FINALLY Unreal Engine VFX Won't Look FAKE

Añadido: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]If you're struggling to get realistic results from Unreal Engine, there's a very good reason for it, and it matters if you're doing filmmaking, visual effects, or virtual production using Unreal. But, Nvidia just announced something incredible that could change this completely. It might just be the best news in years. DLSS is Nvidia's technology for improving the performance of real-time 3D graphics. Now, so far it's only dealt with things like upscaling, improvements to ray tracing, and frame generation in its latest version 4.5. That's where DLSS 5 comes in, and it's a completely different beast. It's a neural rendering. It looks at the frame that's currently being generated, and runs it through an AI model that understands what it's looking at. It knows skin, it knows stone, metallic, fabric, and uses its knowledge to improve the scene by applying a physically plausible shading to it in real time. But, before we get too far down the rabbit hole, let's talk about why Unreal Engine's real-time output feels fake. In a nutshell, it all comes down to light, and Unreal has a lot of different techniques to handle bounce light, reflections, and shadows. And while systems like Lumen can produce nice-looking results for games, they have a lot of shortcuts under the hood that trade quality for frames per second. And to be fair, there have been a lot of examples of really realistic-looking work in Unreal by talented artists, but most of these examples are very short and really high effort. If we want to do this at scale and do a lot of shots without tweaking materials and lighting forever, >> [music] >> we're going to need a solution. Let's take a look at some of the examples from Nvidia's demo, do some pixel peeping, and see if this is actually going to be any use. The first example's from a game called Zora, and I thought this was probably my favorite actually of all the demos. It's really making a big difference to the materials and the lighting. What it is adding is that physical accuracy, that directionality.

[00:01:41]And I especially love this shot of these different chalices. The metallic difference is huge, and that explains why I'm seeing much more bounce light in all these examples. It's like having extra samples without having to add samples. And one thing that just does not get mentioned enough is the subsurface scattering on these leaves.

[00:01:59]The increase in realism from the before and after on this is amazing. Faces. And yes, this is the area where the gaming community has the most complaints, and maybe rightly so. The Hogwarts Legacy footage and the Resident Evil examples are the ones where this complaint is the most obvious. It's quite clear that what DLSS 5 is doing is exaggerating a lot of the wrinkles and creases on the talents' faces, maybe even inventing a few, and that's a problem. We don't want these tools to be inventing anything when there's artistic intent. But we also have to bear in mind that this is a showcase of DLSS, so they've probably turned it all the way up to the max to the point where it's starting to do some weird stuff. And when you take a character's face and exaggerate elements, and then you re-light it as well, it's not a wonder that people think that characters are changing.

[00:02:42]People have really honed in on this example from Resident Evil because it looks like the DLSS is adding lipstick to this character, misinterpreting what that lip shader should be like. We have to remember that this is early days, and maybe even it's a little undercooked right now. But this is the worst it's ever going to be. But as a filmmaker, this is actually got me pretty excited.

[00:03:00]I love the idea of being able to use this technology on backgrounds, maybe improving an Unreal Engine scene, take it from 70 or 80% up to 90 or 95% realism. It'll also help with our background talent as well. So if we have a crowd in the background, it's not just going to be a bunch of stock MetaHumans.

[00:03:16]If you take all of this and look at it from the point of view of virtual production, where you have to capture your backgrounds in camera when you're on an LED wall, or live when you're shooting on a green screen like the one behind me, you can see how this might be a bit of a game changer. So when DLSS 5 actually does launch, will we be able to use it? Because these demos run on [music] 2 5090 GPUs, and that's going to rule out most people, including myself, from ever using it.

[00:03:41]However, the way DLSS has worked in the past is it's always started on high-end hardware for demos, and then the requirements have gradually gone down over time. Although I am wondering whether you need a 50 series GPU for it to run actually. And while we wait to find out if DLSS 5 actually works, it's not the only game in town. Nvidia already has a whole branch available for Unreal Engine featuring some of the most cutting edge technology including ReSTIR which is basically real-time path tracing. There's mega geometry which is a way of ray tracing against Nanite meshes in Unreal and neural materials which is a way of getting more complex, more realistic materials in real-time in the engine. And I have it running in real-time on a 4090 GPU. While DLSS 5 might give us plausible results, if you want true physical accuracy for your backgrounds in virtual production, this is the way to go. I've always said that virtual production should end up feeling like picking up a camera and just shooting in the real world. That's the goal and I expect that this kind of tech will get us a step closer. And if you're interested in seeing what can be achieved with path tracing, watch this video next where I make a Stranger Things short film in my living room and I may have really pushed this one to the limit. I'll see you there.