Epic Games has announced the release of Matrix Awakens, a tech demo for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S consoles. The project is a test case for its upcoming version 5 of Unreal Engine which was used to generate an environment of 16 square kilometres, procedurally populated by building, vehicles and pedestrians. The main characters were scanned by recently acquired 3Lateral who were responsible for metahuman also used for the other characters in the game.
According to Epic the environment contains 7 million instantiated assets, 7,000 buildings created from modular elements, 45,073 parked cars of which 38,146 are playable, over 260km of roads, 512km of sidewalks, 27,848 streetlights or 12,422 sewer blockages. To achieve this amount of geometry in a real-time engine, the new Nanite tech was used.
Watch a video of the demo on YouTube.
Faces still look unreal, sorry for the pun
looks awful
It is astonishing that there are almost no feedbacks to this demo-reel at all. 10 years ago, heck 5 years ago, this would have been a revolutionary break-through in the visual industry. Now… nothing. Few kids in Youtube with “wow, can’t wait to see it as a game” or so.
Ok, the story is remarkably profane, the scenery absolutely irrelevant. Actors drive car in a city car-chase, unfunny dialogs about marketing, actually they do not talk, they make statements.
It is as if there was a huge compromise between marketing division how to make the clip as compatible to all viewers as possible. At the end, it addresses nobody. It is flat.
There is nothing bold in it.
They have completely misunderstood the real function of the 3D art and technology: the awesome 3D art & technology are there to take us where no other medium can!! And they took us in their 10 minute ride right there where we already are: in a city traffic jam. The most boring, uninspired environment you can imagine, instead of showing us impossible, creative, unimaginable, distant worlds, forms, animations and characters, to blow us away with something we did not expect…
I would like to reiterate that Sony is an investor in Epic…
And as far as one can remember Unreal Demos have always been about pushing the limits of available hardware. With this new one many see a demo worth buying a PS5 😉
Hi Laurent!
This makes sense, you are right. As I wrote, the GFX is from another planet.
I was just puzzle about the lame story, but maybe I am thinking in other dimensions. I have had the feeling that other Epic investor, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board, was behind the senior plot. 🙂
Yup. Agreed. This photorealism chase is just getting nowhere interesting. Want photoreal immersive reality? – go outside and take a walk… And be amazed by the details and incredible fidelity of your uni(not meta)verse. Spiderverse is just far more entertaining than Unreal Matrix. Just my two cents on the subject. (PS. The Uncanny Valley still holds ground !)