Weta Digital Showcase Realtime RTX 3090 Animation in Unreal Engine

If you keep up with the world of TV and movie production, even just a little bit, then you’ve likely heard about the of virtual sets. This is something they’ve used heavily on The Mandalorian. Instead of a greenscreen, they use enormous ultra-high-resolution displays and render a background using that. This means they can have an animated background and much of the work is done using Unreal Engine too.

That means real-time CGI elements can be caught with the actors live on the set. It’s all pretty incredible how it goes together. Few CGI houses can match the might of WETA, and recently they’ve demonstrated some of the cool things they can do with a modern graphics card.

Working with Epic Games, Weta Digital demonstrated the new Hair & Fur Rendering and Simulation tool from Unreal Engine. The demo was running on an Nvidia RTX 3090, and it looks stunning.

Keep in mind, as impressive as this is maxing out a single modern GPU, the set is heavily animated its self, and there’s only two animals in the scene. It is rendered in real-time though, which is impressive.

“Epic Games partnered with Weta Digital on this exclusive animated short, created in Unreal Engine using the new Hair & Fur Rendering and Simulation tool coming to all users later this year in Unreal Engine 4.26. Weta Digital also leveraged Unreal Engine’s Control Rig and Animation in Sequencer features to create the meerkat, and Movie Render Queue for export.” – Unreal Engine YouTube

Check out the video below and let us know what you think!

You can find details on the latest Unreal Engine 4.26 release here.