It can be argued that we have yet to see the full potential of realism that Unreal Engine 5 can deliver cause there’s no game out there that can come even close to the Electric Dreams demo that came out several years ago and yet, we already have Unreal Engine 6 from Epic Games which was first showcased a couple weeks ago. But it seems like the next version of Unreal Engine will be more about it’s Gen-AI functionalities than with increased visual realism as according to Epic Games, AI, especially generative AI will play an even bigger role in Unreal 6.
At the State of Unreal showcase this week, Epic Games discussed how the integration of generative AI with Unreal Engine 6 will help create in-game assets and the entire process is described as an “art concepting process” that can take any handcrafted design from actual artists and use the new technology to visually translate it as a 3D in-game model, as demonstrated in the video below:
“The design is king. AI can generate generic stuff all day, but that’s not what we’re doing here,” the studio explains, “It just skips ahead in the timeline so he [an artist] can focus on honing in on the design and crafting it exactly how he wants it to be.”
While it really sounds like Unreal Engine 6 will use gen AI as a form of augmentation with the actual designs of the artists, overall response to the integration and the AI features is kind of mixed right now, especially after we’ve seen the results of NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 where AI usage results in a complete distortion of the original art direction and drastically alters in-game assets and other details.
Also, in a recent blog post, Unreal Engine development lead Marcus Wassmer has stated that Epic is currently working to find a balance between providing full creative control to the artists while using gen AI in the process of ideation and for speeding up workflow: “For UE6, we see LLMs, generative AI models, and tools like Claude and Codex playing a central role in helping you build content faster while maintaining the creative control you need.”
