Dr. Zsolnai walks through Unreal Engine 5.4's biggest upgrades: motion matching that actually works in production, animation retargeting that saves hours, and rendering tricks that add detail at runtime instead of eating storage. Most features are free to try.
Fellow scholars, there is a huge new update for Unreal Engine 5.4, a popular game development platform. Previously we showcased its extraordinary simulation capabilities. I really flipped out when seeing those. Hopefully you did too. And this new batch of features is also incredible. It can now do animation retargeting. That is an animation that that you created for a bipedal character can now be transferred to someone else. Do the animation once reuse for many characters. Forever loving it. Especially that moving these characters around just got easier as now you can say that this leg is actually a leg and should be moved as such. Now this only takes a few clicks. Editing these skeletons and bones also got easier and more efficient. And there is so much more. I don't even know where to start. Dear fellow scholars, this is Two Minute Papers with Dr. Zsolnai. And here is one of my favorites, something that you heard about on two Minute Papers before. You see, we talked about amazing computer animation papers where we have a database of real people moving around and we would like to transfer these movements to computer video game characters. The trouble usually is not with the movement itself, but with the transitions between these movements. Pulling that off in a manner that looks realistic required plenty of research work. And now you know what happened. My favorite thing, the papers coming alive in the real world around us. Oh yes. Motion matching has existed in Unreal Engine as an experimental feature, but. But now it is ready for production. Absolutely amazing. Now rendering, or in other words, computing the image that you see also got many improvements. Things got faster. That's great. But look at this. You can add these additional high frequency details like cracks and bumps to a piece of geometry during rendering. So you don't even have to add these to the geometry itself. You can keep it nice and clean in the editor when you work with it, but when the player encounters it in the game itself, it gets tons and tons of more detail. Loving it. Unreal Engine also has improved its super resolution technique. You know this one, in goes a coarse image. You can compute quickly and out comes an image with lots of more detail that would otherwise take much longer to compute in practice. Lots of people are using it to create 1080p full HD footage and upscale it to 4K. And now it works better and more predictably on multiple platforms. Or if you wish to deform these characters with a node based system that is also easier. The sequencer is now better too. This looks like a little video editor program, but it is for animating scenes, characters and environments. Now experimental features include a new mode for creating these really cool 2D motion graphics with 3D objects. And if you would like to be immersed into these 3D video game worlds as you are working on them, new virtual production tools are also available. Depth of Field calculations this is everyone's favorite, where the background gets blurred, hopefully in a physically plausible manner, depending on the distance and the geometry of the objects. Those are also now better, for instance, on these LED video screens where the actors just stand in front of them and appear as if they were somewhere else. In these cases, the results are way better than before. This way you can mix real actors with virtual 3D worlds more seamlessly. And these are just some of the new things it can do. This system is an absolute powerhouse that can already create these incredible simulations and everything that you see here. And it gets better. Not a new feature, but something that I have to show you. Metahuman A realistic person creator, if you will. The this is a culmination of a ton of papers that we talk about here. For instance, the hair also has to be simulated correctly, often strand by strand. The appearance of skin has to be correct, and deformations to the skin also have to be simulated correctly. And with Metahuman Animator, we can also scan ourselves and enter a virtual world as a video game character. And this character is able to mimic our gestures too. Wow. And note that the best part is that doing everything that you saw in this video did not require the expertise of a group of artists or a huge studio with a huge budget. And it did not even require months of work. It is done right as we are talking in minutes, and all of you fellow scholars can try it for free. What a time to be alive. And if you wish to run your own experiments in the cloud, make sure to check out Microsoft Azure AI. Azure AI is a powerful cloud platform that offers you the best tools for your AI projects with responsible AI built in. And here comes the best part. You can even try it out for free through the link in the video Description.
