Go behind the scenes of Dune: Awakening with Funcom‘s new video “Creating Worlds, from Book to Film to Game”. Oscar-winning Cinematographer for Dune: Part 1 & Dune: Part 2 Greig Fraser, and Funcom Creative Director Joel Bylos tell us more about bringing the world of Dune to life. We summarized the most interesting details.
Funcom has worked closely with Legendary Pictures from the very beginning of the development of Dune: Awakening to bring Denis Villeneuve’s vision to life in the gaming world. The team was granted access to all of the movie assets, and even Creative Director Joel Bylos and his Art Directors and Lead Artists visited the movie set.
As video games have a larger scope than movies, the team at Funcom is determined to expand on Villeneuve’s work, bridging the gap between the books and movies, offering the ultimate gaming experience that the readers of Frank Herbert have always dreamed of.
With the sandworms, for example, Dune: Awakening features not only the massive ring-mouthed ones from Villeneuve’s movie but also smaller, edge-mouthed sandworms that fans may remember from David Lynch’s movie adaptation.
Dune: Awakening uses the Unreal Engine 5, which allows the team to employ features like the Lumen fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system, significantly enhancing the atmosphere. Especially the interiors of player bases greatly benefit from this technology. Interestingly, the production team of the Dune movie also used UE 5 to create realistic lighting simulations and plan shoots in the desert.
Nanite, Unreal‘s virtualized geometry system, enables the creation of ultra-detailed surroundings in the foreground while reducing the detail in the background, depending on the player’s distance, boosting performance.
This video featurette, along with a new game trailer, was aired during the first episode of the Dune: Awakening Direct livestream.
Dune: Awakening is in development for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X with closed beta tests ongoing, but a release date has not been announced yet.
