Elijah Dixson

Game Producer / Designer

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Troll | UE4 Ray Tracing Demo

March 20, 2019 by Elijah Dixson

Role: Production Assistant

Key Responsibilities:

  • Project planning

  • Hardware set up and tracking

  • Video editing

  • Meeting notes

Project Summary

Troll is a real-time rendered short video developed by Epic Games and Goodbye Kansas Studios, based on John Bauer's Nordic Art Nouveau fairytale universe. The goal of the project was to showcase the state of ray tracing tech, digital humans, and Niagara particles in the Unreal Engine. The piece debut at GDC 2019 during Epic Game’s State of Unreal Keynote and later that same year we developed and brought an interactive touch screen version of the demo to Siggraph 2019 to show off UE4’s real-time ray tracing capabilities.

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Running on a Single RTX 2080TI GPU

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One of the coolest things about this tech demo to me was that we were able to achieve real-time rendering at a cinema level quality all on a single RTX 2080TI.  In order or accomplish this crazy goal we set out for ourselves we had to do massive render optimizations in Unreal Engine 4 and made sure that is was stable enough for people outside of the company to be able to take advantage of too. For more on the crazy work we did to optimize ray tracing in Unreal Engine 4 check out this tech talk we gave at GDC 2019:

During GDC 2019, Epic's Juan Cañada and Patrick Kelly delivered an up-close look at ray tracing functionality in Unreal Engine 4.22.

At the time all these improvements were totally unheard of– it was game-changing to be able to use 1 GPU for about $1200 where previously developers would need 4+ GPUs each at $3000+ to get anywhere close the same performance. While $1200 still isn’t cheap– this drastic increase in performance meant the average consumer / independent filmmaker / or indie game studio was suddenly able to hit cinema level fidelity visuals and better compete with the titans of their industries.  An incredible example of this can be since with Quixel’s Rebirth– a short film rendered in real-time.

Introducing Rebirth, a real-time cinematic produced by Quixel, harnessing the power of Unreal Engine and real-world scans from the Megascans Icelandic collection. With photorealistic results rivaling traditional offline renderers, Rebirth represents a new way of crafting computer graphics.
March 20, 2019 /Elijah Dixson
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