Game Development and Virtual Production with Dell Technologies and Unreal Engine
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Content production has changed…
Powered by technologies like Epic Games’ Unreal Engine, the creative landscape of Film, Episodic TV, and Live Broadcast has been changed forever. With the advent of Virtual Production and In Camera VFX, which are essentially an extension of both Game Development and Post Production, we have changed the way that we create and interact with our content during its production life cycle.
Because of this shift, many production facilities are challenged by the exponential growth of their content. Data continues to grow at an alarming scale, driven by increasing resolutions, the expected quality of assets, and the sheer volume of content being produced to meet viewers’ insatiable demands.
Dell Technologies and Epic Games Unreal Engine can work together to help solve this challenge, with solutions that allow media companies to deliver massively scalable architectures that remain easy to manage, even at petabyte scale, and allow data to flow between datacenters, the edge, and the cloud.
Solution benefits
Real-time edit
Enable more creatives to work simultaneously on more assets than ever before, when using Unreal Engine with PowerScale All-Flash nodes. Eliminating bottlenecks and driving creative productivity.
Build repositories
Build game titles and levels quicker and more reliably using PowerScale All-Flash nodes as a lightning-fast centralized artifact and cache store.
Version control
Using PowerScale as your depot and repository storage for your facility enables you to grow your version control storage without subjecting your developers and editors to the usual downtimes associated with disk expansion.
How do we help?
This solution brings together a highly trusted name in media storage, PowerScale OneFS, with one of the most recognized names in Virtual Production and ICVFX technology, Unreal Engine.
In the past, when working on levels / scenes in tools like Unreal, all of the data for the game had to be localized to the machine you were working on in order to get the response times required. This meant lengthy copies down to the workstation to edit, and then lengthy saves back to the storage when done. Faster ethernet technologies (10, 25, 50, 100GbE, and beyond) are much more common in both workstations and access level switching now. When you combine this shift in network throughput with PowerScale OneFS All-Flash nodes, Unreal editors can access their content simultaneously on PowerScale storage, while modelers, riggers, texture artists, and others can create and amend assets on the fly as well.
While all of this live creativity is happening; on-set editors and colorists can perform ultra-high-speed editing tasks on the shot footage, ultimately giving the Director of Photography the freedom to visualize and capture the shot they want, in real time. Fundamentally, our solution keeps actors acting, creatives creating, developers iterating, and directors directing - without having to worry about the constraints of the technology behind the camera.
Figure 1. A sample Dell Technologies infrastructure for Game Dev / Virtual Production / ICVFX
Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine 5 is the latest generation of Unreal Engine, a complete suite of creation tools for game development, architectural and automotive visualization, linear film and television content creation, broadcast and live event production, training and simulation, and other real-time applications.
With UE5, game developers and creators across industries can realize next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before.
Dell Technologies
At Dell Technologies, we believe great storytelling comes from creative people empowered by advanced technology. Our solutions for storytellers span the workflow, built with leading technologies across storage, servers, networking, workstations, displays, and partnerships with key media software and services vendors. These solutions provide media professionals with the foundation to continue driving innovation without technology getting in the way of the art, so they can deliver more powerful stories faster.