Epic Games’ GDC Tech Sessions Now Available

Epic Games has finally shared several of their Unreal Engine tech sessions from GDC 2017. The event was full of surprises and various demonstrations, so it’s your chance to check out the highlights of this year’s GDC.

Exploring the Technology that Drives “The Human Race”

The development teams from Epic Games, The Mill and Arraiy provide an up close look at the key technologies that were created, developed and used during the production of The Human Race real-time short film, as presented during the “State of Unreal” opening session.

The Future of Audio in Unreal Engine

Aaron McLeran, Senior Audio Programmer, Epic Games gives a technical presentation of the new multiplatform Unreal Audio Engine. Starting with a brief architectural description and walkthrough of the old audio engine and its varied technical challenges, he’ll outline the core design pillars of the new audio renderer. He’ll then give several demos of the audio renderer in action, describe how it’s used in Epic’s upcoming VR game, Robo Recall, and what’s available now in Unreal Engine 4.15. He then gives a walkthrough of several exciting features which are coming to Unreal Engine 4.16, such as real-time synthesis, dynamic DSP effects, and physical audio propagation modeling via third-party collaboration. Finally, he demonstrates the steps to create a synthesizer from scratch and playing in a level in 30 seconds.

UE4 Animation and Physics Technical Showcase

Members of the Unreal Engine 4 development team demonstrate several exciting upcoming animation and physics features for the engine. These include new workflows for previewing and editing animation, new tools for creating physics simulations with improved quality and performance, and other ways to improve the quality of digital characters.

Content-Driven Multipass Rendering in UE4

With the ability to script drawing to render targets through Blueprints, content creators can now create and prototype advanced rendering techniques that would have previously required a graphics programmer. This opens the floodgates to many possibilities such as custom fluid simulation, surface deformation, and caustics rendering, for starters.

Find an overview of Epic Games’ GDC activities here.