Top Gun Maverick Showcase on the Unreal Engine 5
Back in July, Senior Cinematic Artist at Owlcat Games Nikolas Samborsky announced that he was working on a fan cinematic dedicated to his favorite movie Top Gun: Maverick. Recently the artist released the short Top Gun Maverick Unreal Engine 5 showcase after months of working on it, and it looks absolutely brilliant. The showcase is a recreation of the well-acclaimed Tom Cruise title. Created within Epic’s new game engine, the 20-second clip shows off some impressive looks as it makes use of iconic shots from the movie. The graphical fidelity of the recreation on the Unreal Engine 5 is truly on par with what we’ve seen in the CGI cutscenes of the movie.
A side-by-side comparison of the movie’s scenes and the artist’s work has most people dumbfounded as they struggle to spot the difference. Top Gun Maverick recently hit theaters in May 2022 and was an absolute success. The return of Tom Cruise, Van Kilmer, and others were celebrated by fans in the sequel as the movie ended up the highest-grossing film of 2022, with over 1.5 billion dollars in earnings. Not to mention, Tom Cruise made a payday out of it as well as the title was the 60-year-old’s highest-grossing movie to date. Nikolas is clearly a big fan of the movie and planes, for that matter. He used not only Unreal Engine 5 but 3D plane models from Ace Combat 7 as well for the project. He was able to create a digital version of Tom Cruise, otherwise known as Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, in the movie, which is nothing short of impressive. To pull off the feat, the artist used Epic’s Mesh to MetaHuaman plug-in. The feature helped him create a base model, after which he used a DeepFaceLive to give the model Cruise’s touch. Nikolas made sure to keep everyone in the loop by sharing his day-to-day progress on his Twitter handle @NikolsaNNN. He shared demos, behind-the-scenes looks, and much more. Nik uploaded the showcase to his Youtube channel recently on September 16, where the clip has garnered around 4600 views. Fans in the comment section were quick to appreciate the artist’s talent, even saying that Ace Combat 8, an upcoming video game title that’s in the works in Unreal Engine 5, should take notes. Samborsky put up clips of the movie and the regenerated scenes side-by-side, and it was obvious to the people watching that he was able to match the quality of the original source material. In fact, some have pointed out that the second scene with the jet engine looks better in Unreal Engine 5. As for the engine that made the Top Gun Maverick Engine 5 Showcase possible, Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 was made available to developers just this year in April. With unique features like Nanite and Lumen, the game engine has been heavily trending in the community. Equipped with next-gen technology, the engine is able to run video games seamlessly, much like Hollywood movies, as we saw with the Top Gun Maverick unreal engine. Lumen has been particularly creating waves as it allows developers to create fully dynamic lighting in real time. This saves game developers the trouble of having to design light maps by hand. On the other hand, Nanite allows game developers to massively scale in-game art assets. The virtualized micro polygon geometry enables artists to create as many geometric details as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized micro polygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real-time, so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs, and there is no loss in quality. Hopefully, Samborsky will keep using these features and share more extended videos with us. But can he push the Unreal Engine 5 to its limits with future concept trailers and showcases? We’ll see as he continues to pump out content in the future. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console. – Epic Games on the Unreal Engine 5 Did the Top Gun Maverick Unreal Engine 5 showcase impress you, or does it not fare too well compared to the original? Let us know in the comments below. We upload daily on Appuals, so stay tuned for more. Till then, see you later and goodbye!
