#Matrix series series

The city comprises seven million instanced assets, made up of millions of polygons each.

In a dense, open-world city environment, UE5’s virtualized micropolygon geometry system comes into its own. The technical demo also puts previously showcased UE5 features Nanite and Lumen through their paces.

#Matrix series series

Where our sample project Valley of the Ancient gave a glimpse at some of the new technology available in UE5, The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience goes a step further: it’s an interactive experience running in real time that you can download on your Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5 today. The team was able to use the simulated universe to author cinematic content, like live-action moviemakers scouting a city to find the best streets to tell their story-but without the physical constraints of the real world. Many of the action scenes in the demo originated with crew members driving cars around the city to capture exciting shots. The high-fidelity simulation capabilities of UE5 are enabling an entirely new process: cinematic creation through simulation. This isn’t just a demonstration of the visually stunning environments it’s now possible to build, however-it also opens the door to a completely new way of storytelling. Block after block, it ticks with photorealistic AI-driven characters and vehicles-whether you’re looking at them or not. Because the systems that drive its actors are part of a global simulation that is evaluated continuously, the activity that takes place in the city is far more consistent and believable. This opens up so many creative possibilities-and proves that any team can make a triple-A-game-quality open world in UE5, irrespective of size.Īs for the city in The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience, it’s a living, breathing environment that never stops. It means you can regenerate the entire city, right up until the last day of delivery, and continue to adjust and improve it. For small teams looking to build open worlds, that is incredibly powerful. Using this workflow, you can modify the input rules and the whole city will change, redefined by those new instructions. Procedural rules define how the world is generated: from the size of the roads and the height of the buildings, all the way down to the amount of debris on the sidewalks. The experience is a tangible demonstration that UE5 offers all the components you need to build immersive, ultra-high-fidelity environments.ĭespite the city’s complexity, a relatively small core team was able to create the experience thanks to a set of procedural tools including SideFX’s Houdini.

Sixteen kilometers square, photoreal, and quickly traversable, it’s populated with realistic inhabitants and traffic. The demo starts out with a cinematic that features exceptionally realistic digital humans, before morphing into a fast-paced interactive experience of car chases and third-person shooter action.Īll of this takes place in a huge, bustling, and explorable open-world city that-like the simulated world of The Matrix-is incredibly rich and complex. With Wachowski and many of the original crew onboard, the team set out to create something with Unreal Engine 5 that’s nothing short of spectacular: an experience that merges artforms in exciting new ways. Whatever the future of cinematic storytelling, Epic will play no small part in its evolution.” The Epic sandbox is pretty special because they love experimenting and dreaming big. 'Keanu, Carrie, and I had a blast making this demo. It’s mind-boggling how far games have come in twenty years. “I imagine the first company to build an actual Matrix-a fully immersive, persistent world-will be a game company and Epic is certainly paving the way there. “When I told them I was making another Matrix film, they suggested I come and play in the Epic sandbox,” says Wachowski. Wachowski, Libreri, and Gaeta have been friends since the days of the trilogy.

The project reunited many of the crew that worked on the seminal The Matrix trilogy, including James McTeigue, Kym Barrett, John Gaeta, Kim Libreri, Jerome Platteaux, George Borshukov, and Michael F Gay, in collaboration with teams across both Epic Games and partners, such as SideFX, Evil Eye Pictures, The Coalition, WetaFX (formerly Weta Digital), and many others.