During yesterday's 'State of Unreal' keynote at the Game Developers Conference 2019, Epic Games showcased a gorgeous ray tracing demo titled 'Troll'. Running on a single GeForce RTX 2080Ti graphics card and made with the Unreal Engine 4.22, Troll was developed with no custom plugins or code by Goodbye Kansas and Deep Forest Films.
'Troll' was visually inspired by the works of Swedish painter and illustrator John Bauer, who is famous for his illustrations of Swedish folklore and fairy tales anthology 'Among Gnomes and Trolls'. Epic's 3Lateral took care of 3D and 4D facial scanning.
Fredrik Löving, Studio Manager at Goodbye Kansas LA, said:
Goodbye Kansas has always strived to work with the best talent in the industry, and it has been a very rewarding experience to team up not only with the great people at Epic Games but also incredible talent from the film industry, intersecting creative minds and technology pioneers in ways never seen before.
Nick Penwarden, director of engineering for Unreal Engine at Epic Games, added:
Ray tracing is more than just reflections — it’s about all the subtle lighting interactions needed to create a natural, beautiful image. Ray tracing adds these subtle lighting effects throughout the scene, making everything look more real and natural and making it easier to create beautiful shots.
Ray tracing techniques are now supported in Unreal Engine 4, Unity and CryEngine. It's reasonable to assume they will be employed in various ways in a significant amount of upcoming games after the initial batch sponsored by NVIDIA.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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