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Comment by wdb | Hacker News Reader

Do they use Unreal Engine 5 for Mandolorian?

They used UE4 to run The Volume in season 1. For season 2, ILM developed their own real-time render engine (Helios).

Thx. I didn't know that and did a search on it [1], some more details here [2], [3] but they still dont explain why they dropped Unreal and made their own in technical details. I guess partly to protect their IP partly to protect Unreal's PR.

I am also wondering how much did it cost for them to develop their own Rendering Engine.

Or could it be Epic was too busy with Unreal 5 they dont have the manpower to help ILM for their specific feature request.

[1] https://80.lv/articles/a-look-at-ilm-s-work-on-the-mandalori...

[2] https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/mandalorian-season-2-virt...

[3] https://www.engadget.com/the-mandalorian-season-two-stagecra...

I found an article in Variety [1] that says "Additionally, ILM has a proprietary real-time engine dubbed Helios, based on technology developed at Pixar" which sounds like they adapted it from Renderman rather than build something entirely new from scratch. Pixar has been working on adding real-time/GPU capability to Renderman forever (supposedly it's finally coming to the public in RM24. We'll see).

[1] https://variety.com/2019/biz/features/video-game-engines-vis...

Thank You, the use or Renderman makes much more sense.

Yes, in quite a fascinating way, too: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/forging-new-paths-fo...

That's the previous Unreal Engine 4.

I really doubt it. I can't imagine UE5 being stable enough to use in production at this stage of development unless they've prioritized the featureset that Mandalorian is using.

I believe they used UE4 for season 1 and switched over to an internally-developed engine for season 2.

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