INDUSTRY INSIGHT
What is the future of 3D visualisation?
We explore the increasing popularity of game engines for visualising real and virtual worlds
News and views from around the international CG community
Unity’s adorable real-time ‘Lion’ demo, featuring assets made by Monster Emporium Animation School students, showcases the Unity Art Tools, including SpeedTree and Ziva, in action
Lion imagery © Monsters Emporium School and Unity, Deadhaus Sonata imagery © Apocalypse Studios, Artificial Intelligence image © Warner Bros.
The world of 3D visualisation has seen some pretty seismic shifts in the last few decades. First up were still images, quickly followed by videos and interactive experiences hot on their heels. For most of this evolution, T 3D artists have been supported by a range of traditional 3D packages including 3ds Max, Maya and Cinema 4D as well as renderers such as
Mental Ray, V-Ray and Octane. The latest shift has seen a move away from these applications and towards game engines. Unity, Unreal Engine (UE) and CryEngine have been around for a long while but have largely occupied the games market alone. Unreal Engine, for example, was birthed out of the first game that was developed with it, Unreal in 1998. A couple of years prior to that, Quake Engine released its debut game, Quake. These were exciting days of development and advance, but it didn’t touch other industries.
It has only been in recent years that we’ve seen a substantial uptake of 3D artists using these engines for 3D visualisation. This has coincided with the creators of these engines broadening their horizons so that film, games and architecture industries that were historically very independent fields could become more closely integrated.
CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has been on a mission to draw these industries together for a while now. His vision is to see them mesh together, creating a common and unified vision but also a united set of tools that drive them towards that goal. Previously, these industries needed specific, independent tools to support their needs, but it is now possible for artists and filmmakers to achieve the same results, and more, with game engines at the heart of the process. This vision is becoming an increasing reality with it now possible to create both a game and film of the same title using a single engine to produce the two.