Star Wars: Rogue One's best character was rendered in real time, a cinema first

A breakthrough moment for film, according to Epic

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’s visual effects supervisor, John Knoll, took the stage at GDC today to reveal how Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 allowed his team to approach filming the movie in a way they couldn’t previously.

Knoll spoke at length about how Epic’s engine allowed the ILM team to render the beloved, sarcastic droid K-2SO in real time, bypassing the pre-rendering process. As a result, the team was able to see K-2SO on the screen during a specific scene instead of having to implement the rendering and editing after the fact. Knoll explained that achieving final pixels on screen helped with the production of Rogue One — and it marked the first time the studio was able to work with CGI in the moment. The technique was developed by a team at ILM, modifying Unreal Engine 4’s source code.

Knoll was on stage to showcase just how the technology worked and how visual effects editors used it on the film. It can be seen above.

Rogue One, which was released in December, has garnered more than $1 billion globally and was nominated for Best Visual Effects at the Oscars. The film lost out to The Jungle Book, another Disney movie that mixed CGI with real world environments and actors.

Read the full article here by Polygon