How good will the next Gears of War game look? The Coalition gave us a potential look at that today with its new “Cavern” cinematic tech test, one that demonstrates the power of the technology behind the fifth iteration of Epic Games’ hugely popular Unreal Engine. The footage suggests that Gears 6, or whatever the developer might be planning to dazzle Xbox Series X|S and PC gamers with next, could potentially feature scenes with tens of millions of polygons, enabling a “massive 100x leap forward in detail.” Kate Rayner, studio technical director at The Coalition, has shared some of her thoughts on Unreal Engine 5 and what players can expect from future games in an interview linked below.
The Coalition Debuts New Unreal Engine 5 Tech Test with 100x More Graphic Detail (Xbox Wire)
First off, I have to give credit to the whole team, as this was truly a studio-wide effort to create our first ever cinematic in UE5 – as well as our first time using Sequencer – and we had a lot of fun making it. A couple things we’re really proud of are the facial animations and just the overall quality of the character model.
We were able to utilize a preliminary version of our next-gen face rig and hire an actor wearing a head-cam to capture performance, and partner with Cubic Motion to bring it all to life. That, coupled with Control Rig, helped us create someone who looks and moves in the most realistic ways we’ve ever done, and it’s incredibly exciting to think where we can go next. We also utilized Chaos cloth physics to get to a really high level of visual fidelity, and we’re extremely pleased with the results.
The coolest part is that we’ve got all these great visuals and animations running on an Xbox Series X, so that just gives you an idea of the visual fidelity and quality we’re going to be able to create. Demos like this allow us to learn a great deal about the performance of UE5, and I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to be able to create some pretty incredible things with this new tech.