Epic Games has released The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 demo for the next generation of consoles: Xbox Series X / S and PlayStation 5. This is the first opportunity to evaluate the features of the new game engine and how it works on console hardware.

The interactive demo project was created by members of the original production team, including Lana Wachowski, James McTeigu and John Gaeta. The technical implementation was assisted by Epic Games staff and partners from other game studios.

The demo itself consists of three parts, demonstrating the various capabilities of Unreal Engine 5. In the first part, users are presented with photorealistic 3D models of characters - Keanu Reeves as Neo and Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity. Players can see the actors both in the form in which they were presented in the original film, and in the current form. The MetaHuman Creator technology is responsible for photorealism and accuracy, which allows you to create digital twins of people. It is important to note that the actors were scanned in advance, and the MetaHuman Creator was used for rigging and animation.

The first part of the demo is presented in the form of a narration and does not respond to pressing the controller buttons. The heroes walk through the episodes of the original trilogy, reflecting on the plot and what is real in the film's universe and what is not. It is important to note that the real Keanu Reeves, captured on video, appears only in the reflection of the mirror, the rest of the scenes show his 3D model.

Further dialogue and reflections are replaced by an interactive action scene with a chase and firefight. Here the player is already offered to participate in the process himself and try himself in shooting with a pistol and machine gun. From a technical point of view, it demonstrates large-scale explosions with a lot of particles, real-time ray tracing, lighting work and preserving a lot of background details.

In the last part of the demo, players are given the opportunity to independently explore the possibilities of the open world. Gamers can move around the city both on foot and using vehicles. In addition, at any time you can switch to the world settings menu and change the lighting and time of day parameters. The rendering of the game world is provided by the forces of Nanite and Lumen technologies. The first is a virtualized micro-polygon geometry system that allows developers to add cinematic-quality objects to games without sacrificing performance. Lumen technology is responsible for global illumination and is built on a non-real-time ray tracing system.

Most of the game world was generated using Houdini's procedural generation tools. The map itself turned out to be quite large-scale:

the width and length of the city is 4,138 m by 4,968 m, respectively, which is slightly larger than the size of downtown Los Angeles;

the area of ​​the city is 15.79 square kilometers;

260 km of roads, 512 km of pedestrian zones and 1,248 intersections in the city;

45,073 cars are parked throughout the entire area, of which 38,146 are driven and destructible;

there are 17,000 destructible cars on the roads;

a total of 7,000 buildings in the city;

27,848 street lampposts were installed in the streets;

35,000 photorealistic characters, modeled in MetaHuman Creator, pace the sidewalks;

in the daytime, the entire map is illuminated by a single source - the sun, at night the city is illuminated by thousands of windows and lanterns.

bbabo.Net