| This article is based on the exclusive licensing agreement between Campfire and Polygon China, please revert with your consent.
A new interactive experience set in the world of The Matrix has just come online, and players can now experience Epic Games' Unreal Engine immersively on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. While there is no clear correlation between the Matrix: Awakening demo and The Matrix Reboot (the fourth film in the series), Epic says the demo will allow players to experience "future narrative possibilities."
Polygon had the opportunity to sit down with Technical Director Jeff Farris and Art Director Jerome Platteaux to talk about Epic's collaboration with Lana Wachowski, director of Matrix Reboot.
Platteaux says The Matrix: Awakening was born from a special project team at Epic. The team consists of a group of developers and technical artists from the studio who work on producing an annual technology demo designed to showcase Unreal Engine's latest technological innovations. "Last year we did the PS5 demo film 'Lumen in the Land of Nanite,' and a few years ago we did a ray-tracing demo of the Imperial Stormtroopers in the elevator," says Platteaux.
For the 2021 Unreal Engine demo, the team wanted to make a breakthrough — not only to demonstrate the engine's ability to render dynamic open-world environments, but also to give players a truly hands-on experience.
"We thought 'Lumen in the Land of Nanite' was a great demo, but there was something wrong with it because players couldn't get started on their own," Farris told Polygon. "There should be a lot of people who believe in its authenticity, but obviously there are still some people who have doubts." Therefore, we want to show all the new systems with this demo and push them out to the world. We want to go a step further, increase the leverage, and really put these new technologies in the hands of consumers."
So, the next question for the team was to make a completely original demo or create based on existing IP. The team got in touch with Lana Wachowski, who was filming The Matrix: Matrix Reboot, through Epic Games' CTO Kim Libreri (who previously served as VFX director for the Matrix trilogy) and Platteaux himself (who worked on The Matrix 2: Reloaded and The Matrix Revolution). With Wachowski's permission, the team began creating an independent interactive demo set in the Matrix universe that showcased the technical capabilities of Unreal Engine 5.
The demo opens with a real-time reproduction of The Matrix by the Unreal Engine of Unreal Engine – Thomas Anderson, played by Keanu Reeves, falls asleep at his computer desk. Young Reeves' model is based on the original CG model used during The Matrix 2: Reloaded and rendered in Unreal 5 with added visual detail and fidelity. This scene is followed by a live-action scene of Reeves, written and directed by Wachowski himself.
"That's when we asked ourselves, 'Can we imagine what the narrative of the future will look like?' Platteaux said. The demo itself is an attempt to answer this question by example — a combination of live-action and computer-generated live-action images, through interactive action scenes and an open-world environment that can be actually explored and traversed. Despite being compressed into a 10-minute demo space, The Matrix: Awakening is a natural continuation of the series' original cross-media narrative.
The presentation included a video in which Reeves and Kerry Ann Moss reprised Neo and Trinity respectively, and was filmed together when Matrix Reboot was made in Berlin. The human resistance fighter IO that players control during the demo is based on a character in epic's tool MetaHuman Creator trailer released earlier this year.
"It's a great opportunity to show the look and expressiveness of the characters because they have to stand with real people like Keanu and Kerry-Ann," Platteaux says. The Matrix: Awakening strikes a fine balance between the mesmerizing philosophical thinking of the series itself and the thrill of bullets and bullets, giving players the chance to experience a fast-paced shootout on an open highway before entering an open-world city to roam uninhibited. All told, the demo took a team of more than 20 people more than a year to complete.
Asked if there was any clear connection between The Matrix: Awakening and The Matrix Reboot, Farris and Platteaux stressed that the demo was a completely standalone experience and was only a demo, not a game. The Unreal Engine 5 will be released in spring 2022, and Platteaux is excited to highlight that assets for the creation of The Matrix: Awakening will also be available.
"In the future, we're going to see small teams being able to use these tools in some way to create large-scale environments," Platteaux says. "The mission of the UE5 engine is to empower these groups."
Translation 丨 April
Edit 丨 Tonkotsu Ramen
Follow, like, watch