gears of War (which, is a pretty huge franchise that was eventually purchased by Microsoft), but the first Gears of War was also the debut of the Unreal Engine 3 technology.
That engine was… remarkable. It was a breakthrough in what was accomplish-able in real time graphics, running on the XBOX 360 hardware. It made every other game technically look like muddy sadness compared to what it could accomplish. It felt like a true next-generation engine that created deep shadows, ambient occlusion effects that provide a sense of volume to in-game assets, and shaders that reacted to the light in a more elegant matter than any other engine I’d seen to date, minus perhaps one contender: CryEngine from Crytek. But even so… Epics UE3 could arguably beat Cryengine for dark, moody interior scenes, and CERTAINLY was much more efficient, being able to produce a new standard of visuals on a console that wasn’t as powerful as the heavy PC power needed to run CryEngine.
So yeah… I’ve loved this engine forever. Epic, being some seriously gracious developers, also released a version of UE3 called UDK (the Unreal Development Kit) for indie developers who couldn’t afford the license to UE3… but had all the same features.
And then, in 2014… Epic released something even better. Although in the beginning it wasn’t quite as capable in some senses as its predecessor, Unreal Engine 4 was released to the mass of indie developers with a suite of artist-friendly tools like blueprints (a visual scripting system that connects nodes and parameters together via an interactive chart to build game functionality instead of code) and incredibly polished interface that was forgiving and accessible to people who want something that is beautiful to work with, and empowering to build interactive experiences and spaces and ideas with.
Not just that… it opened the door everyone else to start thinking in different ways how to visualize their projects no matter what field you work within. Real time graphics, if you know how to really work with the tool called Unreal, were suddenly good-enough to rival the renders that we all hate waiting for. The lighting, the shadows, the material-responses and the complexity scale allowance had become fine-tuned enough to pass for something you could easily be proud of in presentations and it meant less time spent on tweaking shots to correctly capture your vision. Now that’s a tool worth having in your designer-tool box.
Yes, it does take a bit of design-mind-changing to understand what the tool is great for, but once you get lost in the possibilities, you’ll see how much it both enhances your work, and how much it can change your concept of how to PRESENT your work. That’s pretty nifty…. not a lot of things can make stuff faster and better AND are actually a ton of fun to learn at the same time.
I began using real-time-rendering techniques years ago with Unity while I worked for a company called DCI Marketing in Milwaukee. We were developing retail environments for a very expensive piece of technology called the CAVE in the Retail Experience Lab… a special suite where important clientele were taken to reveal to them how scientific measures could be implemented to make better decisions and forecasts for developing designs and implementing them in the retail marketplaces. The CAVE was for special projects… we’d place dealerships for Triumph Motorcycles or Cadillac Dealership designs or high-end retail experiences into Unity game engine, and have clients stand in a three-walled room. Projectors would suddenly bring the space to life, projecting full-bleed imagery onto the walls and floor, and the camera perspective of the projections would change according to the client’s head movements in the room.
This gave the illusion of actually being in the proposed retail design… but without the gigantic expenditure of building out a prototype store for them. And it gave me a first glimpse of how real-time tech was altering how design will be accomplished. Any designer who could figure out how to leverage real-time tech, or faster tools, or had an inkling of where things were headed has a huge advantage: if you can bring your ideas into reaity faster, you have more time to explore more ideas.
And that led me to start on the two games I’ve been developing for a while… The Goatman is Nigh and The Lost Pisces. Suddenly a designer who doesn’t know anything about coding, could be empowered to build a game, even if it was just by your lonesome at first.
But it also led me to use it on a day-to-day basis and explore where i could leverage the tech for my day-job. It really changed how I worked, and over the years I’ve been happy to share the technique with other designers on the teams I’ve worked with. One day I’d love to go back to MIAD (the place I went to school for a BFA) and teach a course about the use of real-time engines because I honestly think that it will be SO ESSENTIAL, SO SOON in the workplace that it really is something that needs to be taught to young designers while they’re still in school to give them an advantage when they graduate and need a job!
That said, I implement Unreal in almost everything I do. And now, with the announcement and sneak-peak of Unreal Engine 5 just around the corner… I feel like this might REALLY change design. Some of the features they’re teasing so far include the ability to stream-in high-rez geometry… like a tens of millions of polygons like you get from engineering CAD software or modeling-tools like Zbrush. And when I say “stream-in” I mean you’re no longer going through the insanely tedious effort of reducing models anymore… the geometry is literally the same geometry from the other software. Couple this with ray-tracing techniques and algorithms being finely tuned to work on probably the next -generation of GPUs from NVIDIA (the predecessor to the RTX series currently available) and we will see visuals that rival movie-quality imagery.
The next 2-4 years should be amazing in terms of leaps in graphics, and Unreal 5 will drive that. So, if you’re a designer, my suggestion is this: LEARN UNREAL NOW. Because you need to stay fresh, energetic, passionate and flexible. Real-time tech allows for this and it’s going to be your best friend too! So get learning!
