Today consisted mainly of a captivating introduction to EpicGames, Unreal Engine (the game they use), what goes into creating game engines and designing characters and sets (long-story short: billions of tiny triangular pixels arranged with the help of programs coded to determine how the light sources would hit different parts of the scene), and plans for the next two weeks. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Polge, a senior programmer at EpicGames (and an all-around awesome individual). One really cool part of my day was playing around with Unreal Engine’s MetaHuman creator. Basically, this application allows you to design your own eerily-realistic-looking avatars by contouring facial features, adjusting a ton of settings, and choosing different body parts and details. Each metahuman is creepily realistic, and it’s very easy to adjust settings and features to indicate different genders and/or ethnicities. The featured photo is an example of these metahumans (totally looks like a real person. It’s astounding how advanced and high-quality game graphics are). I’d say this has been a pretty solid first day.
