As well as enabling connectivity with the real world, Unreal Engine has lots of other features that Westworld found useful during production. “Through the Level Snapshots feature added to Unreal Engine 4.27, we were able to perform tasks, such as the control and restoration of level versions, much more intuitively than with the existing Perforce server method,” says Joo Young. “The thumbnail and comment features for each level effectively prevented any common mistakes in version control and restoration.”Westworld was also able to reduce the build time for checking lighting changes from several hours to less than 10 minutes through GPU Lightmass using multi-GPU. “This was hugely helpful in making and applying lighting changes on the spot,” says Joo Young.

“Unreal Engine’s powerful flexibility and scalability, marked by features like an open development environment, Color Correct Regions, and Multi-User Editing, have made an enormous difference to The Silent Sea’s production pipeline,” says Joo Young.

When it comes to the texture and color depending on lighting, camera location and settings, the studio is now able to instantly edit and apply assets on-site. The entire production team, including the director, cinematographer, and supervisors, can discuss the scene and make decisions on the spot. Traditionally, the team could only see the results after shooting with a green screen, post-production, and then waiting for a long rendering time. Unreal Engine’s ICVFX technology is bringing the innovation of real-time into the pipeline so that the team can see and improve on the expected result on the fly.

Source: Unreal Engine Blog