Unreal Fest 2024: Opening Highlights and Virtual Production Updates

Epic Games' Unreal Fest Seattle 2024 kicked off with a flurry of announcements and insights, showcasing the company's vision for the future of interactive entertainment and real-time 3D content creation.

The Big Picture

Epic is leveraging its success with Fortnite and Unreal Engine to create a more open, interoperable digital ecosystem across gaming, film, and enterprise applications.

State of Play

Epic CEO Tim Sweeney reported the company is financially sound, with Fortnite hitting a record 110 million monthly active users. He emphasized Epic's goal to help all developers achieve similar success by sharing their technology.

Key Announcements

• Unreal Engine 5.5 preview is now available, featuring improvements in rendering, animation, and mobile development.

• Epic Games Store is expanding to mobile platforms, starting with Android worldwide and iOS in the EU.

• A new digital asset marketplace called Fab is launching this month, supporting all game engines and digital content creation tools.

• Epic is introducing "Launch Everywhere with Epic," offering a reduced Unreal Engine royalty rate (from 5% to 3.5%) for games that ship simultaneously on the Epic Games Store.

Film and TV Production

Epic highlighted Unreal Engine's growing role in film and TV production, with over 800 productions using the technology.

Guest speakers Wes Ball (director of "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes") and Tim Miller (director of "Deadpool") shared their experiences using Unreal Engine in filmmaking.

Ball emphasized Unreal's value in pre-production: "Unreal really became a pre-vis tool and a production tool for us, a great tool for figuring out the technical aspects of the movie."

Miller showcased "Secret Level," an upcoming animated anthology series based on video games, with some segments created entirely in Unreal Engine.

Virtual Production

Key improvements for virtual production include:

• Evolution of virtual production from video capture card support to LED walls and in-camera VFX

• SMPTE 2110 integration for in-camera VFX is now production-ready. SMPTE 2110 offers a cost-effective, low-latency, flexible solution for LED wall setups.

• Addition of multi-camera support amd inner-frustum splitting for better performance at high resolutions

• New Depth of Field compensation tool that correctly defocuses the LED wall for improved realism

What's Next

Epic announced that Unreal Fest will be moving to Orlando for its next event, scheduled for June 2-5, 2025.

The Bottom Line

Epic Games continues to push the boundaries of real-time 3D content creation, fostering a more interconnected digital ecosystem across gaming, film, and enterprise applications.

With ongoing improvements to Unreal Engine and expansion into mobile platforms, Epic is positioning itself at the forefront of the next generation of interactive entertainment.