Unity just released this demo video today and it just makes my jaw drop. Every frame, every pixel of this video was rendered in the Unity engine, featuring Ziva Dynamics' digital human tech, in real-time on an Nvidia RTX GPU. Just a couple of years ago you would've needed a big render farm to render something like this, now anyone with a good enough ray tracing GPU can put together a scene and start making their own kino.
Are game engines the future of filmmaking? Because right now I'm convinced they are.
It still looks a bit off, not as bad as The Spirits Within but not quite there yet.
Gabriel Scott
looks terrible
Jacob Johnson
>realtime
Imagine if Hironobu Sakaguchi had this technology back when he was making The Spirits Within. It took an average of 90 minutes to render a single frame back then.
Both Epic and Unity are trying really hard to make it that way. Just download a couple of assets from Quixel Megascans and you can have yourself a full fledged desert or tundra scene. You have full control over lighting and weather, the camera angles can be manipulated after the fact, and most importantly you can see the final result the same day you shoot.
George Lucas would probably coom if he had this stuff back in the day.