Today Epic Games revealed the “The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience” demo clip, which can be downloaded for free on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
This breakthrough technology demonstration is an original concept, set in the world of Warner Bros.’s “The Matrix”.
“The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience” was written and directed by Lana Wachowski. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss also played Neo and Trinity again, and played themselves in the reversed real world.
The real “The Matrix 4” movie will be released in China on January 14 next year.
The project reunited many staff who had participated in the production of the classic “The Matrix” trilogy.
The teams of Epic Games and its partners also participated in the collaboration, including SideFX, Evil Eye Pictures, The Coalition, WetaFX (formerly Weta Digital) and many other companies.
Wachowski, Libreri and Gaeta were good friends when they made the trilogy.
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“When I told them that I was going to make another “The Matrix” movie, they suggested that I play in Epic’s sandbox.”
Wachowski said, “Oh my god, that’s a magical sandbox!”
“In my imagination, the first company to create a true Matrix (a timeless world that immerses people) will be a gaming company, and Epic is undoubtedly paving the way for this. The progress made in the gaming industry over the past two decades Unbelievable.”
“Keanu and Carrie, I, and I felt very happy when we were making this demo. The sandbox provided by Epic is very special because they love experimentation and love dreams. Regardless of the future of cinematic narrative, Epic will play an important role in this development process. Role.”
With the addition of Wachowski and many of the original crews, the team began to use Unreal Engine 5 to achieve their feat: to integrate multiple art forms into an experience in exciting new ways.
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The demonstration started with a movie shot, starring a very realistic digital human, and then transformed into an interactive experience including fast-paced car chases and third-person shooting operations.
All of this takes place in a spectacular, prosperous, and exploreable open world city, just like the simulated world in The Matrix, extremely colorful and complicated.
This photo-real world covers an area of 16 square kilometers, can be traversed quickly, and is full of lifelike residents and moving vehicles.
This experience truly proves that Unreal Engine 5 can provide all the components you need to build an immersive ultra-high-fidelity environment.
Although the city is very complex, thanks to a series of procedural tools included in SideFX Houdini, a relatively small core team can also create this experience.
From the size of the highway and the height of the building to the amount of debris on the sidewalk, the procedural rules define how the world is generated.
Using this workflow, you can modify the input rules, and the entire city will change accordingly and be redefined by those new instructions.
This is very powerful for small teams who want to build an open world.
This means that until the day of final delivery, you can regenerate the entire city and continuously adjust and improve it.
This opens up many creative possibilities and proves that any team, big or small, can make a 3A game quality open world in Unreal Engine 5.
The city in “The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience” is a lively and vigorous environment that will never stop operating.
Because the system that drives the characters is part of the global simulation and is in a state of constant calculation, the activities that take place in the city appear more coherent and credible.
In block after block, whether you are looking at them or not, the realistic characters and vehicles powered by AI are constantly moving.
This not only shows that such an amazing visual environment can be constructed now, but also opens the door to a new way of narrative.
The high-fidelity simulation capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 enable a new process: film creation through simulation.
Many of the scenes in the demonstration are derived from the wonderful scenes captured by the staff driving cars in the city.
The team can use the simulated universe to create movie content, just as a real-life movie maker finds the best streets in the city to tell their stories.
But this has no physical limitations of the real world.
Our ancient valley example project gave us a glimpse of the new technologies implemented in Unreal Engine 5, and “The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience” took another step forward: this is an interactive experience that runs in real time. You can download it now on Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5.
In the demonstration, extremely realistic digital humans reproduced the performance and appearance of Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss.
To this end, Epic’s 3Lateral team performed high-fidelity 3D scans of the actors’ faces and captured their performances in 4D at their studio in Novi Sad.
This open world city environment includes the hero character IO, the starting character of MetaHuman Creator.
Thousands of MetaHuman agents demonstrated the exciting new possibility of creating high-fidelity game characters on a large scale.
The AI system drives the characters and vehicles, and the programmed system built with Houdini generates the city.
The world partition system of Unreal Engine 5 makes the development of a broad environment easier to manage.
The movement of vehicles, the clothing of characters, and the destruction of buildings are all simulated in the engine using the Chaos physics system of Unreal Engine.
In the chase experience, since the collision of the car is simulated in real time by Chaos, the same collision will never happen twice.
Each run is unique.
The two Unreal Engine 5 functions, Nanite and Lumen, which were previously shown, also showed excellent performance in this technology demonstration.
In the dense open world city environment, Unreal Engine 5 virtualized micro-polygon geometry system exerts its expertise.
The city includes 7 million instantiated assets, each consisting of millions of polygons.
Among them are 7,000 buildings composed of thousands of modular components, 45073 parked vehicles (38,146 can drive), more than 260 kilometers of roads, 512 kilometers of sidewalks, 1,248 crossroads, 27,848 lamp posts, and 12,422 Manhole.
Nanite can intelligently stream and process these millions of polygons, rendering everything with cinematic quality and super fast speed.
Unreal Engine 5’s fully dynamic global illumination system Lumen uses real-time ray tracing technology to provide very realistic lighting and reflections throughout the interactive part of the demonstration.
Real-time ray tracing can also be used for movie elements to produce beautiful, realistic soft shadows of characters.
At the same frame rate, by using Unreal Engine 5’s next-generation up-sampling algorithm-temporal super resolution, the definition of each pixel is four times higher than other algorithms.
This allows players to experience more refined geometric details, better lighting and richer special effects at higher resolutions.
When we enter the meta-universe era, we will be able to use these technologies and build huge open worlds, which presents exciting possibilities.
“The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience” gave us a glimpse of what these worlds look like.
They can be as highly stylized as the environment in Fortnite, or they can be as real as the real world.
“The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience” is not a game, but the technology demonstration provides a vision for future interactive content: creating colorful and complex cities and environments, as well as realistic and eye-catching movie scenes.
With the release of Unreal Engine 5, creators will have the ability to build a colorful world.
For consumers and players, a new world of experience is coming.
For all of us, the future of interactive narrative and entertainment is just beginning.
