AN UNREAL ENGINE 5 EXPERIENCE

Trevor Hogg dives deep into this ambitious, open world project, showcasing UE5’s exciting new features

Images courtesy of Epic Games

As the boundaries between the real and virtual worlds continue to blur, filmmaker Lana Wachowski has partnered with Epic Games to create an interactive experience for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S; coinciding with the release of TheMatrix Resurrections, it reimagines Thomas Anderson/Neo (Keanu Reeves) as a video game creator who begins to question the validity of his reality. Collaborating on the project with Epic Games were The Matrixtrilogy alumni James McTeigue, Kym Barrett, John Gaeta, Kim Libreri, Jerome Platteaux, George Borshukov, and Michael F Gay as well as SideFX, Evil Eye Pictures, The Coalition and Weta FX.

Reprising their iconic roles as incredibly realistic digital doubles are Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. Capture sessions were held at Epic Games’ 3Lateral Studio in Novi Sad, Serbia, which produced high-fidelity 3D scans of Reeves’ and Moss’ faces and 4D captures of their performances.

“All of the demos we create as part of the Special Projects team are designed to push Unreal Engine to new heights and expand everybody’s perspective on what it is capable of,” notes Matthias Worch, design lead at Epic Games. “The Matrix Awakens is no different in this regard, pushing existing initiatives [Nanite, Lumen, digital humans, World Partition] as well as new technologies [Mass AI traffic and pedestrian systems, MetaSounds] to a downtown city environment, which presented a new dimension of complexity.”

The green tint look is a homage to the original trilogy

10 million unique and duplicated assets were created to make the city