A short Top Gun Maverick Unreal Engine 5 showcase has been released, and it’s looking absolutely stellar.

　　Created by Nikolas ‘Maverick’ Samborsky, Senior Cinematic Artist at OwlcatGames, this 20 seconds concept is part of a  cinematic short dedicated to Top Gun. This showcase is a recreation of Top Gun Maverick within Epic’s new game engine, using some shots from the movie. It has to be said that this looks utterly impressive, and based on the artist's comparison, we could hardly see the difference between the movie and the recreation in Unreal Engine 5. Be sure to check it out.

　　For those who have been living under a rock, Top Gun Maverick is the sequel to 1986’s Top Gun. It features Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer alongside Ed Harris, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, and Lewis Pullman. The sequel harvested over $1.4 billion globally, becoming the highest-grossing film of 2022, and Tom Cruise’s highest-grossing movie to date.

　　Epic’s Unreal Engine 5 was released back in April of this year. Key features include Nanite and Lumen.

　　Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality.

　　Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console.