Following its release late last week, more details are out via Variety regarding the rather incredible “The Matrix Awakens” tech demo now available for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S consoles.
“The Matrix Awakens” is designed to show off the capabilities of Epic’s 3D creation tool Unreal Engine 5 which will power the next generation of both gaming and virtual production and gets an official release in 2022.
The proof-of-concept demo mostly consists of an open-world city in which you can walk, drive and fly around along with adjusting various elements from the sun’s position, to turning on and off the ‘Matrix filter,’ to adjusting the levels of crowds and vehicles.
It’s not unlike taking the world of PlayStation’s “Marvel’s Spider-Man,” which already looks great, and adding even more realistic lighting, architecture, styling and zero load times with no pop-in.
There’s also the more cinematic section with video blended with next-level QuickTime event-style elements. The demo was written and cinematically directed by Lana Wachowski, actors Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprising their roles as Neo and Trinity.
With the exception of a very brief video clip of Reeves in the white space (and a few seconds of clips from the original “The Matrix), the actors and characters are entirely digital re-creations. That includes the meticulously recreated sleeping on his keyboard Neo shot at the start. The actors provided the dialogue along with high-fidelity 3D scans and 4D captures of their performances in a studio in Serbia.
The demo also showcases multiple features of the game engine including the MetaHuman Creator, the Chaos physics system, the Lumen dynamic global illumination system which uses real-time ray tracing, a World Partition system for developing large environments, and Temporal Super Resolution which allows rich, high-resolution images at low processing cost.
The city of the demo reportedly has a surface area of 15.79 square kilometers and contains 260 km of roads, 512 km of sidewalks, 1,248 intersections, 17,000 simulated (and destructible) traffic vehicles, and 45,073 parked cars. It also boasts 35,000 simulated MetaHuman pedestrians, 7,000 buildings and 27,848 lampposts.
By day, the city is lit only by the sun, sky and “emissive materials” on meshes – no light sources were placed for streetlights or headlights. At night, nearly all lighting comes from millions of emissive building windows. Epic plans to release all the creative assets used to build the virtual city, its vehicles and pedestrians, next year alongside the final release of Unreal Engine 5.
You can see a short comparison of film vs. Unreal Engine 5 scenes below, along with the originally released full video of the cinematic intro elements of the game.
