Fallout TV show used Unreal Engine

One of the largest shows of the year Fallout used Unreal Engine in its production with the LED Volume. While this isn’t surprising, with a majority of CGI heavy productions using the volume as a substitute to green screen in recent years, the way it was used as a storytelling element was. In universe an underground nuclear fallout shelter fakes outdoor lighting using the volume. In the show it is revealed to be from a projector but it serves the same purpose as an LED wall. The viewer is fully aware that the surrounding environment is a projection and it’s destroyed in the first episode to dramatic effect.  

It is ironic that the first time Unreal Engine has been used for a Bethesda production was for television not gaming. But if rumors are true, we may soon find Bethesda remakes running UE5.

You can learn more about the production from this FXguide article.

‍

Here is an amazing talk by Epic Games technical artist Arron Langmead where he covers best practices for using Nanite with displacement which was recently added. He also revealed a new way of creating trees directly in the Engine with Procedural Content Generation, one of the most creative uses I have seen of the tool. We don’t need to fake branches with opacity masks and can rely on Nanite geometry to represent each leaf and branch while not taking up too much memory. It goes to show how versatile PCG is and this is just the first of many use cases we will see.  

‍

In last week’s newsletter I mentioned how Hellblade II is the first true UE5 game made from the ground up in the Engine. It makes use of all of its new features like Lumen, Nanite and Temporal Super Resolution.  

In this video by Digital Foundry they take a deep technical dive into the game and the current state of Unreal Engine 5. I recommend watching it to see what UE5 currently excels at and what parts of the Engine can use improvements. With Hellblade II, we now have a technical benchmark from which we can compare other UE5 games going into the future.