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hey everyone it’s great to be back at GDC
you know back in 2020 as the pandemic was ramping up we were the last major
company to drop out of GDC we’re the first to go all remote and then we
headed into the pandemic it was a completely crazy time with thousands of
people working from around their homes but the company thrived and so I’d like
to go through some of the things that we’ve done since the since the last GDC
first of all we launched project Liberty epic challenge the App Store monopolies
yeah we’re in front of the ninth Circuit Court Europe has passed major new
legislation and the fight goes on for the freedom of all Developers
mediatonic joined epic um launched Fall Guys for free and
brought in 60 million new players bandcamp the Indie music site joined
epic bandcamp helps Indie musicians reach fans online today and we’re going
to build metaverse opportunities for all musicians in the future
fortnite Thrive during this time we launched two major chapters lots of
seasons and brought the fortnite audience up to 500 million player
accounts Travis Scott launched the astronomical
concert into fortnite Ariana Grande launched the rifter
and so overall fortnite had a really great time with tons and tons of players
enjoying and the world constantly evolving
we also learned some hard lessons Epic into a massive settlement with the
FTC it really brought home to us and to the whole industry that kids in
technology are a pressing topic for all developers to take seriously and that
the expectations of regulators here in the United States and around the world
are much higher than ever before and so we’ve done a lot over the past
few years to improve things we’ve had huge sets of new parental controls into
fortnite and the epic game store and the child safety features like cabin
accounts and being epic when we solve a problem for ourselves we like to bring
it to all other developers so they can benefit from the work and to that end
super awesome joined epic super awesome makes verifiable parental consent tools
they are available to all Developers for free so it becomes much easier to comply
with all the regulatory laws around children’s access to games worldwide
we also launched on your own Engine 5 into Early Access during the pandemic we
went through a year yes
went through a year of Early Access followed by release we updated fortnite
to Unreal Engine 5 and then we spent a whole year visually upgrading fortnite
to the latest capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 and which we launched late last
year and we’ll be showing later in this show
epic game store also thrived the player in race has grown massively during this
time to over 230 million players on PC we’ve uh paid out more than a billion
dollars to all developers and we’ve also just very recently launched
self-publishing so it’s easier than ever before to launch your game to all
customers in the PC market with really straightforward tools and earn 80 88 of
all revenue but that’s a summary of the past and
this day of unreal is about the future so I’d like to invite Nick penwarden to
come up and talk about Unreal Engine 5.2 thanks
all right thank you Tim
thanks Tim and hi everyone I’m excited to get to show you some of the new
experimental features we’ve been working on for Unreal Engine 5.2
let’s take a look
all right so last year we added several new features to the engine to support
foliage rendering and the fortnite team used those features to ship battle
royale chapter 4. at the same time Jacob over there and the team at qixel were
experimenting with what’s possible for photoreal foliage environments as well
as testing out the latest functionality that we’ve been building for Unreal
Engine so Jacob’s here with us today in the
unreal editor let’s explore the environment and what better way to do
that than off-roading and what better way to off-road than an arivian r1t
now rivian uses unreal to power their instrument cluster including 3D
visualization of their vehicles so we worked with them to bring the r1t to
life in this experience let’s head on out Jacob sure thing on my
way all right so we’re building tools for interactive and dynamic worlds so
here we have chaos physics simulating rocks that tumble as we drive over them
leaves Bend out of the way and we also added some real-time fluid simulation
we worked with the team at rivien to set up unreal’s chaos vehicle model to
simulate the suspension of the truck and how the electric motors Drive each
individual wheel chaos also simulates how the tires
compress and deform and meta sounds enabled the team to precisely
re-synthesize the sounds of the electric motors and mix them with the ambisonics
of the jungle
so rivien provided us with a highly detailed model of the truck about 71
million polygons that were able to render in real time thanks to nanite
now the rivian not only looks incredibly realistic because of lumen and nanite
but also its materials and today we’re introducing substrate our new material
framework
and to better demonstrate it let’s swap the paint out for opal
now of course you can’t order a rivian with opal body panels but opal was the
internal code name for this project and also a really great demonstration of
substrates capabilities the base layer models the iridescence
refraction and Reflections that occur inside of an opal and on top of that is
a layer representing the polished surface and how light is absorbed as it
travels through that clear layer of varying depth
and now we can add back on the dust and dirt layers
and notice how the reflection changes when interacting with the dust layer and
that there are no artifacts along the transition from dirt to dust to opal
so substrate is more expressive enabling artists to create materials like this
with different shading models and compose and layer those materials as
they see fit all right let’s uh head on out Jacob on
my way in terms of performance substrate
materials that are similar to the current Unreal Engine shading model cost
about the same but now artists have the freedom to author more complex materials
for extremely detailed use cases like in cinematics and in film
so we’re gonna drive under this fallen tree here and everything that you’ve
seen up to this point was painstakingly hand built by the environment theme at
quixel everything since that fallen tree has been built using our brand new
experimental Suite of procedural content generation tools entirely an engine that
are flexible deterministic and artist driven
our guiding principle in building these systems was to empower artists to make
tools for artists so Jacob’s going to go ahead and add a
procedural assembly to the world and the cool thing is that it
communicates thank you
yeah pretty cool
and the cool thing is that it communicates with other nearby
procedural elements in the scene like the creek bed so let’s say a designer
comes by wants to direct the player to drive to the left Jacob can simply move
the assembly to the right and everything updates to accommodate that change
game design is iterative so let’s say the designer comes back wants to give
the player the choice of going left or right again Jacob can simply move the
assembly back over
now the artist who created this assembly also added some additional handles that
Jacob can use to Art direct where Rock slides occur allows them to customize
the piece a little bit more make it a little easier for the Arabian to drive
by so we started by hand crafting that
original part of the level to set the visuals and art direction for the entire
piece and then built out procedural tools that allowed the team to create a
much larger play Space much more quickly now let’s see how we can use these
procedural tools to make larger sweeping changes to the environment
so Jacob let’s start by removing some of the trees in this area absolutely that’s
easy enough actually
all right a little too much let’s let’s add some trees back in okay and let’s
also add in some Cliff formations give it a little bit more variability
so the procedural systems are all deterministic as Jacob is experimenting
with different sets of input parameters once he finds a set that he likes he can
always go back to it and get out exactly the same results
and the procedural systems aren’t just placing trees and rocks but also fog
cards bugs birds everything that’s needed to bring this environment to life
and everything that you’ve seen here works at scale this environment is four
kilometers by four kilometers if we hide all the procedural elements
we can see that original hand built area about 200 meters by 200 meters
we believe that there will always be the need for hand building environments so
we design these procedural systems to be tools for artists that work in concert
with hand-built content both substrate and the new procedural
tools will be available in experimental form in 5.2
and everything you’ve seen here is running in the unreal editor in real
time on a developer machine with an Intel 13900k CPU and Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU
so Jacob thanks for being here and helping us out today thank you very much
Nick for having me it’s been a pleasure
all right so come visit us at the Unreal Engine booth on the Expo floor you can
check out this demo for yourself and this afternoon here in the ybca we’ll
have a tech talk diving into the details behind this demo
in addition the preview one build of Unreal Engine 5.2 is available now so
you can test out all of the experimental new features we showed today as well as
numerous other improvements head over to the epic game store to download the
binary build and also get the full source code from the Unreal Engine
repository on GitHub now I found that we make the best
technology for developers when we use it ourselves when we really put the engine
through its Paces both through Tech demos like this one as well as full game
Productions so to talk about how the fortnite team used the latest Unreal
Engine 5 capabilities to ship battle royale chapter 4. please help me welcome
John laugh [Music]
[Applause]
thanks Nick for chapter four we wanted to show
fortnite in a way players had never seen before
we upgraded with broad Strokes using Lumen nanite and other ue5 Tech
we work directly with the engine team to improve these features and ensure they
scaled on all platforms fortnite ships on
first up was lighting now our options in the past to improve lighting have been
somewhat limited because fortnite is a really Dynamic game
big lighting just doesn’t work because the moment a player destroys a wall
light maps are invalidated so we were really excited to give Lumen
a shot it updates Global Illumination in real
time as the environment changes early in chapter 4 development we
captured a video of lumen enabled in a fortnight test build and the player in
the video destroyed a wall and light just came flooding into the room and
honestly it was pretty stunning it brought new life to the environment and
the realistic bounce light worked great with fortnite’s vibrant Style
well initial results were exciting you know nothing is that easy in Game Dev
and as we discovered Real World Lighting can create real world problems
playtests revealed areas of the map like attics and basements that had no windows
and were just too dark for gameplay and it was also the first time we were
using Auto exposure and it was causing bloomed out areas when players were in
dark Interiors looking outside we solved these issues using ue5
features like local exposure and some art directable controls within lumen
that enabled us to provide a final image much better for gameplay
while they are team refined content the engine team provided some new
scalability options so that we could run Lumen on next-gen consoles at 60 frames
per second in addition to lighting nanite opened
the door for us to add an incredible amount of detail to the fortnite island
it was introduced in ue5 as a virtualized geometry system that
supports extreme mesh complexity so we spent some time experimenting
looking for a good balance between stylized art Direction and detail
so we could increase visual quality but still maintain fortnite’s iconic Style
now that artists weren’t limited by triangle counts we scaled our content
pipelines to um support Nana on high-end Hardware
Tech artists modeled new vegetation assets
and the art team created some high detailed props and some amazing hero
assets but this still left us with the large
building library that needed a visual upgrade
we resolved this using an offline process that took displacement maps from
our materials and created high resolution nanite
meshes it was really cool to see these Classic
fortnite Materials like brick stone and wood get a high resolution facelift and
pop off their surfaces
now past the United demos have relied on static hard surface environments but
fortnite’s an animated world trees blow in the wind and buildings
wobble when hit so we worked with the Nani team and they
extended the material pipeline to include masked and animated materials on
nanogeometry
the island in fortnite is constantly evolving with major changes each season
and complete reboots when chapters launch so it’s essential that we evolve
our workflows too during chapter 4 development we started
utilizing two new ue5 features that changed how we build levels World
partition and one file per actor World partition automates the level
streaming and it allowed us to work in one large level
we use level instance actors to group content logically like a building and
all of its props one file per actor ensured our large Dev
team could work in this space without Source control conflicts
now these features hadn’t yet been put to their Paces by a large Dev team so
there were some early bumps in the road but rlds were in Daily communication
with the engine team and we saw consistent improvements
not long into production we were developing fortnite and a much more
collaborative environment our goal for chapter four was to deliver
an awesome experience to our players but we also hope by using and improving
the engine’s newest features we’ve improved your experience as well
now with the look with the look of the amazing work developers are already
doing in ue5 please welcome Dana Cowley foreign
[Applause] [Music]
tools and amazing content at your fingertips making games is hard and it
gets even trickier when you’re trying to ship while you’re upgrading your
features and we put a lot of effort into making sure that the trans the
um the transition from ue4 to ue5 was as smooth as possible and you’ve proven
that it worked and we’ve been impressed with all the teams who have made the
jump ever so quickly you know many of you moved your games over right in the
middle of development and quite a few of you have left internal Tech in favor of
ue5 and as of last month 77 percent of all Unreal Engine users are on ue5 and
that’s rapid adoption and Mass and over 750 000 of you are actively
building with Unreal Engine each and every month
you’ve invested in us and we’re investing in you
and Beyond games you’re telling Amazing Stories across live action and animated
entertainment and to date more than 550 television and film projects have been
made with Unreal Engine in production now these are some of the leading
Studios using UEFA today this represents a Brain Trust of
talented game developers from all over the world and it’s getting bigger every
day you have validated that we’re on the
right path and we’re blown away by how you’ve embraced the tools and shown us
what’s possible and now you’re about to hear from
several talented teams who are bringing their awesome games to PC console and
mobile first up we have qubit Studios a small
team whose game infinite testicles has not only received an epic Mega Grant but
it’s also coming to the epic game store with the help of Epic Games publishing
here to give you an exclusive New Look is Michael forzard
hi everyone
I was invited here today to share our story with you qubit Studios is a small
Studio from Europe and we have one mission to bring the
world of infinitesimals to life in our first game you play as Captain
orkney Redding rank as xiani’s crew explore a mysterious planet filled with
large environments now a universe is already big at our
scale but when your main character is only a few millimeters tall it takes on
a world new meaning as a studio we have big ideas as a small
team we need to make choices and that’s where switching from uv4 to
ua5 made a big difference for us it has empowered Us by giving us time back
let me take you through a few examples is very small we want players to truly
feel a sense of scale by having a large space to explore
by using wall partition in uv5 we managed to save months of Dev time not
just because of the size of the world but also because we can build on top of
it it allowed us to specialize a lot of systems very quickly
and with the built-in H lab we get strong runtime performance while being
able to load the entire world visually in editor
what world is great but it doesn’t do us any good if it’s empty and that’s where
the new packed actors and level instances came in handy
a level designer can use prefabs to quickly prototype ideas while artists
can refine those prefabs in editor by assembling assets together
and with one file character it all happens in parallel
on the animation side motion warpings allows us to use a single animation for
a large range of situations and with control rig we can quickly create those
first pass animations in editor but the most outstanding features on a
knight and lumen we don’t need to spend time on topology
optimization and can directly use high polymers lighting is more realistic and
we don’t have to use tricks for transition between exterior and interior
all in all working with V5 has been a tremendous time server for us and
upgrading from B4 was surprisingly easy we were up and running in a couple of
days we can know iterate more quickly focus
on gameplay and allocate time to riskier ideas
but enough talking go on the epic game store and wishlist the game now
thank you everyone enjoy the rest of the show
your team is built a beautiful game Michael fantastic work now our next
partner is one that needs little introduction Kabam develops and
publishes world-class highly social multiplayer mobile games and today they
are here to make a special announcement please join me in welcoming vice
president of product Tyler black [Applause]
thank you Dina for that kind introduction hi everyone at Kabam we’ve
worked with the world’s biggest brands and created our own stories to bring
some of the most successful mobile games to players
today we’re proud to announce a new project
one that ushers in a whole new era for Kabam
King Arthur Legends rise
it’s a new cross-platform Squad RPG set in a stunning reimagined Arthurian world
when we began this ambitious project we knew that Unreal Engine was the only
solution that had the tools to bring incredible visuals to both mobile and PC
at launch so here’s how we put those tools to use
King Arthur Legends rise allows players to explore campaign stages and interact
with their environment using a variety of animations
if we were to use traditional animation techniques the number of assets that we
would need would be massive thanks to unreal’s Advanced animation
technology like ik rig retargeting motion warping and property access we
can create high quality detailed and attractive animations with relatively
few resources but that isn’t the only way that we’re
using Unreal Engine 5’s tools to deepen the player experience
we’re also making use of dynamic weather to affect character strengths and other
stats and keep the battle gameplay fresh and immersive
that’s all from us today we can’t wait to share more with you
about King Arthur Legends rise in the coming months so check out our website
playkingarthur.com and sign up to stay up to date on our newest game
thanks Tyler now the next developer coming to the
stage was founded a few years ago and they’re already making a big name for
themselves hexworks is a CI game studio and they are capturing the imaginations
of fans of Dark Fantasy with their new action RPG Lords of the Fallen
creative director Cesar bitosu is here to give you an exclusive look at how
they’re using ue5 to build one of this year’s most highly anticipated games
thank you Dina thank you thank you for the introduction and handling my name so
graciously hello everyone I am very excited to be
here and represent hexworks our incredibly talented multinational team
behind Lords of the Fallen our upcoming dark fantasy action RPG and today we’ll
be sharing how Unreal Engine 5 has helped bring our highly ambitious and
decidedly Grim Vision to life please enjoy
welcome to the Lords of the Fallen technical showcase
here at hexworks our goal has always been to create the most immersive game
experience possible
today we’re journeying to Sky rest Bridge one of the game’s early locations
to demonstrate just some of the impressive ways Unreal Engine 5’s
state-of-the-art technologies have helped us deliver on this ambitious
vision for our upcoming action RPG we want players to feel fully immersed
in our world by playing as their own unique virtual persona to achieve this
we’ve used a combination of Technologies including 3D scans of real people and
ue5’s own character customization Tech players can create unique faces and
bodies by dynamically morphing between a huge range of shapes before finessing
the finer details our extensive selection of armor sets
seamlessly adapt to whatever shape the player chooses it’s really important to
us that we represent as wider proportion of our audience as possible
being able to customize your hero in Lords of the Fallen is only the
beginning each and every one of our characters is
incredibly detailed using high resolution textures
get up close to any surface in the game like this tunic for example and detail
texturing provides incredible levels of micro detail
how these objects move and behave is also crucial for player immersion ue5’s
chaos physics engine facilitates Advanced simulations for clothes chains
air belts and a whole lot more this helps to substantially enhance the
secondary Motion in all our characters making their movements look much more
lifelike [Music]
the lighting in Lords of the Fallen takes full advantage of unreal’s brand
new Lumen GI we’ve been able to light our complex environments in real time
meaning we can immediately see the effect of a light bounce for example
without waiting for the traditional slow baking processes watch how the lighting
reacts as we move our light source around this environment
Global illumination like this can be quite demanding on processing so we also
make use of emissive shapes to add additional details to the lighting of
any space we can then fine-tune these light bounces on our nanite meshes
providing our world with impressive levels of detail and minimal impact on
performance
perhaps the most important element of Lords of the Fallen is the ability to
travel between two worlds the realm of the living Axiom and the realm of the
Dead umbrella we’ve created our own custom tool set
within ue5 it allows us to intricately craft these two environments side by
side and seamlessly swap between them this means our artists and designers can
ensure these worlds feel intrinsically linked like two sides of the same coin
even if one side is decidedly more horrific than the other
on behalf of hexworks thanks for watching today’s brief Tech presentation
the twin Realms of umbral and Axiom await Fearless adventurers later this
year when Lords of the Fallen Launches on PC and current gen consoles
thank you looking awesome thank you
this next team is known for making some of the world’s most popular
MMORPGs and recently they’ve been pushing the boundaries of cinematic
storytelling and the results speak for themselves
here with more is ncsoft’s Chief strategy officer Dr song Yi Yoon
[Applause] thank you so much for the introduction
Dana good morning everyone
I’m excited to share our latest production Project M with you today
as you may know ncisoft is recognized as one of the best
MMORPG developers thanks to our Blockbuster franchises like lineage and
Guild Wars however
we’re not content with this achievement we’re always pushing for boundaries and
exploring new technologies so let me introduce project MTU
it is our latest Innovation harnessing the power of Cutting Edge Ai and
Graphics technology to an unprecedented level
with help of Unreal Engine we have achieved our vision for Project M with
seamlessly integrating our foundational AI technology resulting
in breathtaking detail
so to give you a sneak peek we have prepared a video
featuring our CEO and chief creative officer TJ
who will personally guide you through our newest creation as a digital version
of himself thank you so much for your attention and
I hope you enjoy Project M
[Music]
[Music] thank you
Project M is one of ncsoft’s most ambitious projects today
[Music]
what would it mean to you if the world was comprised of informational particles
instead of physical particles oh I got a little ahead of myself I am
TJ Kemp from ncsoft welcome to project
[Music]
how would the fabric of simulated reality change our perceived world if we
could tamper with the arrangement of those particles
this very idea is what sparked Project M
m
the informational particles that shape project M’s world can transform reality
based on your choices and each choice you make will change
your experience
the information that exists in the present reality determines how the world
will unfold [Music]
right
value every encounter and every moment these will be essential in the world of
project and this is where our journey ends for now I
look forward to seeing you all again soon
[Music]
thank you Dr Yoon Project M is looking amazing and it’s unlike anything we’ve
seen and thanks to all the teams that have
given us a new look at your incredible games
like we just saw the world’s year building
these are awesome looking characters with loads of detail and authenticity
and our team understands that believable digital humans are at the heart of great
storytelling and for more on that I’m happy to hand it over to our CTO Kim
Larry thank you some incredible games sir hey
everybody wow it’s great to be back after four
years um it’s good to see you all
um so it’s been two years since we released metahuman Creator This Cloud
hosted tool allows you to create photorealistic digital humans for your
game or experience with the Simplicity of an RPG character creator
yet with a level of realism and customization that you’ve never seen
before our community has created millions of
metahumans for their unreal projects and the work we’ve seen has been
unbelievably breathtaking and I’m sure a bunch of you in the audience actually
making better humans as well let’s take a look at some of this work
thank you
amazing you know there isn’t a day that thank you
so there isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t see some post on LinkedIn or
Facebook or wherever showing us amazing usage of metahumans and I think it’s
been a really big game changer for anybody trying to tell a story in their
game or their experience um but today we want to take things to
the next level so I’m going to actually introduce two of my most favorite
friends um to the stage our head of digital
human technology Vladimir masilovich and the actress best known as senua from
Ninja theories fantastic hellblade series Melina Jurgens how are you both
doing good thank you it’s been a while since we were last on the stage in fact
I think it was seven years ago that we went through this uh that’s a long time
ago we are triggering there but it was the first time we all came together
Ninja Theory epic cubic motion free lateral to do something that we thought
would wow audiences here and sort of set a template for the future of using
characters in games so anyway um I think we’re I think we’re in a
pretty good pretty amazing place right now with the industry but we do want to
take things to the next level and what I want to do a little bit about is how’s
things going at Ninja Theory how’s that how’s the new game going yeah the team
and I are doing really good and we’re just extremely busy working on the
follow-up to the first hellblade which will be called senua Saga held light too
I can’t wait the first game was fantastic I really can’t wait to play it
so get it out soon anyway I’m Gonna Leave the stage and let these two take
over go and blow people’s minds thank you
hi everyone
our guiding vision for metahuman has been the democratization of complex
character Technologies allowing you to work faster and see the results
immediately a character is only truly believable if
it’s motion Fidelity matches its visual Fidelity but animating at this level is
a hard task for even the most skilled Studios
some of our best work leveraged 4D capture but this took specialized
Hardware in weeks or even months of processing time
while meta human creature gave you the ability to generate high quality
characters animating them still wasn’t as easy
this is why I’m very excited to announce a new capability to the American product
met a human animator met the human animator contains the
essence of our 4D pipeline but optimized to run on a single machine
it is able to use iPhone as well as stereo professional systems and today
we’re going to demonstrate how it works for this we’re going to need now our
technician John Cook and just the phone
Mel can you take your position please sure let me know when you’re ready
okay and action I need performance capture to work like
a mirror I needed to capture whether I’m acting scared
or angry and sometimes all I need is a look
cut thanks Mel that was great yeah you’re
welcome okay
our technician John is currently pulling Mass performance from the phone onto his
machine where everything will be processed locally
we have updated our live link face mobile app to capture all data at the
best resolution possible with the device meta human animator uses video and Dev
data to convert this data into High Fidelity performance animation and it
can even use audio to produce convincing tongue animation
John is currently scrubbing through the take to pick the section that he wants
to process John are we all good with the data
awesome so from now on it’s just a single button click to kick off the
processing which for a performance of this length will take less than a minute
to convert into animation
so Mel well that is processing let me show you something else
oh is that me yeah this is what we refer to as your meta-human DNA cool
as generated by the capture we made earlier yeah that’s right so from only
three frames of video and that data we can generate a rig that predicts all of
your facial expressions in just a couple of minutes well
to do this once for each actor that’s right it
over to your face so that we can produce the performance in in a way that
faithful reproduces your original performance sounds cool yeah so let’s
check back on the on the processing which today is on the latest CP and GPU
Hardware from AMD metahuman animator uses a custom epic
facial solver and landmark detector we can interactively look at the
Innovation while it’s being solved and compared to your original performance
so it looks like it just it’s almost finished
after this is going to do one more pass to make the curves more stable
really quick and from here on
we can we just need to export the animation this takes only a few seconds
and then John needs to drop it in the level and add the audio so that we can
see the result so Mass meta human should now be ready
in the level well you excited to see the results yeah I can’t wait to see it
I need performance capture to work like a mirror I needed to capture whether I’m
acting scared or angry
and sometimes all I need is a look
thank you also Mel what do you think I think it’s incredible because it usually
takes months between performance capture and getting any results back so this is
blowing my mind and all of this is sold directly onto animate your friend and
controls in this case we are using a bespoke 4D rig which we created together
with Ninja Theory for hellblade 2 but it’s also ready to use on any meta human
or any other rig that follows our new metahuman standard
let’s have a look at that
I need performance capture to work like a
I needed to capture whether I’m acting scared
or angry and sometimes all I need is a look so
the same thing works even on stylish characters
thank you
thank you all these Technologies are completely redefining our creative
process as they already find yours One release met a human animator to everyone
in just couple of months we’ve got one more thing we’d like to
show you we haven’t forgotten about the needs for full performance capture
shoots what you’re about to see is animation that has not been polished or
edited in any way and it took metahuman animator just minutes to process start
to finish yeah so here’s one of my favorite lines from Ninja Theory’s
upcoming game senua Saga hellblade 2 and I really hope you enjoy it and the rest
of the show thank you very much thank you
sign perf cut take 13.
[Music] I see through your Darkness now
I see through your lies I will show them how to see us I do
I will not appease your gods I will destroy them
good you like it [Applause]
man was that cool all right let’s talk about the future of
our creator marketplaces we all know one of the biggest challenges in game
development is the time and cost associated with making great art and
Visually stunning environments now we’ve seen that by giving you access
to high quality game-ready assets like quixel Mega scans World building can be
faster more efficient and more economical the resulting explosion of
creativity that we’ve seen from our Unreal Engine developer Community has
been awesome in fact it’s inspired us to double down
on a mission that started several years ago
since the launch of Unreal Engine Marketplace in 2014 we’ve been working
to Aggregate and organized all the world’s best digital assets for you to
use in your work in 2018 we joined forces with quixel
whose Mega scans have now been downloaded over 40 million times
in 2021 art station became part of the Epic family and we welcomed a community
of the world’s best digital artists who’ve since uploaded nearly 12 million
projects to the site later that same year sketchfab joined
epic and now has more than 10 million registered users who are using the
platform to discover share and manage 3D models
on the web now each of these businesses has their
own unique superpowers incredible content of course vibrant communities
and killer capabilities we’re now working to bring all this
together into a unified offering let’s take a look
[Applause] [Music]
foreign
[Music] foreign
[Applause] we’ll be merging our content offerings
into a new unified creative Marketplace called Fab built on the strong
Foundation of sketchfab.com we’re going to drop the sketch and go all in on Fab
Fab will be an Open Marketplace serving the entire digital content creation
industry that means we’re going to offer assets for all game engines All Digital
content creation tools and metaverse inspired open worlds so whether you’re
Studio making a blockbuster game or movie or your player building your first
island in fortnite our goal is to bring you everything you need to build your
world in one place we’ll have 3D models material sound
plugins animations visual effects and more
that’ll be the new home of quixel Mega scans metahumans and other incredible
epic content designed to push the limits of what’s possible
we’ll also bring you high quality assets and environment packs from leading art
studios AAA game developers media companies and even musicians who are
taking fan engagement to the next level but our primary focus is on bringing you
the best stuff out there from millions of Independent Artists who will benefit
from the lowest fees in the industry pocketing 88 of revenue from their sales
so they can build real businesses and invest in making more great assets for
you to use that’s right
now with millions of assets we have to make it super simple for you to find
what you’re looking for and get inspired along the way we’ll leverage automated
tagging to consistently and accurately describe content and we’ll give you the
ability to inspect 3D models before you download making it easy to understand
the game Readiness of an asset so there are no surprises
building on the success of quixel bridge the Fab plug-in will enable you to
search discover drag and drop content right into your scene without leaving
the game editor
we want to we want to improve your workflows by connecting Fab to all
industry leading digital content creation tools for example our
partnership with Adobe will make it easy for you to export and publish models
from Adobe substance painter directly to Fab
finally leveraging sketchfab’s digital Asset Management capabilities Fab will
be the place where you go to store manage and share assets either privately
with teammates for collaboration or publicly on the web to Showcase your
work with collaboration tools like this we
want to help small teams do big things now it’s no longer just major Studios
who are driving our industry forward World building has become accessible to
everyone and we’re seeing this today with tens of millions of new creators
building awesome experiences in fortnite Roblox Minecraft other open worlds
this is increasing the demand for ready to use content and it’s creating an
exciting new opportunity for asset creators to reach massive new audiences
We Believe an open and fair marketplace where artists and developers can come
together to buy and sell assets is essential to the creation of the
emerging metaverse now we’re going to keep you posted over
the course of the next several months as this rolls out and we’re looking forward
to partnering with you all to make this an industry-wide success and now please
welcome sax Pearson
[Applause] [Music]
[Applause] it’s great to be here today
we’ve been working towards this moment for a very long time
this next segment is exactly why I’m here at Epic to move the industry
forward and help make developers successful
I’m here to introduce powerful new tools to existing fortnite creators powerful
new opportunities for professional Developers
fortnite is becoming an ecosystem that means new tools to design develop
and publish games and a new economy that rewards Developers
these updates bring us one step closer to epics vision of a connected metaverse
with billions of players enjoy high quality creations made by millions of
Developers at the center of this all is unveil
editor for fortnite available today in public beta on epic game store
it’s a new pc application that brings the power of unveil engine to the scale
of the fortnite audience deeply integrated with the game with new
workflows that allow PC and all other platforms to create together fast and
fluid we call it uefn for short but first let’s talk about how we got
here fortnite changed when we released
fortnite creative four years ago creatives and in-game toolkit for
players to make sandbox games inside fortnite and because of creative
fortnite is already much more than a game
it’s already a place where players find games and developers find players
but why should you develop in fortnite well our players are highly social
content hungry with over 500 million play accounts massive PC presence and
the largest console player base is the best most vibrant place for developers
to find an audience quickly and publish new games
Islands built using creative tools already account for roughly 40 of play
time in fortnite that’s billions of hours a year and we expect that number
to keep growing with uefn so this is a sample of games in fortnite
today what we have noticed is that players are
more engaged they have more fun when they play epic Zone games like Battle
Royale and Community games made by creators like you like the combination
is what makes fortnite special and what is going to help us all grow
as we’ve shown it on real engine epic’s mission is to deliver an awesome Suite
of tools for developers on Wheel editor for fortnite is for experienced game
developers like many are you in this room but it’s also for the growing
community of fortnite Island creators that are ready for unreal engines proven
PC editor workflow as you’re going to see in the demo
coming up uefn and the existing creative toolkit
is already a great combo for developer and fortnite Creator teams to make
incredible experiences of course our long-term goal is to make
the entire feature set of unveil engine or bring the entire feature set of
unveil engine to uefn but also over time to expose many of the other services
that epic offers bill just announce Fab Fab is launching
today also inside uefn in an alpha version and products like metahuman will
be coming to uefn in the future to support your Creative Vision
for the next stage of fortnite and ultimately the open metaverse we also
need brand new tools that solve really hard problems interoperability
scalability and resilience a real issue when you operate at this scale
and and expect this level of durability this is what led us to develop verse
it’s a powerful new general programming language designed specifically for this
purpose you’re going to see us use it in the demo in just a moment
the second thing we’re working towards is high interoperability between uefn
and Unreal Engine that’ll enable you to take your work anywhere and
by the way behind me is the new Creator portal also launching today where you
can manage all your Islands one click publish them to the world and when you
publish the uefn your original Ip and your assets are yours to take anywhere
now let’s take a closer look at uefn features and workflows we put together a
short video and then we’re going to do a demo thank you
let’s start with the basics unreal editor for fortnite runs on PC and is
integrated directly with fortnite so you have access to over four years of
content all for free to get you started what’s special about uefn is what we
call live edit live edit allows anyone on your team to join a uefn session from
any platform that runs fortnite that means someone can join from a console
using the normal fortnite client and they’re able to work alongside and
collaborate with PC users uefn has access to all fortnite creative
devices our modular gameplay systems that work in the in-game editor this
allows you to instantly add gameplay and quickly bootstrap your game from the
hundreds of gameplay devices already available the uefn beta has many of the
same features we use to create fortnite including the landscape editing toolset
you can edit the landscape to change the look of your island or make sweeping
changes to create something completely new and then quickly play it in game to
check out the results so even though you have access to tons
of fortnite content with uefn you can make content that looks nothing like
fortnite this is a section from forest Guardian a
tech demo built in uefn that we are launching today
a big feature of uefn is the ability to import your own custom assets so we used
a few 3D models textures and materials that we built just for the project
and all the lighting in the cave was made possible thanks to Lumen our
real-time Global illumination system you can also find more content like
quicksomega scans and sketchfab models and our initial Alpha release of the Fab
plugin for uefn all assets are curated and optimized for use in fortnite and
the full version of Fab will launch later this year you can also create and
modify materials so you can change the look and feel of objects easily and you
can import skeletal meshes and then animate using sequencer and control rig
everything you’ve just seen is available today in the public beta version of
unreal editor for fortnite
so it’s a short video of just like the most condensed way we could show
somebody in like the more important workflows but I think a much better way
is to temp fade let’s do a live demo on PC running on fortnite public servers
right here on stage welcome Michael and Ray to the stage
take it away [Applause]
[Music]
I’m glad that went well all right hey folks so let’s talk about
how all this was made Michael here has the scene open in unreal editor so we
can take a closer look for the environment we built this level using
quixel megascan assets many of which are available in the Fab uefn plugin we also
use custom content that we built just for this demo
for the gameplay you just saw we had we hand placed enemies using a
creative device called a guard spawner which generates the aliens that you saw
at specific locations however we wanted to do more and introduce Dynamic play
that goes beyond what the current creative devices can do
so to do this we used our new programming language called verse
so in this short section of code every second we grab the position of the
player and for each spawn location we then calculate the distance to the
player and if it’s within a certain threshold we tell that guard to spawn
into the level so now we have gameplay that’s more
reactive to the player’s actions this is just a short example of using
verse but for a deeper dive check out the verse Tech talk later today
now Michael is going to show us how we put the intro cinematic together hi
everybody so before the gameplay section we played this quick cinematic animation
this is actually created entirely in uefn using sequencer sequencer is our
multi-track editor and it’s been used in everything from in-game cinematics to
Hollywood feature films so let’s take a look uh now all of this stuff is
available right inside uefn so let’s take a look at this last shot from a
slightly different perspective so the other thing we featured in this
section was a bunch of Niagara Niagara is now available in uefn and it’s our
high-end VFX system so and just like in the movies you can
frame up shots and have great effects so what we’re going to do here is just set
this up
so just look at the movies you have slow mode too makes everything better right
so this is just a sampling of some of the stuff that you can do inside
sequencer but let’s get back to the game all right so now that we’re back in the
game in uefn you have access to fortnite’s time of day system or you
could use what we did and do what we did and use a completely custom lighting
solution and thanks to Lumen both daytime and night time look great now
let’s go to the final gameplay section and let’s close out the demo
but as a reminder everything that you’re seeing here was created in the same
version of uefn that we’re releasing today I think I’m gonna jump in here and
help you right I am all for that
um
foreign
[Applause]
thanks Michael and Ray anyone everybody that put this together
the the demo came about when we asked the special projects team inside epic
that came straight off the Matrix demo to why don’t you put uefn through its
paces and one amazing fact about this demo is that it’s less than 400 Megs it
downloads and plays in less than a minute and it plays on any platform that
fortnite runs on like that is the promise of what uafn is
so again on related to fortnite it’s available today in public beta in epic
game store if you want an early glimpse of some other technical showcases that
our internal teams made with uefn and verse check out asserted domination
Forest guardian and the space inside all three available to play right now in
fortnite discover so we’ve talked about brand new tools
and the fortnite ecosystem now I want to talk about the next generation of
fortnite’s economy they’re both epic and creators will participate in
we call it create a economy 2.0 here’s how it works
the money in the economy comes from player spending in the item shop
fortnite generates billions of dollars a year in revenue from player purchases
fortnite players who have fun engaging in Islands tend to spend more in the
item shop creators who make popular islands are bringing real value to the
fortnite ecosystem and we’re going to share the resulting Revenue with them
this is the engine powering a Creator economy 2.0
we believe this so strongly we will distribute 40 percent of fortnite’s
global net revenue to eligible creators who publish games in fortnite both
independent developers and Epic anything we make like Battle Royale zero
build also participates in the pool shared with creators this will be the
primary way that epic will pay for our own game development in fortnite going
forward
thank you
I’m glad you feel it’s a big deal that I I feel exhibited
um this is this is transformative and a big gut check for us too we imagine
thousands of third-party development teams building businesses and thriving
with this model payments from the pool are based on
performance of The Island we take into account data like Island popularity
engagement retention attracting new players
and the benefit of this new approach is rooted in player fun and rewards
everyone’s creative work both yours and epics
there’s no need to design cunning monetization Loops or extractive gating
items you make an island the players love that is all you need to be part of
the new economy Creator economy 2.0 is live right now
for eligible creators who are currently publishing
we are back dating the engagement payouts to the beginning of this month
and for more details and to sign up go to create.fortnite.com
everything you’ve seen today represents epic’s biggest bet ever the release of
advanced tools that publish directly into fortnite on PC console mobile and
Cloud lowering the barrier for developers to be part of one of the
biggest entertainment ecosystems we welcome anyone to join us in the
future where original content is owned by its creators where developer earnings
our function of fun and what ecosystem can be directly linked through Community
language standards like verse so support to support developers who
adopt uefn we’re broadening the Epic Mega grants program to help teams
bootstrap projects that use uefn and verse
we’re just getting started and we hope that you’ll join us and help shape the
future of development now we’re going to give you a look at
what uefn can do right inside fortnite after the video Tim is going to come
back out to talk about epic’s Future Vision thank you very much
[Applause]
thank you
thanks we think this is going to be a really powerful combination putting
together a fortnight 70 million monthly active users with the power of the
unreal editor and a new Creator economy to share the revenue with creators
through great engaging experiences and it’s another Milestone on the path to a
new kind of entertainment medium which science fiction literature calls the
metaverse because there’s a crazy amount of hype
around this whole topic I’d like to step back and take a long-term look at what
we see here and the core of it is some very real
growth starting with fortnite 70 million monthly active users Roblox is 250
million monthly active users Minecraft’s 100 million and pubg mobile and Apex
Legends and numerous other metaverse inspired games is leading to an
identifiable audience today of over 600 million active users in these Virtual
Worlds and it’s on a growth trajectory they will put it at billions of users by
the end of this decade and so we can set aside the crazy hype
cycle around nfts and VR goggles you know these Technologies may play a role
in the future but they are not required this revolution is happening right now
and the core of it is something every gamer already understands it’s you and
your friends getting together online and going around as a group on voice chat
having a fun time and social entertainment experiences and some of
these experiences are serious games like Battle Royale some of them are going to
a concert and dancing or chatting with friends and just having a good time
we see this as the next big changing change in gaming and an epic’s Evolution
as a company you know we started out back in 1991
making 2D games uh we recognize the opportunity with 3D so we vote the first
Unreal Engine and the first Unreal Tournament game we evolved to make
console games like Gears of War then we evolved to make online games like
Paragon and fortnite but when fortnite shipped first in 2017
it was just our game uh but over time we recognized the audience the opportunity
to bring it to a much wider audience so we built fortnite creative mode
um and then the unreal editor for fortnite coming out now but we see the
future of this medium primarily not about epic’s work but about the work of
independent creators and we’re building towards the sofa
metaverse from two different directions first of all we’re taking the fortnite
audience we have and enhancing the development capabilities with the new
tools and this Creator economy to support everybody’s work
but we’re also helping Developers boning Standalone products evolved
towards building metaverse experiences themselves the Unreal Engine is a tool
for this the epic game store is a distribution vehicle for it epic online
services has taken fortnite an epic 700 million player accounts and 5 billion
social connections and open them up for free to all developers so they can plug
into voice chat and participate in these social experiences in a very easy to use
way and all of these are on-ramps to the Future metaverse
we really think that over the next decade today’s separate apps and
ecosystems are going to join together to form tomorrow’s open metaverse
and yeah because the last couple decades have been about wall Gardens wall
Gardens wall Gardens let’s back up and talk about how open systems have
successfully come about in the past you know this has happened really big time
back in the early 1980s and 1990s when the open internet was built
you know back in those days there were a bunch of closed networks at different
companies and universities that couldn’t talk to each other
and so the industry got together and defined Open Standards connect these
closed networks into one big open network the connected email systems by
playing the at sign and email addresses so people on One service could
communicate with people on other services and then they began to Define
Open Standards like JavaScript and HTML for the open internet so any user could
participate and the rule at that point was that any company could connect as an
equal into this system just by following the Open Standards
now let’s talk about what this means for the open metaverse of the future
you know we have the opportunity to take all these different online ecosystems
for gaming consoles and Publishers and connect them together into a single
place where anybody can talk to anybody else
we have the opportunity to turn today’s game engines into tomorrow is metaverse
browser engines if you take a look at Unreal Engine and
unity and Godot you have some very powerful 3D engines that have an
increasingly common set of features and increasingly adopting industry standards
is ways of communicating with each other and with other tools there’s the glotf
content standards there’s Pixar’s Universal C in description format and
then there are a lot of new standards bodies that have formed to help to
standardize some adverse there’s Cronus group there’s the metaverse standards
form there’s the academy software foundation and the open 3D Foundation
and we have the opportunity for all developers to work together to define
the future of this thing and there’s also the opportunity to
connect the economies of these different ecosystems you know what a user would
really like is to be able to buy a cool looking outfit in one place and take it
everywhere they go unless we were designing this new
fortnite Creator economy one of the things we were constantly thinking about
is how this could in the future be connected into an open metaverse economy
and there’s no reason that the core model there in which revenue from item
shops are shared with creators of experience based on engagement couldn’t
be turned into an economic model for the open metaverse at large with economic
peering and overseen by governance groups to make this work in a safe way
for all players and this gets us to a really key
question here and that is who is going to build the metaverse in the future
and we believe the answer has to be all of us together it has to be a
combination of indie game developers together with double A and AAA game
developers and fortnite creators and Minecraft creators and Roblox creators
each bringing their best specialized knowledge to the to the new world and
Brands like Disney and Ferrari and Ralph Lauren have already experienced the
metaverse through crossovers with fortnite we think this is just the very
beginning of a very long-term opportunity for all these companies tell
that if a much larger presence in the digital world in which it becomes a
major and first class business line for all of them uh future open metavers will
be about musicians and music labels and film and television Studios who are
using virtual production today to build world-class photorealistic content being
able to bring it and launch it playly in the metaverse timed together with their
film and television experiences in an endless stream of awesome entertainment
content that’s open to everybody to participate in
now epic has a long history of supporting developers this way you know
we’ve built a lot of different services that are available to everybody to use
there’s the Unreal Engine there’s epic online services which are open to all
platforms and all stores there’s the epic game store which is open to
software built on all engines using all different online services and we believe
the metaverse has to be opened it can’t be another monopoly’s wall Garden
and epic is all in on this you know we went from the
uh you know we went from the pandemic to the tech downturn the crypto implosion
and now banks are failing and it’s a really crazy time again but we’re
investing very heavily in the future with the belief that companies who
invest now through these hard times are going to come out the strongest company
in the future become the strongest companies in the future
some of these Investments we’re making in fortnite initially and then bringing
the work to Unreal Engine some things were building an Unreal Engine taking to
fortnite but the aim is to support everything the AAA game developers are
doing today and more in this project to build this all out
into an open system is going to take most of the decade and that is the
journey from Unreal Engine 5 to Unreal Engine 6. that will happen over this
time period it is the same Journey to the open metaverse but there’s no need
to wait because we’re doing it live we’re building all these systems and
deploying them as we build them right into Unreal Engine 5 openly with
Partners so we hope you’ll download this stuff download on your editor for
fortnite download the Unreal Engine and get started and come see some of our
Tech talks where you talk about this in way more technical detail thank you very
much for your time
thank you