The Unreal Engine 5 can create very impressive images, as a new video shows. The scenes shown from a virtual workshop look amazingly real.
It’s no longer a secret that the Unreal Engine can create impressive environments. It feels like we’re constantly seeing an old game spruced up in the engine or fancy tech demos. But ray tracing in its extended form, or path tracing, puts the crown on the whole thing. With this and a lot of attention to detail, almost photo-realistic environments can be created.
The prop master and environment artist Daniel Martinger has done just that. He has created a small, cosy carpenter’s workshop that is hardly distinguishable from a real one. By his own account, it is A small cellar in the Swedish countryside where an elderly man spends his time carpentering.
Yet the workshop is not based on photoscans of a real environment somewhere in Sweden – it is completely self-built. Only the metal texture and the texture for the floor come from the material database of the scan provider Quixel. The environment is based on a wish of the artist to have his own little workshop in the basement. You can see the result of his work here:
However, even this environment is not perfect. In some places you can see slight flickering of the light or on the stone wall. But these are only small flaws in an overall very successful tech demo.
But it is still just that, a very static tech demo. Meanwhile, a new game inspired by Last of Us shows what Unreal Engine 5 can do in games:
The Unreal Engine’s Path Tracer makes it possible
A big factor for photorealistic environments is lighting. Daniel Martinger created this with the Path Tracer feature of the Unreal Engine 5. This is basically an extended type of ray tracing.
The technology provides physically correct global illumination, reflections and refraction for different materials. It was developed for photorealistic renderings and is less suitable for real-time applications such as games, as it is very hardware-hungry.
Do you think photorealistic graphics will come to games sooner or later? When can we have enough computing power in the living room to make that happen? Your opinion is needed.
