While the demo did not get a PC release, Epic released the city environment in the demo as a sample project titled "City Sample" in their Unreal Engine 5 workshop. Released during the 2021 Game Awards on December 9, 2021, it features Trinity ( Carrie-Anne Moss) and Neo ( Keanu Reeves), along with photorealistic 3D-scanned models of both Moss and Reeves from the present time, portrayed by themselves, in cinematic and QTE shooter scenes where the player can take control of IO, a character which Epic introduced with Unreal's MetaHuman creator tool. Pictures, The Coalition, Wētā FX, Evil Eye Pictures, SideFX, and others for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and Series S, serving as a marketing tie-in for the 2021 film The Matrix Resurrections. Especially if you peek behind the menu and get a look at the in-engine controller as it scrambles to load all the assets in the background as you push it to its limits.The Matrix Awakens is a 2021 open-world video game and technology demonstration developed by Epic Games using Unreal Engine 5 in partnership with Warner Bros. When you add to the fact that this entire space has hardware ray tracing turned on, as well as ray-traced shadows in the cinematics, it’s hard not to be a little impressed. Or just fly around and admire the architecture from the air as you toggle on the different views to see just what goes into creating a city that consists of 10 million unique and duplicated assets. You can drive cars and crash into any of the 17,000 simulated and destructible vehicles. In this new world, you can fly to any street location, change between night and day, or move the sun or moon around the world as you watch the dynamic shadows powered by lumen stretch across the streets in real time. They showed us how you could quickly paint roads onto the map, add large sections of “buildings” that they quickly decide the height of, and then create an all-new world in what seems like would only take a few moments. They would rebuild the city weekly resulting in 52 unique cities that they would create, tear down, and then create again quickly with a little help from tools like SideFX’s Houdini for said procedural generation. ![]() Because they needed to work fast, the entire city was made with procedural generation. The end goal is to inspire other creators to use the Unreal 5 Engine so Jerome notes that Matrix Awakens was created by a small team after shipping their Unreal Engine 5 demo last year. “Basically we are the little swat team that tries to come up with ‘Okay, how are we going to show the engine the best?’.How can we show that the engine can do something else other than just rocks?” referring to last year's Lumen demo. But… it's a glimpse of the future." says Jerome Plattteaux, Art Director at Unreal as he talks us through the tech. there's a little bit of gameplay, a little bit of exploration. If someone out there could make a certain flying man in blue and red I’d certainly love to see it. And I can’t wait to see what the Unreal community does with it. One difference? Similar to how they made the Valley of the Ancient demo publicly available this year, The Matrix build will be given away for free next Spring for you to tinker around within the Unreal 5 engine. Their recreation of New York City had ray-tracing, heavy crowd density, as well as traffic that’s procedurally generated the same way it was in the Matrix demo. Finally, you’re allowed to explore the city at your leisure and toy with some of the engine’s tools.Īs I look at what’s been created I can’t help but compare it to Insomniac's Spider-Man Miles Morales. Of course it all ends with a massive explosion. You are then transported to an on-rails game experience where you’ll play as a new character with the ability to shoot some cars and helicopters as you’re chased by agents on the freeway. The demo opens with what amounts to a trailer where Keanu Reeves and Carrie Anne Moss talk about the ideas of the Matrix and what the Unreal 5 engine can create. You can absolutely make an open-world game in Unreal.’ Really, it’s a chance for the team to say, ‘Yes. There’s a playable component as well, but what you “play” is more a proof of concept than what you should expect from any final product. Matrix Awakens isn’t just a visual teaser, however. ![]() ![]() They’ve already been showing you the engine and reality mixed together for the first 2 minutes of the experience. I think cynics are going to call out how, yes, things do look a tad plastic-y, but the “trick” the Unreal team pulls here is quite cheeky. The entire demo enters that uncanny valley feeling from there.
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