When introducing the new procedural tools on stage, Penwarden said it’s important how procedural systems can bring environments to life. But the artificial element is always necessary as well. We asked him about his thoughts on generative AI and its challenges.
“You always need the human element of creativity,” he says. “Tools help humans be more expressive, and different types of AI tools, like non-generative AI tools… can be powerful tools to help artists more easily express their creativity. There’s a lot of potential,”
he adds: “We believe that any kind of data that AI uses to learn needs to be ethically sourced.”
I believe that in the next decade all forms of entertainment will be integrated into one blast furnace – Kim Libreri
Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri joins the discussion of generative AI, agreeing it won’t replace human creativity.
”And some things don’t exist without people,” he says. “But as a tool, I think it’s more useful for artists to inspire people to be more creative. What can machines not produce? What new levels of artistry, art? Will form, storytelling be possible?”
Speaking of things that machines can produce, another impressive piece of Epic’s presentation at GDC was the Metahuman Animator. Two years ago, Epic announced Metahuman Creator , promising to let you create high-fidelity human characters in less than an hour. On stage, Libreri introduced that 4 million characters have been created by 1 million users since then.
Metahuman Animator, with its sequel, promises to create animated characters in just minutes. An on-stage demo showed how a few seconds of footage of actress Melina Juergens captured on a mobile phone could lead to an animated version of it with just a few clicks. Vlad Mastilovic,
Vice President of Digital Human Technologiessays, “Metahuman has long-term plans.” “The initial concept was drawn 10 years ago, and the animators were always in the planning, because while it’s important to make characters ultra-realistic, it’s also important to animate them. ” At the
end of the day, when it comes to digital humans, it’s the weakest component part that really determines the final quality of the whole. Rendering got a lot better a few years ago, Textures and such have gotten better, but animation has always been a challenge because once a still image starts moving, the illusion breaks at that point.” “One of the key innovations of Metahuman Animator is this Metahuman DNA
. It’s a file, it’s also a character rig and an animation solver, if it’s a rig, it’s made up of some base element, so it’s calculated into a final representation, but how that representation
is You have the final data of what should be visible, and you can work it back down to the basic elements, so that’s how it works, and DNA is exactly the key to unlocking both.”
Epic’s evolution in procedural tools, Metahumans, and beyond takes into account the increasing convergence of movies and games, and the company’s engine is increasingly being used in blockbusters in the film and TV industry is becoming At GDC, Cowley revealed that more than 550 television and film projects have been produced using Unreal Engine to date.
”(Epic) is largely a game maker as a business, but a large part of the rest comes from the film industry,” says Libreri, who has been in the film industry for 20 years before switching to games 10 years ago. “Many of us use the same tools in these two industries. The film industry is kind of a pioneer in photorealistic images using CG, and we’re seeing gamers’ interest in more beautiful images all the time. “I know we have. But it doesn’t have to be photorealistic. Fortnite isn’t photorealistic, but it benefits from very high quality [imagery].
” What we’ve been able to do is take a lot of techniques and translate that technology into real time and actually improve it, and a lot of us have been in the movie business and the game business, so that intuition comes naturally. And we really believe that in the next 10 years, all forms of entertainment will converge into one blast furnace: making IP, making characters, creating environments. It’s made, it’s a game, it’s a movie, it’s an experience, who knows what it can be! We’re starting to understand this.”
A few years ago, people didn’t really think about things like ‘how do we scale up for movies’, but now it’s really core to how Unreal Engine is developed – Mr. Nick Penwarden
Penwarden says this has always been on the back end of Epic’s mind. Unreal has the ability to scale up and down to accommodate a wide range of small mobile games to big movies.
”When developing the engine, we’re always thinking about the scalability of our business. We’re not just making console games and running them on mobile phones, but we’re also using that technology in movies to achieve cinematic quality.
”How do we provide the tools, techniques and algorithms to make it happen?” I don’t think I thought much about how to scale it up to 2020, but now it’s become a very important factor in the development of the Unreal engine.
” , is also central to the vision of Metahuman Animator, Mastilovic adds.
”There’s going to be a future where movies and games are mixed together. You might be able to watch a movie and then play a game that looks almost the same,” he says. “For that, you need to be able to allow the actors to exist in that space. For interactive media, you have to transform it into that 3D space,” he continued, “so we’ve solved this problem
. It’s not, but we can do it with decent quality, but what’s more important to us is making sure everyone else can do the same, and millions of dollars for one actor. I think it’s about not having to spend, and I think Metahumans Animator is part of that.”
While the games industry seems to be positive about the merging of movies and games (at least from a technical standpoint), it remains to be seen if the movie industry has much interest in interactive mediums. We asked them all if the movies weren’t as interested in games.
”Oh, I don’t think it matters,” Libreri responds. “I think it’s the consumer that’s important. We’ve seen that on a lot of TV shows. Look at The Last of Us, it’s been made hugely successful by the people who made that game. As for the movie business… it’s up to the individual, and many old-school filmmakers are obsessed with telling linear stories.
”But given the percentage of people who play video games right now… A new generation of filmmakers want to be more than just open, they want to explore the stories they tell in all media. I think in the next generation, crossovers will come naturally, and there will be new types of creators.’ Finally, Libreri, Penwarden, and Mastilovic, I’d like to ask Epic’s future
. I heard the prospect of
”I think we’re going to continue our journey towards photorealism,” Penwarden says. “It’s something that’s built into the culture at Epic. I’m committed to a unified approach to give artists better tools to succeed without worrying about technical details as much as possible. I’m very interested in continuing to build out the toolset.”
As far as Metahumans are concerned, Mastilovic says their mission is not just to enable photorealism, but to enable diversity in datasets. To do that, he says, “I want to be able to represent most people, everyone on the planet. It’s incredibly difficult.”
”And we want to allow people to become Metahumans,” he adds. “In the future, it would be nice if people could become Metahumans by just taking a few images with a future device. But ultimately we also want to model behavior, I think that makes for a very interesting and immersive experience in this virtual world, and it would be great if there were characters like agents with intelligence around you instead of beings like NPCs. ”
Concerts with Travis Scott and Ariana Grande are just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities – Kim Libreri
This, of course, leads to the metaverse vision that was at the core of Epic’s GDC showcase. Saxs Persson says: “The Metaverse needs human inhabitants, and in this keynote I showed you how they translate into a story.
” As Libreri points out, that’s not all: “In terms of the metaverse ecosystem, we want to start experimenting with entertainment that’s different from normal video games. Because it’s a virtual world, because it’s huge, it’s millions of people. I think (I) have the potential to entertain people in ways they’ve never seen before, and the concerts I’ve done with Travis Scott and Ariana Grande have been an iceberg of what’s possible. ” We want
players to be able to get closer to the stars they care about in a meaningful way. Bringing music into a virtual world is pretty cool. , I think the possibilities are endless, and we don’t want the actual underlying engine to become an invisible barrier to people’s dreams.”