Who wants to make a brush before painting a picture?
One of the most striking things about Light & Magic, Lawrence Kasdan’s captivating documentary series about the early days of the special effects house behind Star Wars, is how differently artists were forced to work back then. It was one thing to have an idea about how a space battle might look on the screen, but getting it up there could involve literally inventing new physical technology in order to facilitate capturing the shot. ILM pioneers such as John Dykstra and Dennis Muren had to be as much engineers as artists, which makes the visual qualities of George Lucas’s original trilogy all the more remarkable. Little wonder that it remains such a key reference work throughout movies, TV and indeed games.
Nowadays, achieving high-quality visual effects isn’t exactly easy, but tools such as Unreal Engine allow the technology to get out of the way much more than has ever been the case in the past, clearing the channel between concept and execution. With the same extraordinarily powerful tools available to everyone, a game’s production values now have much more to do with the talent of the artists a studio is able to attract than some piece of bespoke technology its CTO has cooked up in his secret lab.
At this point, the enthusiasm among developers for Unreal Engine 5 can feel somewhat cult-like, but this is only the kind of response to be expected in the process of shackles being removed, allowing creative people to get on with the business of actually being creative. Epic’s toolset is repeatedly endorsed in our discussions with Hexworks, the CI Games studio working on The Lords Of The Fallen, and if you’ve seen the game’s most recent trailer, you’ll understand why. For a bit more evidence, consider the visuals showcased in our cover story, beginning on p48.
It’s especially important to admire this kind of craft against a backdrop of machine-generated visualisation that is creating so much angst among the artistic community. On p60 we look at the rise of AI tools in game production, and even manage to find some positive notes out there.