Developer Blog

Inside Look - Unreal Engine

April 14, 2009

Working with the Unreal Engine on an action game like X-Men Origins: Wolverine has been a fantastic experience.

Here at Raven, we were able to look at the strengths of the engine and leverage them in the game to make a gorgeous-looking experience.

One particular area of the project that we’ve focused our attention toward is the quality of our material shaders. Unreal already had a great foundation for working with shaders, so we tried to push it in new ways that made sense for our title. In order to make our winter environments more believable, we made a really useful shader that automatically put snow on top of any object. This approach made it easy for an artist to fill an entire forest full of snowy looking assets. What this means for gamers is that they’re not going to see the same snow-painted rock a hundred times over, but instead each will have a unique look that makes sense for how they are placed in the world.

We also spent a lot of time making sure Wolverine has realistic skin shaders, lighting and especially battle damage. He’ll look great running around in a natural outdoor jungle lighting, but even better after he’s wounded. His wounds are accented with accurate highlights on the edges, and then everything slowly heals back up. This system is a blast to see in action.

We also built our tech to extend what Unreal does to each rendered frame after its finished drawing all of our models and effects. Our game has dedicated a serious amount of horsepower to what is called “Post-Process” in order to adjust the color and contrast similar to a Hollywood movie. If you’ve seen the first screenshot we released, that’s actually in-engine using our post-process to tweak everything. We even looked for ways to extend this tech into gameplay in order to show the player what we think Wolverine sees with his feral senses. It’s a great visual effect that rolls over the entire environment, highlighting enemies and point of interest in a super-stylized way.

Using the Unreal Engine has extended the boundaries of our content creators. The benefit of having every major game system live in the same editing tool has let us to raise the quality the X-Men Origins: Wolverine video game to a new level.

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17 comments on

Inside Look - Unreal Engine

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The White Knight's avatar

The White Knight

04/15/09

Wow! That looks awesome!

matthood5's avatar

matthood5

04/15/09

Thanks guys, looks great.

Spidermark's avatar

Spidermark

04/15/09

Looking great thanks for the info

WOLVERINEUNCAGED's avatar

WOLVERINEUNCAGED

04/15/09

Looks freakin’ awesome!!!

beastfromtheeast's avatar

beastfromtheeast

04/16/09

Agreed, Unreal never ceases to impress

sam_tgo's avatar

sam_tgo

04/15/09

i can feel its really cold out there! wolvie should wear a jacket. lol...it looks awesome!

Omega red's avatar

Omega red

04/15/09

i want to see the feral sense in action

iron24's avatar

iron24

04/15/09

Very, very cool I love the detail.

Iceman's avatar

Iceman

04/15/09

This is way cool. Having the ability to see the environment for the first time in wolverines point of view is the best part. I’m tired of seeing the same environments in games always repeating.

matthood5's avatar

matthood5

04/17/09

I pre ordered yesterday, cant wait!

juicebeast's avatar

juicebeast

07/20/09

The detail is unreal! (can’t believe nobody said that yet...)

PerfectExample's avatar

PerfectExample

11/06/09

great work

Insestemo's avatar

Insestemo

01/22/10

Love the environments, its cool that they don’t keep repeating themselves like most games do.

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Annanicole's avatar

Annanicole

02/26/10

It looks really great, I’ll mention it in my online term paper soon I hope

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03/05/10

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03/10/10

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03/10/10

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