The relationship between video games and Hollywood has become increasingly transactional in recent years, with video games turning to Hollywood for inspiration, and vice versa.
Allan Poore, a senior vice president at Unity, a video game development platform that is increasingly entering the film industry, said that the core principles of these two mediums are actually the same.
In fact, modern video games look so good that the technology behind them is changing the way blockbusters are made.
Avatar: The Way Of Water was the highest-grossing film of 2022, thanks in part to many of the tools used to bring it to life, which came from Unity’s Weta Digital division.
Unity’s purchase of Weta’s tech assets brought talented film engineers under the umbrella of a video game engine company.
One of the main differences between video games and films is that the rendering of the worlds players explore in games is done in real-time, which means that a game can play out differently depending on what the player does.
This is unlike in films, where visual effects have traditionally been added in post-production.
Real-time techniques allowed the Avatar team to have a representation of what the final frame would look like on set, which makes the film production process smoother, easier, and faster.
Unity’s rivals have also taken advantage of how photorealistic real-time visuals have become and are making moves into filmmaking.
For example, The Mandalorian, the hit Star Wars series, uses an immersive soundstage called The Volume to put actors into various virtual environments.
The Volume boasts an enormous wall of screens that show digital environments made using Epic’s Unreal game engine in real-time, which means the actors know where their characters are supposed to be, and changes can be made on the fly.
While Poore doesn’t see the need for traditional digital effects techniques to disappear, the idea of a “virtual production space” where visuals can be generated on the fly is only going to grow. At the UK’s National Film and Television School, there’s already an entire course dedicated to just that.
Ian Murphy, head of the school’s visual effects MA, said that this technology takes what was traditionally done at the end of the process, and involves visual effects people right at the beginning of the process, pushing them into having conversations with production designers and cinematographers on set.
The trajectory is all moving towards game engines eventually being the actual images people see in the cinema.
»How video game engines are revolutionising Hollywood visual effects«
↯↯↯Read More On The Topic On TDPel Media ↯↯↯