Unreal Engine is a versatile tool. “Unreal Engine has become the platform where you can bring things together,” Gombos notes. “You can bring in the assets as well as the scans that you do, such as Gaussian splats or photogrammetry and some of the set builds. In our case, we had data from the art department, so we were able to bring that in, add our things to it, and offer different camera positions or allow the DP and director to explore the scenes. Unreal Engine is generally being used currently in the industry for all of these visualizations. We were be able to go to a location in the morning, create a Gaussian splat, bring it in and have a scene ready in the afternoon. This quick turnaround was really useful. Mostly, it helped us to assess locations and make more informed decisions about where bluescreens would be placed and where set extensions would start.”

…It used to be a divide, with Unreal Engine being very good at video games, but then people started thinking maybe movies can also use Unreal for finished visual effects. So you have this sort of gaming aesthetic entering the world of cinema.

I think that’s why those Kubrick movies still hold up, because they were shooting miniatures and paintings, and now you’ve got this different aesthetic. It works with Marvel movies where you kind of know you’re in a heightened, unrealistic reality. I think it doesn’t work from a strictly photo-real standpoint.

I just don’t think it takes light the same way; I don’t think it fundamentally reacts to subsurface, scattering, and how light hits skin and reflects in the same way. So that’s how you get this uncanny valley when you come to creature animation, a lot of in-betweening is done for speed instead of being done by hand…

I think that Unreal Engine coming in and replacing Maya as a sort of fundamental is the greatest slip backwards. And there’s also something, a mistake I think people make all the time on visual effects. You can make a very real helicopter. But as soon as it flies wrong, your brain knows it’s not real. It has to earn every turn; it has to move right. It’s still animation, sometimes it’s not just the lighting and the photography, sometimes it’s the motion.

[We] received a statement from the company's VFX supervisor Pat Tubach in response. Tubach joined Epic Games in 2022 following a lengthy career at ILM, working on everything from George Lucas' 1971 classic THX 1138, as well as Armageddon, The Perfect Storm, Jurassic Park 3 and 1999's The Mummy.

Tubach has a strong knowledge of modern movies too, having worked on Star Wars and Marvel entries including The Force Awakens and the first Avengers, numerous Harry Potter films, Pixar's beloved WALL-E and... Gore Verbinski's original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy.

"It's inaccurate for anyone in the industry to claim that one tool is to blame for some erroneously perceived issues with the state of VFX and CGI," Tubach told IGN. "It's true that there are a lot more people making computer graphics than ever before, and with that scale comes a range of successes and failures – but aesthetic and craft comes from artists, not software.

"Unreal Engine is primarily used for pre-visualization, virtual production, and in some cases final pixels. I can guarantee that the artists working on big blockbuster VFX films like Pirates of the Caribbean 10-15 years ago could only dream about having a tool as powerful as Unreal Engine on their desks to help them get the job done — and I should know — I was one of them!"

When people talk about Tilly Norwood, they often forget one crucial detail: There’s a real person and a creative human vision behind her.

But through all the noise, if we ignore her human origin, we miss the point of how AI fits into our future creative work, and that’s where most of the fear comes from.

This is not about replacing real performances, it’s about giving actors new opportunities in this new medium of AI film and TV that’s fast arriving.

An AI actor is a storytelling vehicle that can be used to portray many different characters. An AI actor could be a digital twin of the performer, or a bolder, more expressive version of themselves. It might even be something entirely different — wilder, more imaginative, something that would never exist physically. Or a younger and more beautiful AI actor than oneself, as in the case of Tilly Norwood. Some actors might choose to use performance capture, bringing the AI actor to life with their own face and movement. Others might prefer guiding their actor like in animation, shaping it through intention, timing and emotional framing. I use a combination of both.

When I created Tilly Norwood, I didn’t stop being an actor. I became an actor in a new way. Everything about Tilly, her humor, rhythm, style, comes from my own instincts and years of formal training. Tilly doesn’t exist without human guidance. She doesn’t move, speak or react without careful human direction. Crafting her personality is a creative process, just like animation, puppetry or performance capture. Think of Andy Serkis as Gollum — he was acting, even though Gollum was digital. The same goes for Zoe Saldaña in “Avatar.” She wasn’t less of an actor because her character was blue and rendered in pixels. In fact, she’s pioneered what she calls the “most empowering form of acting.”