ILM used Unreal Engine to make StageCraft and kept iterating on it until it’s the awesome tech that it is. They have a vested interest in seeing the underlying engine continue to prosper.
They made a point of highlighting the use of Unreal during the production of Season 1, but then it's completely absent from their discussion of later seasons, instead only referencing an in-house renderer they call Helios. Have they specifically said anywhere that they're still using Unreal Engine?
This 2021 article mentions that external productions using StageCraft services can choose to use either Unreal or Helios for rendering, so the Unreal integration may still be available for those who want it, but obviously ILM didn't write a brand new renderer for the fun of it. Unreal must not have been cutting it for their own productions.
> StageCraft leverages Helios ILM’s real-time cinema render engine. It is a set of LED screens that work as a 360 extension digital set, allowing filmmakers to explore new ideas, communicate concepts, and execute shots in a collaborative and flexible production environment.
"Ask HN: What's the state of the art for drawing math diagrams online?" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38355444 ; generative-manim, manimGPT, BlenderGPT, ipyblender, o3de, how do we teach primary math intuition with the platforms that reach them, how do we Manim in 3 or even 4D?
> Is there a way to vary the [UE] AutoLOD for longer shots?
UE5 (and other 4d graphics and physics simulators) automatically reduce the LOD Level-of-Detail for objects in the distance.
Is that LOD parametric with StageCraft software?
(For example, reportedly Cities Skyline 2 is bad slow because they included meshes for characters' teeth and expected AutoLOD to just make it work on the computers kids tend to have. It doesn't work on reasonable machines because the devs all have fast pro GPUs to develop on, so they don't know what the UX is for the average family (that would be happy to turn down the polygon count themselves for what we can learn from the gameplay). Having game devs dogfood with real-world devices that families afford would be good for these firms too.).
Hopefully they'll continue to sell games through non-Epic stores that people have already invested in.
And hopefully, they'll make sure their products work with Proton and thus popular Linux-based handheld gaming devices.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StageCraft
ILM used Unreal Engine to make StageCraft and kept iterating on it until it’s the awesome tech that it is. They have a vested interest in seeing the underlying engine continue to prosper.