Epic Games Unreal Engine Electric Dreams Art Blast

By Daniel Wade - June 20, 2023

At this year’s State of Unreal event at GDC, one of the things we showed was a demo we called Electric Dreams. It offered a sneak peek at some Experimental new technology that has now shipped with Unreal Engine 5.2.

Electric Dreams got its name from the Rivian R1T it featured. Rivian uses UE to power the R1T’s instrument cluster, including 3D visualization of the vehicles. We worked with Rivian to bring the R1T to life in Electric Dreams as an accurate 3D model. We used Chaos vehicle physics to simulate its suspension, which was pretty cool! We also gave it a pretty rad paint job that looked like it was made of opal, thanks to Substrate, our Experimental new material authoring system.

But it was the jungle environment we put the truck in that really got people’s attention. It was built using our brand-spanking-new cutting-edge Procedural Content Generation framework, or PCG for short.

With PCG, you can use a handful of assets, like the Quixel Megascans we chose, to quickly and easily populate entire worlds—and it really scales. The Electric Dreams environment is 4 km by 4 km, and mixes procedurally generated content with hand-crafted assets, which we used to set the visual style and art direction for the entire piece.

And what’s even more fun is that the content can be adjusted in real time based on gameplay or other requirements. So you can do things like constructing a ground surface based on the shape of a neighboring embankment, or triggering a landslide when a player reaches a certain point.

Just a caution: PCG and Substrate are Experimental features, meaning they are there for you to try out and give us your feedback, but you shouldn’t use them in live projects—we’ll be continuing to develop them for future releases.

We got a lot of requests to make the environment available as a sample for you to dive in and explore for yourselves—so we did! The Electric Dreams Environment Sample Project comes with seven different Levels for you to choose from, depending on your hardware’s capabilities and your particular area of interest, from the entire environment, including all hand-crafted and PCG content, to just the procedural river bed / creek area and the large cliff structure.

In addition to PCG, you can use the project to explore Substrate, as well as taking a look at how PCG integrates with other UE5 features, including Lumen, Nanite, and Soundscape.

We’ve put together a landing page where you can find more info on what to expect from the sample, the link to download it, and a whole bunch of resources you can use to get up to speed. We hope you enjoy it, and please do share your feedback with us on the EDC forums!

We had a blast creating Electric Dreams, and we want to thank the talented art team who put their hearts and souls into making it beautiful. We hope it inspires you to go have some fun with the latest UE5 feature set, and we have no doubt that you’ll make sure the next round of real-time experiences we see is going to be truly amazing!

Nick Penwarden
VP of Engineering, Epic Games