From Technicolor’s ‘HP Mars Home Planet’ VR experience to a demo set in the Star Wars universe showcasing techniques for virtual production, Epic Games will offer real-time experiences at Siggraph.

The Siggraph 2018 conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, is the place to go to explore the new trends and technologies, and Epic Games invites visitors to the event to delve into a new world of immersive experiences with Unreal Engine! Epic Games will use the event to demonstrate the power of its Unreal Engine technology to drive the most advanced real-time workflows across film and TV, VR/AR, games, architecture, automotive, product design, marketing and manufacturing.

Kicking things off on Tuesday, August 14 at Siggraph’s must-attend Real Time Live! competition, Epic will be showing a new version of the “Reflections” demo, first revealed at this year’s Game Developers Conference in partnership with ILMxLAB and Nvidia. Set in the Star Wars universe, the demo showcases techniques for virtual production as well as photorealistic real-time ray tracing. At Siggraph, Epic and ILMxLAB will use virtual reality and Unreal Engine’s Sequencer cinematic editor to film a live character performance within “Reflections,” edit the sequence and play the new short film featuring real-time ray tracing at 24fps.

Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri will join a panel discussion to explore how real-time graphics are used in the movie industry today and how they will be used for filmmaking in the future. Under the title The Present and Future of Real-Time Graphics for Film, the panel takes place on Wednesday, 15 August 2018, from 2pm – 3:30pm, this panel brings together voices representing various areas of expertise to provide information about how real-time graphics are being used and how they foresee the future of real-time graphics in film.

Moderated by Pol Jeremias-Vila, from Pixar Animation Studios, with the presence of Kim Libreri (Epic Games), Guido Quaroni (Pixar Animation Studios), Adam Myhill (Unity Technologies) and Damien Fagnou (Technicolor Production Services), the panel will discuss how are real-time graphics used in the movie industry today and how they can and will be used in the coming years.

Epic will also be leading Unreal Tech Talks on Wednesday August 15 in Meeting Room 16, Vancouver Convention Center East Building, featuring presentations on real-time production, live performance motion capture, real-time ray tracing, virtual production, and more. The schedule is as follows:

• 9:30-10:30am: Real-Time Raytracing Advances in Unreal Engine: Explore the latest in raytracing advancements in Unreal Engine, including a deep look at our new path-tracer and progressive lightmapper.
• 11:00am-12:00pm: Fortnite – Advancing the Animation Production Pipeline: Understand new improvements in UE4 to dramatically streamline your animation pipeline, including Sequencer improvements, Shotgun integration, and much more.
• 12:30-1:30pm: Real-Time Motion Capture in Unreal Engine: Learn how Unreal Engine is helping to bring the power of real-time motion capture to film, games, theater, and beyond.
• 2:00-3:00pm: Virtual Production with Unreal Engine 4.20: Take a closer look at how new tools in Unreal Engine 4.20 are enabling a new wave of production workflows that integrate real-time VFX with live action footage.
• 3:30-4:30pm: Mixed Reality Production Using Unreal Engine 4.20: Learn more about the pipeline and processes for designing immersive mixed-reality experiences with live 3D characters.

In addition, Epic will host a series of theater talks on the Siggraph expo floor in booth 1401 covering diverse customer use cases, from creating location-based VR experiences, to leveraging mixed reality tools for live broadcast, to photorealistic architectural visualization. Select theater talks include:

• Taking The Weather Channel into the Mixed Reality Future: Join The Future Group for a behind-the-scenes look at how they used Unreal Engine to help an AR tornado destroy The Weather Channel’s studio during a live broadcast. Presenters: Lawrence Jones and Justin LaBroad of The Future Group.
• Creating ILMxLAB’s Location-Based VR Experiences in UE4: Get an exclusive look at how ILMxLAB used Unreal Engine to design leading location-based VR experiences including the Academy Award-winning ‘Carne y Arena’ and ‘Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire.’ Presenter: Mohen Leo of ILMxLAB.
• Unreal Collaborative Design: Crowdsourcing 3D Assets for Immersive Experiences: Learn about Technicolor’s upcoming ‘HP Mars Home Planet’ VR experience and how they were able to populate a large environment with a variety of crowdsourced CAD data. Presenters: Brian Frager and David Witters of Technicolor.
• Creating 3D Virtual Driving Environments for Simulation: Learn how Ford uses Unreal Engine-powered environments to simulate real world scenarios for autonomous vehicle testing, resulting in the reduction of physical road testing. Presenter: Ashley Micks of Ford.
• Unreal + Shotgun: Real-Time Production Pipelines: Take a deep dive into the new Unreal/Shotgun integration features available in Unreal Engine 4.20. Enable deeper and richer pipeline development capabilities, with an eye toward maximizing efficiency in real-time workflows. Presenter: Ryan Mayeda of Epic.
• The New 3R’s: Real-Time Rendering Revolution: Explore high-level examples of how real-time engines are transforming processes in manufacturing, design, architecture, and entertainment. Presenter: Ken Pimentel of Epic.

The different events planned for Epic Games’ presence at Siggraph will allow attendees from all industries to see the latest developments in Unreal Engine. Lastly, Epic will also host an Unreal Engine customer event on Wednesday, August 15 at 6:00pm, at the Pinnacle Hotel Harbour front. This casual cocktail gathering provides a great networking opportunity and chance to connect with other creative minds in the professional user community.