Epic Games MegaGrant

29th October 2020 Company News Creative News

We are extremely excited to announce that we have been awarded an Epic Megagrant to enhance our capabilities in the Medical Animation and Interactive Space.

Epic Games are the creator of the Unreal Engine (UE4) which is the world’s most open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool. The Unreal Engine is a state-of-the-art real-time engine and editor that features photorealistic rendering, dynamic physics and effects, lifelike animation, robust data translation, and much more. The open and extensible platform gives creators the freedom and control to deliver cutting-edge content, interactive experiences, and immersive virtual worlds.

Epic has committed $100 million to provide financial grants to creative, noteworthy, and innovative projects built in and around Unreal Engine. Grants range from $5,000 to $500,000 and cover a variety of endeavours from game development, architecture projects, and film production to academic uses and software tool development.

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This is an exciting time for the company as we look to take games engine technology into our animations, not just in the interactive space. This grant will allow us to spend the time required to get to grips with the latest releases from Unreal and see how this will sculpt the future direction of the company when it comes to production.

Ben Ramsbottom, CEO

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Receiving the Epic MegaGrant is hugely exciting for us. Unreal is something we have always been interested in developing our skills in but having the time to push forward with any new technology is usually challenging as it takes time. With this rare opportunity, we now have time to develop a whole new real-time approach to our animations. Traditional rendering methods are slower, and this limits creatively what we can achieve. A real-time workflow could have a huge impact on our work as we wouldn’t have to wait for the computer to re-calculate the images every time, we make a slight change. This would enable us to throw ideas down quickly with instant visual feedback making the possibilities endless.

Leo Chilcott, Production Director

The Unreal Engine will be initially used to create an educational animation on the potential use of vaccines for the treatment of COVID-19 as a follow-up to our hugely successful Coronavirus Animation, which received close to 2 million views and has been featured in various news programmes and short documentaries around the world.

As a world leader in the scientific animation space, we felt we had a responsibility to convey the science behind the COVID-19 global pandemic in a way that was both engaging and easy to understand. We wanted to enable people of all backgrounds to understand the mechanisms of this disease and how to stop it spreading. Now with the MegaGrant, we aim to further this work by helping to educate the world about the importance of a vaccine.