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Take a look at these inspiring stories from game developers and studios showing why and how they used Unreal Engine for games, movies, and interactive ventures.
There is no doubt in anyone's mind that Epic Games' Unreal Engine is powerful software suitable for a variety of purposes. Game developers, filmmakers, and other specialists of any experience level are attracted to its strong set of tools capable of making creative dreams come true.
When we hear "made in Unreal Engine 5," we imagine a realistic video game most of the time, and while it's true that the engine can produce mind-blowingly detailed experiences, this is not the only area it excels in, and multiple studios, artists, and developers have proven this fact.
Today, we've brought you several great interviews with talented creatives who explain why they have chosen Unreal Engine for their movies, games, and tools – both realistic and stylized.
Project TH: Using UE5's Nanite & Lumen To Develop a "100% Korean" Game
Let's start our digest with EVR Studio's Dong-Jun Min, who shared an update about the company's upcoming game Project TH, an AAA shooter with real-time cinematics that tries its best to depict Korean culture to its fullest. Min explained why the team chose Unreal Engine 5, discussed its perceived difficulty, and shared how Nanite and Lumen helped to produce an accurate recreation of Seoul.
"Project TH is a story-driven action-adventure genre game. Our goal is to deliver extensive cinematic and action experiences with movie-like photorealistic graphics. To achieve this, we utilize internally developed, highly detailed data based on optical scanning technology.
To efficiently process this data, we actively leverage Unreal Engine's Nanite and Lumen, which we consider to be powerful features that transform our ambitious goals into more achievable objectives. Initially, we worked on our project using Unreal Engine 4, which lacked these features, making us occasionally face challenging situations. With the release of Unreal Engine 5, we made the decision to switch engines from UE4 to UE5 without hesitation."
Developing Games With Unreal Engine & VR App Quill
Unreal Engine is suitable not only for realistic projects – it works exceptionally well with stylized games, too. In this next interview, Federico Moreno Breser, a director and CG artist, discussed the development process of his adventure game, Bogdan's Cross, which uses Unreal Engine and the VR illustration and animation tool Quill. He also talked about setting up animations and offered tips for indie developers interested in using Unreal in production.
"Unreal Engine is a fantastic choice, especially if you're taking your first steps into game development. The engine, along with its extensive ecosystem of training resources and library assets, equips you with everything you need to get started. Personally, I opted not to utilize the UE Marketplace assets because I wanted my game to have a visually unique feel. Reusing library assets could have limited my ability to bring my distinct vision to life. However, I want to emphasize that there's absolutely nothing wrong with using marketplace assets."
Oryctes: How to Create a Flashy Cinematic With Maya & Unreal Engine
Let's move on from games to short movies as they can be set up in the engine. The Glow Production team shared the working process behind Oryctes, a cool dragon-themed cinematic, talked about character design and motion capture, and discussed how they worked with the camera. From this interview, you'll also learn about the rigging process and rendering in Unreal Engine.
"Unreal played a vital role in ensuring the project’s smooth delivery. Its real-time rendering capabilities allowed us to visualize the body movements of the characters (the dragon and the main hero) and their interactions with other elements in real time. This greatly expedited the animation and fine-tuning process. Its advanced tools, such as lighting, shading, and material systems, contributed to achieving a high level of realism for the dragon and the entire digital environment."
Arcware: Building THE ICON Interactive Experience In UE5
As you might have noticed, Unreal Engine is a tool suitable for a variety of purposes, and here is another one. In this article, Arcware provided an overview of the streaming platform Arcware CloudRT, its "Netflix or YouTube for Unreal Engine applications," discussed THE ICON experience created in collaboration with TYDE, and touched on bringing the UE5-powered interactive configurator to the cloud.
"For the 3D streaming service, we chose the Unreal Engine because of its power, flexibility, and diversity of industrial use cases. Each day the Unreal community is growing, and people need more ways of using the power of Unreal Engine in their applications, and we are providing that. Interactive 3D streaming can be added to web pages, e-commerce platforms, inside apps, etc."
Developing a Game With Realistic Graphics in Unreal Engine
In game development, there's "realistic" and there's "indistinguishable from reality," and Bodycam is leaning toward the latter. If you want to know the story behind Reissad Studio's upcoming FPS, this article is for you. The developers told us about the game's camera effects, materials, and lighting as well as its shooting mechanics and the role of Unreal Engine 5 in this photorealistic experience.
"Unreal Engine has been fundamental in achieving the level of realism we desired. While it presented challenges, no other game engine can match this level of realism. Our biggest challenge has been optimizing the game to run smoothly on a wide range of computers, as we want to make it as much accessible as possible to the majority of gamers."
Charles Cox on Developing More Than Human With Unreal Engine
Now let's jump from realism to something completely unrealistic. More Than Human is an open-world adventure game where you can turn into animals or creatures. In this interview, its developer, Charles Cox, explained why he moved from Unity to Unreal Engine and mentioned the Eastern dragon mechanic he set up.
"All of the tools and systems that Unreal offers are incredibly exciting! Not having to pay for a ton of features is great as well. Because the tools are made by Unreal, they integrate with the other systems as well. For example, their water system integrates well with the landscape systems they offer. Unreal also offers a bunch of free example projects in their Marketplace store and gives away five assets every month, which I have been taking advantage of for years now."
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This content is brought to you by 80 Level in collaboration with Unreal Engine. We strive to highlight the best stories in the gamedev and art industries. You can read more Unreal Engine interviews with developers here.
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