Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/711516
j u ly . a u g u s t 2 0 1 6 c g w 4 1 Engine-uity either. Two of the leading game engine developers – Crytek and Epic Games – have expanded the payment options for their soware to include "free" and provide inviting options for individuals and small organizations. Amazon has acquired a license for CryEngine 3 and is making it available for free in order to build the ecosystem for its Amazon Web Services (AWS). Blender, an open-source provider, offers a free game engine, as well. Likewise, Autodesk is targeting the application developer market with its Stingray game engine acquired through the purchase of Bitsquid in 2014. It, too, has no royalty entanglements and offers Stingray free to licensees of its Maya LT modeling and animation soware. These are the more popular offerings at the tip of the game engine iceberg. And the crazy rise of Interest in VR and AR is also bringing in new developers with their own ideas about what can be done with a game engine. M O V I E M A G I C In 2015, at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), Epic and Weta showed the results of their collaboration using assets from The Hobbit to create a VR application. There was not a lot of information published about it; Weta clamped down on the news even though it was a public presentation. Nevertheless, it was an important milestone because the teams were talking openly about the ways in which game engines can be used with content created for movies. In this case, the Epic and Weta teams were experimenting with VR content creation, but as it turns out, the collaboration goes the other way, as well. Movie companies are using game engine technology on set for live virtual filmmaking. At the FMX conference held annually in Stuttgart, Germany, for the digital content creation industry, filmmaking engineers talked about their work in adapting game engines for use on set. For example, Digital Domain has developed the Photon tool using the Unity engine as a base. Photon development began with James Cameron's Avatar and is ongoing. At FMX, Rob Legato, visual effects supervisor for The Jungle Book, teamed up with Adam Valdez from The Motion Picture Company (MPC) to describe the use of Photon to allow Director Jon Favreau and his crew to work within the virtual set. Valdez described Photon as a wrapper for the game engine, which makes it more "filmic friendly" with additional lighting, composition, and photography control. GAME ENGINES KNIT DISPARATE DISCIPLINES TOGETHER By Kathleen Maher