Creativity lies in all of us.
It's what makes us human.
It starts with an idea. The desire to create.
To solve.
To play.
To share.
Together we can build new worlds.
Freedom to create. For all.
SIMON JONES: Hi, everybody.
Welcome to Unreal Engine Build: Automotive 2021.
I'm Simon Jones, director of Unreal Engine Enterprise.
Back in 2016, when we held the first ever Build event in
front of 300 invited guests, we couldn't have imagine that five
years later we'll be streaming to an audience of thousands.
We can see Build as a way to showcase the amazing uses of Unreal
Engine from non-games industries.
And in 2017, we hosted our first automotive event in Munich, Germany.
Now this annual automotive gathering has taken on a
life of its own online.
So for everyone watching at home for the first time,
welcome to the show.
Of course, 2020 was a year like no other.
With many of us leaving our offices behind and adapting to remote working.
And since that first Munich event in 2017, we've seen such innovation from
our fantastic community, including projects across design, production,
engineering, factory planning, retail, and autonomous driving.
We've seen your marketing teams blend cutting edge techniques
from Hollywood to produce some of the best marketing content
created by any industry.
The latest of these technologies being in-engine virtual production,
which has revolutionized the creation of launch films,
of product reveals, and of global events like the one today.
You'll learn more about that technology later,
as we take you behind the scenes. And perhaps one of the proudest
developments for our team, we're beginning to see Unreal Engine
appear in the car dashboard systems via our HMI program.
You're going to hear success stories covering all these
subjects later today.
Now the vision which drives our team is at the core of Epic's philosophy.
To build the best tools and put them in the hands of creators.
And we continue to work hard to make content creation as
frictionless as possible.
Whether you're working on a car configurator, designing an airport,
shooting a movie, or making a video game, we're continuing to
invest in assets, materials, and technologies to further reduce
the high cost of content creation.
And we have our eyes to the future and the convergence of everything
we do in a persistent digital world.
Complete with a digital twin of everything.
For the automotive industry
this starts with having a car that you designed in Unreal Engine
be able to easily appear in a video game or a film.
All of which is also made in Unreal.
And this will keep getting bigger and bigger until all content is
available in a fully connected and interactive environment, which
is our vision of the metaverse.
And there's people like us and each and every one of you,
being here today that are taking another step
closer to being ready for the metaverse becoming a reality.
This event isn't about Epic Games.
It's about all of you.
It's about all of your project stories, not just the ones that made the stage.
And even though this year, we can't meet at the bar and share a beer--
I'm sure we'll all be getting together soon enough--
we can hang out by interacting live in the dev lounges.
Our whole team looks forward to meeting you there.
We have an amazing lineup of stories to share, and I'm proud
and delighted to be the one to kick off Build: Automotive 2021.
That's enough from me.
Let's get on with the show.
DOUG WOLFF: Hi, everybody.
I'm your host, Doug Wolff.
I'm a business development manager here at Epic Games,
working in the automotive industry.
The last time we all got in a room to discuss cool automotive stories
and Unreal Engine was well over a year ago.
And all things being equal,
we would have been in one of those rooms by now, already.
However, we had to do things differently this year and we're on
a digital platform called Hopin.
The video is streaming to you, but the key is you need to interact.
Interact with each other and reach out to us.
Build events bring you the biggest automotive stories of that year.
And one of the biggest stories of this year is virtual production.
BMW did something really remarkable.
Not only did they build a virtual set, they used it to live launch
a vehicle at their Next Gen show.
It's an amazing story.
And I'm super excited to share with you off the top.
AMIAZ: Wow, hello Amiaz here
So they told me, what's coming up in terms of content.
And then they told me I'm standing in a cave and everything is so Unreal Engine.
But for me, this is so very real.
[CAUTION BY SKRXLLA PLAYS]
♫ Stop that ♫
STEFAN PONIKVA: Because of the uncertainty,
we had to change all our plans.
We had plans for a live event, and mid-April due to COVID-19,
we said we can't continue with these plans.
We need to change this into a fully digital event,
and therefore we then screened and evaluated
the entire industry when it comes
to virtual productions, when it comes to broadcasting
studios, et cetera.
And then after a while, we came to the conclusion
that this LED cave is the best of the best.
♫ Stop that ♫ ♫ Yeah ♫
♫ I hear 'em chatting the noise ♫
♫ Move too quick, can't stop for the talking ♫
♫ I hear 'em chat with the boys ♫
♫ Man so tough but mans keep walking ♫
♫ Dress too sharp with the poise ♫
♫ White girls love to tell me I'm awesome, yeah ♫
♫ Hot like fire on the pan ♫
♫ If you wanna touch man, please use caution ♫
ANDREAS SCHIMMELPFENNIG: The interesting idea
is that we can go into some scenes,
and people who are doing the presentation,
they're really in the scene.
And as soon as we pull out, we want
to destroy that illusion so that you feel,
oh, no, they are on the stage.
♫ --in a cage Never let out, let out the, let out the ♫
♫ Yeah I hear 'em chatting the noise ♫
♫ Move too-- ♫
ANDREAS SCHIMMELPFENNIG: This back and forth playing
with the spaces with the impressions
is really, really exciting for us.
♫ --walking, yeah ♫ ♫ Dress too sharp with the poise ♫
♫ White girls love to tell me I'm awesome, yeah ♫
HADRIEN LEDIEU: Everything is reacting to the camera motion,
and it feels really a lot more natural.
And it tricks you in believing that the people are really
in the world.
♫ Let out the, let out the ♫
♫ Big shoes, check out the crease ♫
♫ Flow like I'm Bigfoot, step on the beat ♫
♫ Make a mans run till he stepped out the cleats ♫
ANDREAS SCHIMMELPFENNIG: For the perfect illusion
you have to stick to some physical size relations.
If, for example, a human is too big really far away,
it totally crushes the spatial impression because it's wrong.
♫ Hot like fire on the pan ♫
♫ If you wanna touch man, please use caution ♫
♫ Stop that ♫
♫ Yeah, I hear 'em chat-- ♫
OLE REINSBERGER: When Andreas came up with this idea
to produce Unreal content, we said, OK, all right.
Nobody has ever done it before.
♫ --caution, yeah ♫ ♫ Hot like fire on the pan ♫
♫ If you wanna touch man, please use caution ♫
AMIAZ: Hello people, so now Amiaz is getting a little pretty.
♫ 4, 3, 2, go ♫
SPEAKER: Do you have a favorite world?
ANDREAS SCHIMMELPFENNIG: Um.
HADRIEN LEDIEU: I like the simplicity of the design world.
Like, it's sometimes I like the forest as well.
ALEXA GOLDSCHMIDT: The one with Supercar Blondie
when you have the wood, and the stars,
and it sparkles, and it looks so amazing like in a fairy tale.
HADRIEN LEDIEU: Something simple.
Just pretty.
It's a nice color.
ALEXA GOLDSCHMIDT: And actually, the Mini with the basketball
court, that looks pretty cool.
HADRIEN LEDIEU: It feels quiet.
It's calm, and it's just nice.
ANDREAS SCHIMMELPFENNIG: Jumping into these worlds,
going out, going to the other one.
HADRIEN LEDIEU: You don't feel stress.
Like, it's just a peaceful place,
and that's probably the one I like the most.
♫ If you want to do it, just do it ♫
♫ Do it like it's never been done before ♫
♫ Just do it ♫
♫ Move it like I'm moving in stereo ♫
♫ Just do it ♫
♫ Move it like it's all you've been waiting for ♫
♫ Do what you do ♫
♫ Just do it for you ♫
♫ Just do it ♫
♫ Just do it for you ♫
HADRIEN LEDIEU: Oh, no.
DOUG WOLFF: So BMW have just shown us
how you can use virtual production techniques
for a live vehicle launch event.
And that was great.
It was an amazing accomplishment.
When it comes to shooting commercials, virtual production also excels.
In an indoor controlled environment
You can take the car and your whole team from the center of a forest
to a space station in the blink of an eye.
A bunch of top automotive brands have been doing this at a facility
called the Hyperbowl near Munich.
Let's check it out.
FRANK FOERSTER: Cut!
OK, everybody, moving to next scene.
Glad you made it.
Welcome to the Hyperbowl.
This studio is a joint venture of four companies--
NSYNK, ACHT, TFN, and Fournell.
And now operates as an independent virtual production
studio that is open to everyone.
With more than 400 square meters of high-res LED,
the Hyperbowl is the largest volume of its kind in Europe.
Even our ceiling is made of the same high-res LED as the walls.
Automotive is a particularly valid use case
for virtual production because its hero,
the car, is such a glossy object.
You can't photograph a car without an environment.
And this is where classical studio shoots or even green
screens hit their limits.
Now, we can radically expand what
can be produced in the studio with all the benefits
that come along with this.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Here, we have steady lighting conditions
over the whole day, which can be exactly reproduced at any time.
You can shoot multiple locations in one day.
And this is time-saving and cost-efficient,
but this is also, of course, much more sustainable.
And another important aspect is confidential prototypes
can be kept out of public at ease
and still be shot as if they were on location.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHRISTIAN GENZ: When I think about how many streets had to be closed for various shoots in the past.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We do not need that here!
JAN PRAHL: And pretty cool for the first time that it worked out so well. I like it!
JULIAN KRUGER: What really fascinates me
about this technology is that it opens up
so many creative possibilities.
When it comes to content creation,
you can assume that about 80% of the traditional post-production
becomes pre-production.
You can use existing 3D pipelines
to create your environments to be used on an LED stage.
Concept artists, 3D modeling, shading, and lighting,
it's basically all the same, except you have
to bring it all into Unreal.
And make sure that it can be rendered in real-time.
Then you can benefit from all the possibilities
of a real-time engine, such as changing light in real-time
and altering the scene.
But also, virtual interactive shooting plan and previs.
With this process, you can create a lot of content
in very short time.
The ID.4 campaign was shot in only two days.
We had five locations, two abstract worlds, six talents,
and we created a 60-second ad, various formats
for social media, and then also for different international
markets.
ENO HENZE: Virtual production is also
getting a lot of attention for live communication,
such as car launches or virtual keynotes.
For these projects, we have combined the virtual sets
with layers of augmented reality in real-time.
You can add virtual props to your set designs.
And you can even present cars that
only exists as a virtual concept and have never
been physically produced.
STEFAN WENZ: Working for a couple of years
within the automotive area, I know
the expectations of this industry on CG are very high.
Moving footage has always been the supreme discipline.
But with virtual production, known
from Hollywood productions like The Mandalorian,
there's now a cost-efficient solution,
which reflects the high expectations
and can match the creatives' ideas.
Storytelling has become more important with today's
customers buying a lifestyle alongside with the product.
The CG environment can perfectly
match the communication strategy and can
be integrated into a seamless storyline using various media
assets.
Starting at the virtual courtyard
for OEM internal management presentations,
reuse at the commercial production, and all other media
assets, the synergies are obvious.
Epic Games supports this by providing a huge Megascans
library for free in all Unreal-based productions, which
can be endlessly enriched by recreating using the Quixel
Mixer technology.
ENO HENZE: Thanks for having us
here from the Hyperbowl.
It was a pleasure to be here.
And enjoy the rest of your Build event.
See you.
DOUG WOLFF: So in those last two stories,
we saw some absolutely huge car brands using
virtual production techniques for both live events and car commercials.
On the subject of virtual production,
I'd like to invite a special guest Alistair from our
London Innovation Lab.
ALISTAIR: Thank you, Doug.
It's terrific to be here at the Auto Build event today.
I say here at the event, but it's a little bit of an illusion.
Some of you may have guessed already, but the garage
space that you see behind here, is actually virtual.
It's been created in Unreal and is being displayed on our LED demo
setup at the Innovation Lab.
Let's take a break for a moment and we'll
take a wander around and dive behind the curtain if you will,
and let me show you the Innovation Lab.
Come with me.
Being as this is a break and I'm English,
I'm going to grab a quick cup of tea as we show you around.
This space is actually a converted television studio.
And it's a fantastic space too, to get lots of people in here
to meet and greet and talk about the sort of stuff that they're
creating in Unreal.
Obviously a little bit quieter here today.
We've also learned to virtualize these things from the lab.
So this is a great example.
The Auto Build event will reach thousands of thousands of people
and we're able to do that from here.
The lab is base camp for a fantastic team of artists that we
have here and that team of artists, they really roll their sleeves up and
work alongside you in the community, to make sure that the projects
that you're doing in Unreal are as fantastic as they can be.
They need to look as high fidelity as possible.
They need to be optimized for their real time interactivity as well.
And that's what the group at the lab here do.
Now here's our demo volume again.
And just to point out, it's actually quite a small and modest
space, but you can see the type of results that we're able to get
out of this and bear that in mind for the sort of projects that you
might want to do.
You don't always need to have a big stage setup.
Right.
Let's jump back into the virtual world.
And I want to introduce you to a great friend and colleague
of mine over in America.
Heiko, who runs the Detroit Innovation Lab.
I've got to actually try and get him up on screen
cause he's a hologram.
Oh, there we go.
Works on a good click.
Heiko, fantastic to see you today.
I'm afraid I've wandered back onstage with a cup of tea.
Great for me, but I'm afraid I didn't bring anything for you.
So perhaps as a hologram, you'll forgive me.
It's fantastic to have you here with us in the Innovation Lab today.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you're doing
over there in Detroit?
HEIKO WENCZEL: Alistair, look at this crazy setup.
I've been jealous already about the physical space you have.
Now you're adding this amazing virtual space on top of it,
and you can summon me at will. Look at this.
If I ever grow up, I want to be like you.
But going back to your question,
building a physical lab and collaborating with partners
certainly hasn't been easy in the last year, but it gave us some
time to rethink some options that we have and looking at the
technology we have with virtual production, as well as what's
happening in the virtual events space overall, there was the
idea to build an extension to the physical labs in the virtual
world, build a consistent space where you come and visit us,
partner with us, work with us together.
And so we're building that out now.
I'm hoping I can do some tests with you, invite you into that
space and sooner or later, we all can summon Alistair to us.
ALISTAIR: I look forward to it, Heiko.
I really do.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
From virtual spaces and virtual production,
over to virtual interfaces and HMI, which is a big theme this year,
I want to introduce you to Joe,
who's our technical product manager at Epic Games
for HMI. Over to you, Joe.
Thank you.
JOE ANDRESEN: Hi, I'm Joe Andresen, technical product manager for HMI and
embedded systems at Epic Games.
Last October, we announced our HMI initiative and I'm
here to give you an update on what we've been working on.
One of the things that we discussed last October was this idea of design
driven development, where your Unreal project could be deployed directly
to the vehicle in production.
This allows designers to iterate more quickly on their
designs and get a more polished design in front of the driver.
Also our partner Vector Forum
has developed an HMI starter widget pack as an introduction to developing
HMI user experiences in Unreal.
What's great about this is that there are UI templates that
allow you to get up and running quickly with common HMI elements.
They've also developed an HMI simulator.
This allows you to take your Unreal HMI project and drop it into a 3D
car inside a 3D environment and feed sensory information to your HMI.
Things like blind spot warnings, speed, day/night cycle, and much more
are available for you to test before your HMI ever gets to production.
The HMI starter pack and the HMI simulator by Vector Forum
are available in the Unreal Engine Marketplace right now.
I really enjoyed hearing from all the people who reached out to us and the
cool projects that you're working on.
If you haven't reached out to us, it would be great
to see what you're up to.
Thank you.
DOUG WOLFF: Thanks, Joe.
That was a great update.
You guys might remember Joe from our HMI announcement.
Our automotive partner in that film was General Motors and they're
here today with an update on not only their HMI developments, but a
bunch of other cool stuff as well.
KAREN LEHR: How could a game engine that my little nephew is hooked
on, be a game changer at GM.
That was one of the questions I had when I joined the team.
I'm Karen Lehr, and I lead the IT immersive technologies team.
It started out with a teapot.
Then we made it spin. Fast forward to where we are now.
We've used Unreal Engine to create efficiencies and improve
experiences for vehicle design, simulation, marketing, and now
with our infotainment systems.
Here's a glimpse at just a few of the ways we've utilized the power
of Unreal Engine and our awesome partnership with Epic.
SPEAKER 1: Global Creative Visualization, or GCV,
is part of the industrial design function here at General Motors.
And we're responsible for the first public
look at our vehicles.
In addition to the internal highly confidential assets
created during development,
we also produce the first photos, videos, CGI images, and animation.
When GM is ready to show something new to the public,
including the Hummer EV.
For Hummer EV, the team produced an extensive
and beautiful set of assets worthy of this revolutionary vehicle.
I'm continually amazed by the talent of our team.
The portfolio photography and video, often blended with CGI
imagery and animation, shows the true capability of this vehicle.
Today, I was invited to share with the design family and exclusive
first look at the team's animation.
STEPHEN GRAY: Hi, my name is Steven Gray
and I'm the manager of GM Design's Global Creative Visualization group.
We're responsible for crafting the first
look you as the public sees of GM's products from a design perspective.
We're based on Maya, V-Ray, Nuke, Adobe products, and now, Unreal as
our primary tools.
GCV does a lot of live action CGI integration,
and we will often work with short timeframes to put together projects.
As part of our technical development,
we're working hard transitioning this pipeline over to Unreal
for flexibility and reusability
the platform presents us with.
Currently, if we have a track shot that needs to have the vehicle
replaced, we need to go through a lot of steps in different software.
Unreal opens up options to substantially streamline this
process for faster replacements through GPU rendering.
It's not uncommon for color, parts, or even the full service to
change during our productions. Unreal enables us to remove many
traditional production steps, and there's a lot of value in that.
Given the complex and varied assets we produce, separate
pipelines for CGI images, immersive projects, and VFX exist.
Amalgamating this through the use of Unreal for single data preparation
pipelines and versioning systems is really very powerful in our world.
There are areas of our business where we're already comfortably
shifting asset creation over to Unreal and getting results comparable
to our traditional pipelines.
It's something that team's really excited about.
Our clients don't care how a shot is created just that it's
believable and it looks great.
That's our measuring stick.
Optimizing our pipeline through the integration of Unreal real-time
workflow enables new creative possibilities, our more complex
storytelling, and substantial increases in the volume of content.
On the immersive side, we've found that the use of a real video and
photography adds a lot to create a strong suspension of disbelief during
experiences.
Combined with tools such as Megascans and photogrammetry,
the future is exciting.
Not too much I can say at this point, but stay tuned on that
front and expect some great things from General Motors.
SCOTT MARTIN: Hi, my name is Scott Martin and I'm the creative director for
user experience at General Motors by integrating the Unreal Engine
into our infotainment systems to engage our customers with
their vehicles in new ways,
the engine is allowing us to make vast improvements in a few key areas.
By achieving more robust vehicle visualization on our displays,
more rich, more dynamic, and tailored to a customer's vehicle.
Having a more responsive and iterative visualization process has been
improving our design time and overall pipeline,
alive for quicker sketching, quicker feedback and quicker
overall turnaround times.
Having the interactive data flexibility is giving us performance
boosts not only in hardware, but also in animation and improving our
onboard memory storage footprint.
The Unreal Engine has been opening the door to new
user experience potential thanks to that
real-time environment onboard. Epic has been instrumental
in collaborating with our development teams to help us
optimize our processes and lay the foundation for what's to come.
They've been incredibly informative and will be a
key partner in our future user experience endeavors.
We're just beginning to scratch the surface of what we can
do with Epic's Unreal Engine
and there's a lot more to come.
STEPHEN MURPHY: GM is using Unreal Engine on many projects,
across many different business groups.
Product design, engineering, manufacturing,
IT, and marketing are all working on Unreal based projects.
We have proven Unreal can help deliver business value.
And we continue to create products and applications in Unreal Engine.
But for us, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
We have a mission to continue to improve and innovate.
We have a strategic goal to make real time rendering, more
available and more accessible to our users.
To empower teams to leverage better VR and desktop hardware.
Unreal powered in-car
experiences, autonomous learning, and simulations, and visualizing
our map data, are just some of the targets we've set for ourselves.
Thank you for allowing us to share our journey with you today.
And we look forward to being able to share more with you in the future.
Thank you.
DOUG WOLFF: Being able to use your car model in multiple places is extremely
valuable, whether that's a still, a video, or in a car configurator.
In fact, car configurators were among the first use cases
for Unreal Engine in the automotive industry.
Real-time, particularly VR configurators, were extremely
popular and you guys really embraced game engines as a
solution for those projects.
Year on year, car configurators and Unreal Engine get better
and better and better.
But I think it's going to be really hard to top this one.
Pagani teamed up with MHP, Monkey Way, NVIDIA, and Google to make
what is pretty much the best car configurator of all time.
Let's have a look at it.
EMMA SCHRODER: Hello and welcome.
My name is Emma.
I'm responsible for the project management here at MHP and my team.
and I are very excited to share with you a short insight
into our Pagani Immersive Experience Platform project.
If you have the opportunity to experience the cars and the
company, you get an idea about the craftsmanship, the precision, and
also the passion that every single vehicle is built with.
The clients are not only configuring a car,
they are basically creating a very unique and
hyper-personalized piece of art.
This is an incredible, but also very emotional experience, which
was also one of our biggest challenges in this project.
Because every single vehicle is built exclusively for a customer,
the retailers don't have the physical cars available in the stores.
We had to develop a solution that is visually appealing,
photorealistic, and provides this immersive feel, all inside of an
Unreal Engine based application.
In our end to end approach, we created a visual creative
and technical concept together with the clients.
We also developed realistic 3D environments based on spheres
or photogrammetry, like the actual Pagani headquarter you can
experience in our engine.
This has also to be combined with a very intuitive, easy
and fun to use interface with many interactive features.
We've recreated high definition materials, like the very
special tinted exposed carbon fiber options by Pagani.
And after or during the configuration process, the clients can visualize
their configuration in driving experiences or other digital
giveaways that the retailers can provide to the clients afterwards.
And of course, we had to realize the rollout and operation
of our application on all dealer systems worldwide.
KIM WAGNER: Hi, I'm Kim and I'm part of the Unreal development
team here at MHP.
We put a lot of time and effort into creating this amazing
looking interactive point of sales application, but we
wanted to get more out of it.
And we wanted to use it for more than just a pure dealer experience.
Over the last years, especially with the addition of ray tracing, Unreal
basically achieved photorealism.
So our goal was to use the point of sales application as
it is to change the content,
be it static images or videos delivered on demand or pre-rendered.
We tried to break down our requirements for this.
We need a description of a scene, get our application into
the state and then render out an image, easy as that.
But different Unreal applications might use different input models,
different interfaces, or even use external microservices like rule engines.
We didn't want to spend much time on integration and adoption of
our tools for every application.
So we thought, what if you created a standalone plugin, with it's
completely separate communication interfaces and its own generic scene
description.
All the integration we would need is a small translation
there between this plugin and our native Unreal project.
Having a uniform platform enables us to develop and reuse our
rendering features in Unreal
independently of the application the plugin is integrated in.
That started as a rough idea on a
whiteboard, and it became what we call our Elastic Content Platform.
The goal was to make it seamlessly integrate into any existing
Unreal project and make all our custom rendering features
part of it.
We developed this idea in parallel with the Pagani application
and integrated it into it,
transforming a point of sales application into a
flexible rendering backend.
We use this internally to render out work in progress video sequences
to share with Pagani for feedback, but we also generate hundreds of
images for quality assurance purposes between application versions.
And this platform was also used in our Pagani streaming demo to
deliver screenshots to the user at home.
It's a lot of fun to develop new ideas and use cases around
this concept because every time we want to get an image out of
Unreal, it's easily possible.
PASCAL BAYER: Hi.
I am Pascal Bayer, application architect at MHP, and I'm responsible
for the service architecture of our Elastic Content Platform.
The idea behind our offering is a modular service platform that can
serve all of our customer's content needs from a single 3D pipeline.
Modularization is the key success factor in building a scalable
cloud native content platform.
The Unreal Engine is our core component for visualization.
On top, components like a retail configurator, a streaming
configurator, and image on demand generation can be added
as needed.
Within a few minutes,
each of these services can be scaled up and down automatically
based on the content demands to provide high availability, but
also keep costs under control.
This helped us to deliver a real-time ray tracing streaming configurator
for Pagani at the last GTC event
within a few weeks only.
The Unreal Engine perfectly fits into the
modular approach by connecting our broad range of APIs on the
one hand, but also exposing additional ones for interaction
with the content on the other.
Additionally, this allowed us to easily integrate existing systems in
the enterprise world like analytics or CRM.
That strong extensible and
open platform foundation is enabling our current efforts towards a
hyper-personalized content strategy in the future.
It will enable our customers to create a
more immersive experience.
And a deeper emotional connection with their brands by creating
content on demand for newsletters, landing pages, interactive ads,
digital giveaways, and so much more.
STEPHAN BAIER: So, as you already heard from Emma,
Pascal, and Kim, Pagani offers the best possible digital
experience to their clients.
But we aimed to push the boundaries between digital and real
worlds even further by creating configurable automotive film for Pagani.
So we went for a three-day production and shooting at the
Imola Formula One race track in Italy.
The film which we produced
might look like a regular TV ad, but there's one big difference.
Like in the digital showroom, the cars and the film are
instantly customizable.
You can swap the model or color in and out as you watch, it's
completely personalizable.
To push the visuals as far as they can go
the rendering will accurately reproduce the real time lighting
from the filmed environment
using real time ray tracing from Unreal Engine.
The technology involved in the production provides us a glimpse of
the future of customer engagement and could play a unique role
in how we showcase personalized content and products in the future.
This is only possible with real-time technologies like
Unreal Engine, the experiences we are building and which we are
developing are more like games.
All of this was made possible by an Epic MegaGrant.
And we were really thankful to get this.
And the best part for the Unreal community,
and this is something which we are proud to announce today,
the Imola race track environment and the Pagani hypercar as it's used on
the project will be made available to download from the Unreal Marketplace
after today's Build event.
So thanks again for the event.
Thanks again to Epic Games for making this possible.
And thanks for having me.
DOUG WOLFF: Projects that awesome are delivered
when a group of companies come together to really try and accomplish
something special, we've already heard from MHP, but those outstanding
visuals were delivered by NVIDIA RTX GPUs.
We've got Sean here from NVIDIA to tell us more.
Hey Sean, how you doing?
SEAN: Hey, great Doug, thanks.
DOUG WOLFF: So what's the state of pixel streaming at large scale
and high quality right now?
SEAN: Well that in my mind, the Pagani RTX ray tracing streaming experience
is the proof that we as an industry have finally reached the moment when
all three of quality, performance, and price meet OEM requirements.
First, the quality, the quality of the Pagani experience in my
mind is testament to the amazing creative talents of MHP and the
perfect suitability of Unreal Engine with NVIDIA RTX ray tracing
for this streaming use case.
Next the real time photo realistic performance of this experience,
which can exceed 30 frames per second, is delivered today by NVIDIA RTX.
GPUs with dedicated ray tracing cores and NVIDIA NVENC GPU recoding.
DOUG WOLFF: When do you think this will roll out at a large scale?
SEAN: Well, that is a great question.
And frankly, I think at the answer is today.
Pixel streaming with ray tracing can be deployed today on NVIDIA T4.
GPUs at Google Cloud, AWS, and Azure for around one penny per minute.
And that's for the entire 16 gigabyte GPU frame buffer.
Now this pricing obviously improves if you're able to fit more than
one UE4 streaming instance
on that 16 gigabyte frame buffer.
And this is the perfect opportunity to leverage NVIDIA's new DLSS
plugin for UE4 that's now available on the Epic Marketplace.
So DLSS taps into the dedicated tensor cores on RTX GPUs.
And these are in addition to the dedicated ray tracing cores upscaled
using AI- artificial intelligence.
This means you can use a lower internal resolution in your UE4 scene
and up-res on the fly on the GPU.
So now you can fit more streaming instances on a
GPU and thus lower costs.
DOUG WOLFF: This project looks amazing.
And all of the stuff you said sounds great.
OEMs are certainly going to be excited.
How can they reach out to you?
SEAN: Yeah, I would love to talk to OEMs about any of these topics.
Please contact me directly if you have any questions,
seyoung@nvidia.com.
DOUG WOLFF: Awesome Sean, thanks for being here today.
SEAN: Thanks Doug.
DOUG WOLFF: So the amazing visuals in that piece were produced by NVIDIA technology,
but the experience was actually delivered through pixel streaming
via the power of Google Cloud.
Let's talk to Travis from Google to tell us more.
Hey Travis, how are you doing?
Why is pixel streaming important for the auto industry?
What benefits are derived with doing this on Google Cloud?
TRAVIS: Ah, great question.
So I think the auto industry can benefit in multiple different ways.
So I think pixel streaming really does lower the
friction around delivering interactive experiences
around products and services.
And so I think when you got to do that, right, you unleash
the power of virtual assets that businesses can leverage to actually
deliver these experiences or design products, build products, right.
Go through virtual warranty processes.
So there's a ton of things, that they can kind of
address along that value chain.
And that extends all the way out to things like marketing and sales,
as you've seen with what we've done with Pagani, we're really
building sort of industry leading, very interactive, high fidelity,
real world simulated experiences.
And I think that will change the way customers see and
interact with products online.
DOUG WOLFF: Why do you think Unreal Engine was the right
technology for this project?
TRAVIS: So I think there are two reasons for that.
So I think the first is really the people, right?
The people at Epic are great. They're visionaries.
I think they see a very clear version of the future where
interactive experiences play a big role in everyone's life, right?
Even outside of the role of the traditional gaming space.
And so I think the people are definitely key.
Great minds, great engineers and great ability to deliver.
The second thing is really the technology.
So Unreal Engine is the world's leading 3D creation tool.
And I think that will continue to be true as the Epic folks
integrate and build out more capabilities into Unreal Engine.
We're really looking forward to Unreal Engine 5 and what
that'll bring to the industry.
DOUG WOLFF: Can you give us a teaser of what future Google services
will look like in this area?
TRAVIS: Sure.
Sure.
So I think we've got a set a design goals and principles
around removing any friction related to leveraging Unreal and
delivering interactive experiences.
We think the auto industry, tends to be a sort of leading
industry and in this sector where high fidelity
simulated, real world experiences around vehicles and around other
aspects of the brand are really important to customers to help
understand how that car might fit into their lives and in the future.
So I think you'll see us deliver a service
that allows everyone, any brand big or small, to be able
to leverage pixel streaming, to build and deliver interactive
experiences in the future.
DOUG WOLFF: Thanks, Travis.
Lovely to have you here today.
TRAVIS: Thank you.
DOUG WOLFF: We've seen some really great stories so far and
there's plenty more to come.
But we wanted to take a few minutes to share with you our vision for how
Unreal Engine fits in the automotive industry, as well as highlight some
individual features that will really make your projects shine this year.
So here's Heiko not as a hologram this time to tell you about our
overall automotive strategy.
HEIKO WENCZEL: Welcome to Build.
I'm Heiko Wenczel.
I'm the industry manager for automotive.
And I'm excited to have you here today and talk about our future
perspective and a little bit about the past of what we've done
to define the automotive industry as a segment for
Unreal Engine and the product development that we see important to us.
The automotive industry has always been a driving
factor in the manufacturing world.
Like driving disruptions, changes of like how things are
done, how things are being produced and message to the community.
And we see a great opportunity for Unreal Engine to support in that
field and be part of the overall user journey and the creation of the product.
To support the different industries that we're working in,
we started to build innovation labs around the world.
The one that is the furthest ahead right now is the London
Lab, run by Alistair.
If you think about the innovation labs as an engagement point, it shows
our general philosophy of like how we engage with our product ourselves.
We are part of the creative community.
We believe that creative tools should be easy to access or free
for the creatives in the world to create and envision their products,
work on a production platform or a product platform that encompasses a
lot of elements that are necessary to be creative in this world today.
And so what you see with Unreal Engine being free is to enable
that access to this metaverse philosophy, as well as like,
thinking about what it takes to build open source platforms
or openly accessible platforms
as you see with Unreal Engine.
And as I just pointed out as being part of the creative community,
one part of that vision is that it's a connected platform.
It's an open platform and it gives you access to everything
that you need to like build your vision of a product or a process or
anything else that is connected to that world of real time technology.
And if you look at what we promote from a philosophy
perspective, that all points into that direction of building
a metaverse kind of system that connects libraries with
real-time tools as well as with the engagements in between to
drive the development of future industry engagements overall.
Going back to the automotive industry.
Over the last four years, we worked closely with different clients that
were willing to share where they're going and what they want to achieve.
We learned a lot by the use cases, the POCs and the
products that came out of it.
And it resulted in a better view
of like how we need to make the product work within that field.
The Pagani POC that we have done a key aspect where we engage with
is the marketing and design side.
We learned a lot out of these POCs.
It was great working together with Google and NVIDIA
and optimizing the experience.
And then going all the way through to understanding what
does it take to create a product from a pixel streaming perspective
that like is attractive and can be part of the overall channel
communication that you want to have in that field, which all leads
to that bigger platform vision that we have to make sure that like the
components are all there for you to connect a grand vision and a
user journey that is meaningful.
And like, if you take that Pagani POC and how it showed what kind of
experience you can have and like how quick that actually was created and
connected to the other elements in that field was particularly for me an
exciting part of the journey to get to that announcement that we see with
the automotive platform definitions that we're making all the time.
And we're getting really close to like showing you an overall picture
of where we want to be in this field.
If you take that automotive platform graph that has been shared
a couple of times, it gives you an idea of how we connect
to the principles of the digital twin, as well as the digital
thread, that's being used a lot in the industry, but very seldom
do you see a direct connection to the technology
that enables you to put that into place within your production
cycles or production definitions.
And if we take Unreal Engine as a core component of that, that form
approach that you want to see in the future from all the different
engagement and trends level that we're seeing in the industry, and that
we heard from our industry partners about, you see that like having
a visual data layer that enables real-time technology across the
different departments where you want to use it, as well as the connection
from an IOT site, which is a lot more coming, which will be a focus
for me to understand how we make that better available to you, and
like see more POCs and application in the future in that field.
But also like connecting it
to the libraries that we put into the mix through Quixel and
great shout outs to the components that they created there and the
library that they are building there that enables you to bring the
world into your view without having to create it yourself, or having to
shoot it like in complex manners, as it has been done in the past.
And what's open and what's left really, for us to do in that platform
is to make a Solid connection to the PDM and PLM systems.
So we're going to look as a key step in this year and figuring
out how we make that a more Solid connection and a better experience
overall, which I haven't seen anywhere so far at
a major level with any software.
So we're going to try to figure out how we can make that a
more convenient approach to truly underline and create the
foundation of a platform system
as we see it based on Unreal Engine.
DOUG WOLFF: Thanks Heiko for that glimpse at the big picture.
But what about some features that can make a difference
in your projects today?
Let's hand over to Thomas to find out,
THOMAS CONVARD: Hi, everybody.
I'm Thomas, senior product manager at Epic Games.
Today, I'm going to walk you through some of our product features
and our vision for the industry.
Hopefully you get as excited as we are
about where we're taking Unreal Engine.
Building an interactive experience for automotive, whether it is
deploying a car configurator or preparing a design review
session involves many different stages where data is transformed,
content is created and assembled, and decisions are made.
Our vision is that Unreal Engine is the open platform where creators
can build complete experiences, have full control over their
assets and can connect to any of their standard systems and tools.
First, I would like to go through a few of our achievements.
Unreal Engine introduced real-time ray tracing three years ago,
and it has completely changed the way artists visualize cars.
Thanks to unmatched rendering fidelity and performances.
And Epic Games continues to push the boundaries.
Unreal Engine 4.26
brings performances and visual improvements from global illumination
quality to [INAUDIBLE] shadows and many more.
Also in 4.26, still images and videos can be exported
with the Movie Render Queue.
This tool can now create render passes for compositing outside
of the engine and supports industry standards such as
OpenColorIO or Pro codecs.
Datasmith can now import, process, and optimize
huge amounts of industrial CAD data.
It offers several options for automation from visual programming
to Python scripting.
Unreal editor with Datasmith is becoming the
most open, flexible, and performant tool for data preparation.
With the new modeling tools, users can create geometry from
scratch with poly editing or scripting, or they can modify
Imported CAD data, adding details, generating UVs, deforming meshes.
All of those operations are performed inside the Unreal editor without
having to move data through other software packages.
I can also mention the Variant Manager,
which allows the creation and control of complex product configurations.
Unreal Engine 4.26 brings variant dependencies that can be used,
for example, to design option packages.
Animating has been possible
in the Unreal editor for a long time thanks to the Sequencer.
In addition, we now have Control Rig.
It is a node based rigging system, which allows artists to fully rig
and animate a car or any kind of character within the Unreal editor.
In addition to engine features, we offer content to help quickstart
projects or illustrate the best practices.
The project templates
shipping along with the engine, provide foundations for the most
common use cases in the industry, such as photo studio rendering or
collaborative design review in VR.
Then on the Unreal Engine Marketplace, we release
free content that can be used to enrich your project.
The Automotive Material Pack is a collection of high quality materials
using the Quixel library of textures.
The materials are optimized for real-time performances,
as well as ray tracing.
This material pack is updated with each new engine release.
For example, we added support for anisotropy with 4.26.
The Marketplace also contain series of realistic automative
environments produced by Epic Games.
So far, we've released a bridge, a beach, a winter road, and
we have many more to come.
We recently released a complete configurator sample, which
demonstrates how to put it all together with varients, rendering,
animations, in order to build a full car experience.
The project is available from the learn tab
of the Epic Games launcher.
All assets are provided from meshes to sounds and everything
has been implemented with the Blueprint visual scripting language.
It's a great resource to learn Unreal Engine.
And UE5 is coming this year.
With Nanite, virtualized micro polygon
geometry technology, and Nanite allows users to forget about
polygon count or draw call budget.
And they don't have to worry about tesselation settings or removing
hidden parts.
Highest detail can be used for every mesh in the scene.
UE5's dynamic global illumination system,
Lumen, allows artists to manipulate light sources or move objects and see
in real time, the impact on indirect lighting.
We believe that UE5
will change the way users create and experience any 3D automotive content.
DOUG WOLFF: As Thomas mentions, the automotive
configurator example is available now.
You get it through the Epic Games, launcher under
Unreal Engine on the learn tab.
I can't wait to see what you guys come up with.
But I wanted to share another exciting development with you.
For years, pixel streaming has been the way
to deploy high quality Unreal
Engine experiences on the web.
And you could see from that Pagani example, how great that can look.
That was absolutely fantastic.
But now there's another option.
So you can choose the solution that works best for you.
Our friends at Animech have developed the Mega Converter plugin.
It allows you to take the same Unreal Engine project that you're
using for pictures or videos, or even pixel streaming and
export directly to WebGL.
I really hope you like it.
STAFFAN HAGBERG: Hi, my name is Staffan.
I work at Animech as the Chief Marketing Officer.
And we are here today to present our new project,
Unreal for Web.
What we've been doing for the last year
is to develop a plugin for Unreal that
converts Unreal 3D scenes and 3D models
so you can just publish them straight to web.
Companies can reuse their content
that they've already created in Unreal when creating
web-based applications.
Just convert your Unreal files and start
developing a web-based configurator or an AR
application, or whatever you want to do in 3D online.
Reusing all 3D materials that you already
have in Unreal saves enormous amounts of time,
makes projects much more efficient.
The first version of Unreal to Web
is aimed at the automotive industry.
But I mean, anyone can use it.
So now, I'm going to hand it over to Aidin, who's our CTO.
He's going to give you some of the technical overview
of the plugin.
AIDIN ABEDI: Unreal for Web, it's
more than a plugin, it's a groundbreaking glTF exporter
that converts your files.
But also a Epic-enhanced, web-based glTF viewer
that takes your assets online with key interactive elements
that you are already accustomed to in Unreal.
Both are open source and easily extendable.
What's glTF?
An open standard made by Khronos Group--
that's the guys behind WebGL--
to efficiently share 3D between a wide range of apps.
It's specifically designed for modern photorealism,
compact size, fast loading, extendability.
In other words, perfect for the web.
What can the plugin export?
All the standard stuff.
Meshes, both static and skeletal.
Textures, materials, default lit,
unlit, all the blend modes.
Animations, level sequences, websockets, bones, levels,
including cameras and lights.
But now the interesting stuff.
It can also export level variant sets, let your users
configure meshes, material, visibility.
Basically, make your own web-based product configurator
in three minutes.
It can also export special Actors and Blueprints.
HDRI backdrops, sky sphere, hotspots,
and player controlled cameras for interactivity.
Oh, and one last thing.
Let's not forget the clear coat.
How do we make it possible?
By lots and lots of blood, sweat, and tears.
We had to push some serious limits putting glTF on steroids
by crafting Epic extensions to support all the features,
then fork the material analyzer and baking module
to make the plugin even more powerful.
The roadmap is not set, but this is what I'm looking forward to.
More amazing Unreal shading models, more compression
and optimizations to get every last bit and faster.
Epic extensions to more WebGL engines.
Fined-tuned logging to help understand
how to get the best out of each asset.
Mobile focus.
Thank you for listening.
I'm super proud of what we've done.
Let me hand you back to Staffan.
STAFFAN HAGBERG: We're super excited to have been
working with Epic for the last year developing this plugin.
We gave it to a bunch of customers,
and they all tried it out.
The feedback that we got from them was awesome.
Finally, now we can take our Unreal content online.
Thank you very much for listening and have a great day.
Bye Bye.
DOUG WOLFF: If you'd like to try out the Mega Converter plugin it's available
in the Unreal Engine Marketplace.
So we've heard about our overall automotive strategy and some
individual features and developments.
Now I'd like to bring Heiko back for some additional thoughts
and a look into the future.
HEIKO WENCZEL: A good summary of all these
points that I mentioned so far can be
found in the Automotive Field Guide, which we just released.
And the purpose of the Automotive Field Guide in general was to give
you a good overview of all the touch points we see within that
approach of having a platform for the automotive industry.
You hear that term of having a platform so often, but like truly
showing where all the touch points are and how we can focus on those
and how we can develop against those, is a key aspect for us.
And you will find about 30 use cases overall that are
at the central focus for us to understand how to engage with the
different verticals that we have.
And if you look in the guide, you will find that we have
six key engagement points that we believe give us good
insights into the industry.
And of course, with the announcements that we've made already, and the
things that you see in the event, that's with marketing
and design, which are very conventional, very easy entry
points for a very visual high fidelity engine like Unreal Engine.
But there is the other points that are really important to us
as well, which is the engineering department where we see great
benefits with using training applications or previewing and
analyzing where you want to go.
And it's with the simulation and training fields in general, that we
see a great future from an AR/ VR/ XR perspective of how there's going to
be a massive change in the industry.
If you see what the pandemic did over the last year and how it
forced people to think differently of how they engage across borders, how
you provide expertise to different places in the world, if you can't
travel, or if you want to ramp up things, but you can't be there,
or you have to think differently of how you collaborate overall,
those kinds of parts show us where we need to do the most
development, because we believe that those things are gonna stay.
And it's things that we're taking to ourselves as well as how we
operate in the field in general.
And so I'm very excited to see what the next POCs are
going to be in the next two years in that particular field.
And so I hope you have a chance to take a look at that
Automotive Field Guide.
And we hope, of course, for more feedback and more engagement along
those use cases that we've defined to make sure we're as close as we
can be to the needs that you see and challenges that you have in finding
solutions, um, especially on the real-time side, but in the general
way of how you engage with technology on the automotive industry side.
Over the last decades,
people have become accustomed to amazing experience on the gaming
side based on game engines that have created game philosophies
and all kinds of technologies and storylines of like how to make
sure that customers learn quick of like how to engage with the
content, how to live in that world.
And that world is now coming into your product.
And why shouldn't it be fun?
Why repeating ways of working that are kind of not as
engaging as they could be and like using game philosophy and real-time
technology can change that principle and can bring that kind of fun
into the mix that you want to see that sparks that creative, um,
that every one of us has an in, in him or her and like make us create
better products in the future.
I also want to use the opportunity and give a big
shout out to Quixel and the Megascans library that we have
here and that is available to you because it creates a big piece
of the metaverse that we believe in.
It reduces the amount of time.
It takes you to create content that is not product-related
and it gives you and us a great opportunity of creating
content that that can be shared across IPs and brands and create a
world for creatives to like engage on different levels and create more
value in shorter time cycles, which is of course, always a manufacturing
and especially an automotive problem, like how fast can you go to market?
How fast can you create the right things?
But if you take the, the last year and the restrictions we had in
traveling and creating new content libraries and the capabilities
that we see through the Megascans and Bridge and Mixer allow you to
create high quality realities that otherwise would be either impossible
or very expensive to create.
And that makes it a key part of the platform that we see
for the automotive industry.
And it gives you a unique opportunity in creating better content overall.
I think one of the key elements, um, that we'll see in the future
is the collaborative aspect of Unreal Engine, the way how
you share, and like promote content that you've created it.
Pixel streaming, WebGL, all these touch points that
are related and based on cloud-based computing, we'll get
more important and we'll drive development and engagements overall.
So the smart digital user journey for any product in that field,
but particularly for automotive industry will be dependent on
using the right technology at the right time, building a Solid
platform overall that allows us to connect the different data
sources as well as the libraries and the metaverse as we see it.
And overall that will allow us to create Unreal
Engine as a Solid meta part of your production cycles.
And so we're excited about the things that are coming in the
future in this area.
And if you have any ideas, or any needs that you see
in the particular fields and in the use cases that you've seen
throughout this presentation, then please reach out to us and
let us know how we can help.
DOUG WOLFF: Thanks to Heiko and the whole team for sharing our
vision of the automotive strategy for Unreal Engine.
It's been really rewarding to work with multiple automotive
OEMs around their own strategies for game engines.
BMW have such
an advanced approach to Unreal Engine that allows them to do some
really cool and flexible things.
Here's how they used that flexibility across the challenging 2020.
BURAK SOEHMELIOGLU: I'm Burak from BMW,
and I'm currently IT product owner for 3D, VR, and AR
at BMW.
I'm working now for seven years at BMW.
I'm a computer scientist, and now my focus
is really bringing 3D and VR/AR technologies to everyone
at BMW.
We started using Unreal Engine at BMW six years ago,
and it was the time where the first VR
headsets came to the market.
And we had the idea of using VR headsets in our development
phase and early phase to experience our future costs,
and also give the opportunity to our engineers decision makers
to experience the car functionality, having a ride.
And it was, of course, not just thing about hardware.
Having the VR headsets is not enough.
We also needed the appropriate software application for that.
We already had a rendering application at BMW,
but the issue was that they really did not support VR.
So we are looking for a solution on the market.
And the main usage for VR at those times
was the gaming industry, so it was clear for us to look there.
And since the visual quality is one of the most important parts
for our first use case, we decided to use Unreal Engine.
The success of our first project was so high
that the usage of Unreal Engine was spread
across BMW really quite quick.
So we started to use Unreal Engine, also,
for other departments like the factory planning,
but also later in the phase for a dealer configurator
for presenting the new car so the customer
can go to the dealer and configure its personalized
BMW inside VR using an Unreal Engine.
Here is a video for you how BMW uses Unreal Engine
for remote collaboration.
Enjoy it.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARCEL STRZELETZ: So I use Unreal Engine in my work
for visualization things.
We can show everyone who's involved different solutions
for problems.
Then everyone is able to imagine what
will happen in the real car.
We were able to show the designers what we did,
and they had the same quality like before in the meetings.
They were able to move into the car
and show me which perspective they meant if they
had something they didn't like.
That was really cool.
SENER YILMAZ: We are having very big structural changes
in our plans.
We are implementing the new model E4 with 2D tools,
like on paper or PDF.
We were forgetting, for example, a scanner or a screwdriver.
We have the possibility now, really,
to build up exactly everything how it's going to be.
It's giving us the opportunity to be a communication tool.
For example, teams meetings.
I can open my project.
And together with the process planner and the logistic planner,
we can try out new alternatives, and we
can optimize the planning status in the early phase.
This is saving us time and costs also.
MELTEM MIRZAOGLU: We have less customers in our showrooms.
Yeah.
That's why it's very important to have another way
to show our customers the different cars,
different options, different colors.
EVE is Emotional Virtual Experience.
We use it all the time every day to show our customers our stock
cars, what the options are, calculate
or configurate a new car.
And after that, I can show my customers here also
on the screen, or I can send the link via mail
with the offer to my customers at home.
It's easier for my customer to select the right car.
Half hour or one hour, and we have a finished configuration
with the customers.
And the customers happy, I'm happy.
Yeah.
JOHANNES KNIPPEL: For me as a software developer,
there's no barrier between me and the business partners.
When it comes down to implement the software,
what we use to enable remote work ,
most people don't even know it's a game engine behind
everything.
The great thing about using the Unreal Engine
is that it provides the perfect space that
has everything you need to implement the perfect solution
for any need.
DOUG WOLFF: Work habits are changing.
They can leverage the fact that Unreal Engine
is a connecting technology that allows people to collaborate.
So whether you're in a dealership,
whether you're at home, whether you're interacting
with a customer, by running off the same Unreal Engine
platform, you can really do awesome things.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
BURAK SOEHMELIOGLU: Isn't it great
How BMW benefits from the usage of Unreal Engine for collaborative work.
But the question is what's the next level and the next
level could look like that
it's not just used for BMW employees, but also extended for
our suppliers, that we have a common collaborative environment
where we can work together interactively.
Thank you very much for participating and enjoy the rest of this event.
Thank you.
DOUG WOLFF: Earlier in the show, Heiko touched on the topics of simulation
and autonomous vehicles.
They form a huge part of our automotive strategy.
I'd like to invite Sebastien Loze, our industry manager for
simulation, to tell us more.
SEBASTIEN LOZE: Hello, everyone.
My name is Seb Loze.
I'm the simulation industry manager here at Epic Games.
If you are attending these sessions with us
it means that you already understand
that Epic Games is committed to provide
a meaningful and relevant set of solutions
to the simulation community.
As well as the health care, defense, and civil aviation
simulation applications, the automotive domain
represents a quasi unlimited source
of use cases, which can be sorted in two main categories,
analysis and training.
Now within these two categories, two main segment
of applications coexist.
The first ones are linked to the driver related use cases.
Everything where the driver needs
to interact with its vehicle, this
encompasses the notion of driving simulation as well as,
for example, the vehicle human-machine interfaces or HMI
prototyping applications.
The second segment of applications
is linked to the analysis and training applications
where no humans are involved.
These are all the autonomous vehicle use cases,
which goes from conceiving these vehicles towards ensuring
to fit them with the right experience
before they hit the road.
As you can see, from the first elements of this taxonomy
to ensure for Unreal Engine to remain relevant
for this multitude of applications,
we have to maintain a very strong platform approach.
But this would not be enough.
There's a particular problem linked to simulation.
Simulation application is a stack containing your framework
level, where Unreal Engine lives along with your standard data
set and communication layers.
On top, you have your second level,
which is the integration layer.
And this integration layer is topped by a dedicated feature
set layer containing all these useful tools
and functionalities, specifically developed
for your applications.
So to summarize, you have a layer cake of technology,
integration, and specialized feature layers.
In the specific context of simulation,
the entire community realizes that monolithic solutions are
not often the best approach and that walled garden technology
cannot be the right solutions.
So while we take care of the first layer of our layer cake,
by continuing to grow the core of Unreal Engine
and to innovate with new modules and assets,
as Thomas mentioned in his presentation,
we are also lowering effort for the simulation creators
on the second layer, the integration one.
By supporting our users either at the technical level
or the business level, we are growing an ecosystem,
which from motion cueing systems to HMD equipment
passing by machine learning allows a tangible integration
accelerator around Unreal Engine.
In these sessions that you've attended here
and in the presentations you have seen,
you saw a glimpse of what is possible
when you aggregate the right software and hardware
architecture around Unreal.
As you saw, building simulation solution
for the automotive domain is entering
a new phase of maturity.
And it is time to engage in a more active way together.
So send us the line at simulation@epicgames.com.
Our simulation team is waiting to learn
from your ideas, your challenges, and your dreams.
For the second part of our presentation
today, I'm very happy to introduce the team
from AV Simulation.
In the course of the last year, AV Simulation
took their already very experienced and established
solution scanner and brought it from its existing technology
to Unreal Engine.
This transition was a very important move in the R&D team
from AV Simulation.
And they are here today to talk to us about it.
THOMAS NGUYEN THAT: Hello everyone.
I am Thomas Nguyen That an automotive domain
director at the AVSimulation and I will present you
the amazing work we have been doing with Epic Games
to develop the new SCANeR generation tool.
So we develop SCANeR which is an open modular
and scalable driving simulation software.
SCANeR is a tool to simulate a virtual environment
to test automotive systems.
It means that we build virtual roads, virtual traffic
conditions and scenarios for automotive engineers that
works on ADAS systems, headlamps, chassis, body design, and HMI.
We also build driving simulators, which
are a very big machines with a screen and motion system.
At the moment, we are developing the two largest driving
simulators in the world.
One for BMW and the other for Renault. Our aim
is to accelerate and secure the development
of autonomous vehicle.
There are two big challenges for this incredibly complex system.
The first one is that you need to make
sure before putting the vehicle on the streets
that they will be safer than human drivers.
It means that you have to prove that they can perform
in any day-to-day situation.
Every time of the year, any weather or traffic conditions
and for every road in the world.
It's such an incredible challenge
that it has been computed that if you
had to prove that in reality it would require billions
of miles of real driving that would take hundreds of years.
Simulation is then the only solution.
The second challenge is the interaction between the driver
and the system.
You can build a very sophisticated autonomous system,
if it is not understood or trusted
by the humans in the car it will be useless.
Simulation is again, very useful to study the driver behavior
in complex driving tasks because you
can study how the driver behaves and reacts
to dangerous situations in a very safe environment.
It means that we have to simulate
not only for the driver but for the complete perception system.
And it's a much more complex task because the human brain
can make adaptations to understand the difference
between the simulation and the reality but the sensor system
won't.
Any slight difference between the simulation and the reality
will change the results.
To address these two big challenges,
we had to invent and develop the next generation simulation tool.
To immerse not only the driver but also
the complete perception system- camera, radar, lidar.
And for that reason, we have chosen Unreal from Epic Games.
Why? Because it's the more realistic and performant 3D
engine on the market.
It's physics based and we need to bring trust
in the simulation result. It's very
complete with a full editor and very easily
accessible to the final users.
It also brings a very rich marketplace
with a lot of high quality 3D assets.
We also found out that Unreal was very popular
among our customers.
We have developed a complete seamless workflow
that very easily brings a high realism
to our customer with their existing assets and scenario.
We have developed this very rich and very detailed
environment model where you can dynamically
change the time of day, the weather condition,
where you can have multiple vehicle, pedestrian, animals,
in the scene.
You can program very complex scenarios from everyday life.
We also have developed NCAP scenario tests
with our partner Utextron that behave exactly
like the one on the test truck.
We also have developed an automotive camera
and some models that generates photorealistic images
and exhibit exactly the same default than the real camera.
That really allows us to verify how your perception system will
behave in any complex situation.
We also provide a more advanced workflow
for advanced users that have development skill to completely
customize and enrich their rendering.
We also have a very complete roadmap
to improve the environment creation,
to integrate all the sensor models
and to move our headlight simulation to Unreal.
With this new solution our customer
can recreate super realistic simulation environments
that they can use to perform their validation tests
and prove that their systems are safe.
This is really a strong accelerator for them
and it will bring autonomous system industry
sooner than expected.
Well, thank you very much for listening
and I wish you a nice event.
DOUG WOLFF: We've got one last story for you, and it's a great one.
Over the years, we've had a bunch of the world's biggest
car brands present at Build.
But we've never had Volkswagen until now.
The teams that Unevis and Effekt-Etage worked with Volkswagen to
create something truly remarkable.
A pipeline that ingest raw CAD data uses AI and produces
marketing ready assets.
It's called Project Solid Machine
and I'd like to share it with you now.
RICK POLEY: Simplification in our complex industry is always in demand.
After all we at Volkswagen are a very data-driven company.
When a customer configures a car on our configurator, he also defines the
DNA of a digital twin, which is born right inside of our database.
One single car might hold millions of different personalization
and configuration options.
Each car part that changes on the inside and outside of the
car originates from a gigantic database, which holds detailed
information about size, function, identification numbers, and so on.
We call this car DNA PR Configuration Script.
Ever since real-time technology was able to render an image
of our complex digital twins,
we were searching for more and better ways on how to automate
our production pipeline and to capitalize off our wealth of data.
PIERRE GRAGE: When VW approached us with the idea to use real-time technology in
order to cut down post production times of their digital marketing
images, I was more than intrigued.
So we had to find a way to somehow convert VW's CAD data into
real-time data without changing the underlining structure.
Yet CAD data was never intended to run in real time performance.
With close collaboration with VW, Epic Games, and Effekt-Etage,
we developed a solution to this challenge called Solid Machine.
A challenge considered by many as the Holy Grail
of the automotive industry.
Well, at least to marketing it is.
MIRKO HAENSSGEN: In a modern-day real-time
engine, the CAD data has to be entirely simplified, restructured,
regrouped, and the appropriate metadata has to be extracted and
assigned to the correct geometries,
optimized for real-time productions.
Solid machine handles the error prone and tedious process of
real-time optimization automatically. Our AI routines will analyze the
CAD data and check for errors and correct them wherever necessary.
PR string metadata will be connected to the correct
real-time geometry, wrong shader material or geometry names are
corrected by a fuzzy logic system.
And digital materials are getting segmented and automatically assigned
to the correct real-time car parts.
The CAD data will be ready to use in the Unreal Engine with breathtaking
performance, but we also need to reduce and fix a lot of polygons.
This is where our Solid Slim module comes into play.
Our own semi-automated reduction algorhithm, Solid Slim, automatically
detects polygon errors, and corrects them before the reduction process.
Geometry parts can be categorized in reduction groups
to not having the 3D operator, making adjustments for the same
kind of part over and over again.
With Solid Leap, we've created an AI tool for artists.
Leap analyzes the output of the material in a huge material library.
This can be a picture of a car or a reference picture,
if you have one.
We can see how the car paint shader is supposed to look.
We tell leap to only look at the car paint shader, and then leap
will analyze the reference picture and try to match it in Unreal.
The AI does the same thing an artist would do, but it just tries
out more variations in less time.
It's a great tool to speed up the artist's process.
And our first addition to our AI powered artist's tools for
Solid Machine.
One of the most challenging tasks is getting the
correct PR configuration string for multiple car configurations.
What do you do if you work at an agency that has to set up a bunch
of different car configurations, like a Passat variant with certain rims
and certain colors.
It's highly probable you don't know any of
those PR codes.
With Solid Matter,
we learn all possible car configurations of a car while we
are processing the geometry parts. Solid Matter is able to show the
user if a given configuration is known to the AI and if not, why
it is different and what would be the closest known alternative.
The user then has the possibility to see that alternative configuration
with or without changes enabled that he or she wants to add.
This way, we know if the configuration given is valid, or if there will
be car parts that are missing and might lead to visual errors
in a later review stage.
PIERRE GRAGE: In Solid Creator, everything you saw comes
together and gives the user the power of Unreal and Solid Machine
in one easy to use interface. Solid Creator works right in your browser.
And it feels like playing a computer game while you are making great
looking marketing pictures.
So let's say you want to change the configuration of a car.
You can do that via the configuration tab.
This is also the place where you can check the PR string for
buildability through our AI.
Let's say you want to change the car paint.
For this, you open the paint tab.
Now you see all the possible paint options for the current PR string
that our AI has learned so far.
You can change configurations easily with click and do the
same for the rims.
To get a better of view on how this change looks,
I simply need to go through the cameras in the upper menu.
The PR string adapts in the background and can be accessed at the
bottom of the configuration tab.
BJORN KOWALSKI: Solid Machine and it's AI tools help us to cut down
production times and really to focus on the beautiful pictures instead.
The technology eases our pain when working with
automotive CAD data and makes more complex poses is much simpler.
Solid Machine, in combination with Unreal Engine is bliss.
Not only were we able to adapt the Unreal Engine into
our production pipeline very fast,
We are also able to produce movies entirely within the Unreal
Engine that people thought we produced in classic DCC packages
with compositing.
MARK GRUSKA: With Solid Machine we're going to
the next level of car visualization.
It's a combination of CAD data with AI components really
brings us to another level.
I'm looking forward to see how we can save efforts
and fasten up the processes.
I think that's really the next big step in our business.
PIERRE GRAGE: It was a great honor to work with Epic, VW, and
Effekt-Etage on this project.
We can't wait to see what our clients will do with this new technology.
Thank you for joining us.
Stay well and have a great day.
DOUG WOLFF: So that was Project Solid.
And how inspiring was it? But how inspiring were all of the
stories that we shared today?
To be honest with you, that's what the
point of a Build event really is.
The projects we inspire today, become the Build event stories of tomorrow.
If you have been inspired and don't know where to start, the best thing
you can do is go to UnrealEngine.com and download Unreal Engine.
It's free.
Once you begin your Unreal journey, we would love to hear from you.
And there's lots of ways that you can reach out.
You can go to our Automotive hub page that collects all
of our industry stories in one place,
you can sign up for the newsletter there, and we
would encourage you to do that.
If you have a specific question, for example, we have
a great training department.
They can take your whole team and skill them up on Unreal Engine.
Or you'd like to join something like the development
initiative we have for HMI.
You can reach out to us on social.
Our tag is @UnrealEngine pretty much everywhere.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn.
Now this event here is designed to be the kickoff of
automotive content in 2021. We have a great lineup of stuff.
We've got webinars around specific topics.
We have a web series called The Pulse that has automotive episodes.
We do summits with small groups of people and really
dive down on certain topics.
There's a lot of it coming up.
The way to stay in touch with that is just to
watch your inbox because that's where we'll be dropping all the information.
Now off the top of the event, I asked you guys to socialize and
chat throughout the whole thing, and I hope you've been doing that.
And just because we're coming to a conclusion that doesn't mean we're
going to stop.
Off to the left here,
you can see the link for our dev lounges.
These are specific chat rooms that are manned by all the
people that have been in this film for you to ask all of your
questions and interact some more.
They'll be open for about an hour.
So I hope to see you there.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the speakers.
It's their content and time and dedication to being filmed
that really makes up all the real interesting stuff in this event.
And finally, I'd like to thank you, the audience, for your attention.
Have a great day.