Joe Rigby of Mellanium (previously talked about here) gave me a guided tour of their product recently. There are many things to be excited about with this technology, but one of the most significant breakthroughs is with regard to the quality of 3d models. Since its inception, real-time 3d rendering's trade-off has been low poly models - a necessary evil which is ever so slowly becoming less of an issue. (See Mass Effect, UT3). Finding ways around this limitation has been a bit of a holy grail for machinima in some circles.

Mellanium's modification of the game environment allows the introduction of Autocad-quality (very high detail) 3d models into the UT2004 engine, while still keeping performance speeds / client machine specs very reasonable (i.e. close to the specs already required to run that game).

During the walkthrough, I got to see highly detailed player models, exquisite Autocad props, and all within the kind of large open environments Unreal has always been so good at rendering; I noticed no lag. The video below shows the kind of detail I'm talking about. If they can do this in UT2004... imagine what they'll be able to do in UT3 if they port their tools over there?