Unbelievably impressive demo of the Unreal Engine 4

It's been far, far too long since I posted an update here on Machin-X, but I may be (finally) returning to some digital puppetry work in the near future and when I saw this demo for the Unreal Engine 4 I had to share it.

It is, well, pretty unreal:

The Kite open world demo created in Unreal Engine 4 features a diverse and beautifully realized 100 square mile landscape. Everything is generated completely in real-time at 30fps and includes fully dynamic direct and indirect illumination, cinematic depth of field and motion blur, and procedurally placed trees and foliage.

Real-time 3D sure has come a long way since I first worked on a TV pilot for a proposed kids' series using cardboard cut-outs and blob tracking with a webcam to create some 2D flash animation almost a decade ago.

I wonder where this technology will go in the ten years or so?

Flash Animation Using Kinect

The Dead Man and the Lawyer is a short film and experiment by Nick Fox-Gieg, a Canadian animator and all-round interesting guy I've had the pleasure of getting to know over the past few months. Although this might look like relatively straight forward 2D animation, he actually made it using the Kinect and I think this opens up some exciting possibilities for creating Kinect animation.

To make the film Nick used OSCeleton to record Kinect data to an .xml file via a utility he's written called Processing Sketch. The beauty of this approach is that the motion capture information was written to an .xml file in real-time without any need for video capture. That way the animation data can be read back from .xml in Flash, tweaked and then rendered in full HD. A short tutorial and download links for all the necessary utilities and libraries you need to try this yourself can be found on Nick's website.

Nick's also a semifinalist in YouTube's NextUp competition right now. If you like his work, show him some love and vote for him.