5 Industries That Benefit from Real-Time 3D Animation with Unreal Engine

Realtime 3D animation is no longer just a tool for gaming—industries across the board are benefiting from the advanced capabilities of engines like Unreal Engine. From quick turnarounds to unparalleled creative flexibility, real-time rendering is transforming the way businesses operate, communicate, and innovate.

Here are five industries where Unreal Engine is making a significant impact:

1. Film and TV: Revolutionising Virtual Production

The film industry has embraced virtual production, where real-time 3D environments created in Unreal Engine are used as LED screen backdrops during shooting. This not only eliminates the need for expensive set designs and locations but also allows directors to visualise scenes with greater flexibility. Unreal Engine enables filmmakers to create realistic environments faster and at a fraction of the cost.

Back in 2022, we took part in a Virtual Production course, in partnership with ILM, EPIC Games and Ulster University to gain hands-on understanding of how this technology works. You really don’t understand fully until you are on that stage! We have developed key practices within this field and can confidently deliver both VP-ready environments, as well as offering onset VFX supervision.

2. Gaming: Powering Immersive, Interactive Experiences

As the original domain of Unreal Engine, the gaming industry continues to benefit from its realtime capabilities. Game developers use Unreal Engine to build expansive, interactive worlds, providing players with immersive experiences in realtime. The flexibility of Unreal Engine makes it easier for developers to iterate quickly and bring creative visions to life faster.

In a recent collaboration with a game development company, we created a trailer directly from in-engine gameplay, allowing us to create dynamic shots to reflect user experience. Using Unreal Engine’s real-time rendering, the team could make last-minute adjustments and still meet their tight production deadlines, ensuring a smooth and polished delivery.

3. Advertising: Fast, Hyper-Realistic Campaigns with Unreal Engine

The advertising industry is harnessing the power of Unreal Engine to produce fast, hyper-realistic campaigns. With real-time rendering capabilities, agencies can create photorealistic 3D visuals and animations for commercials, digital ads, and interactive content, as well as more stylised design. Unreal also allows brands to showcase products in a variety of settings, from virtual environments to dynamic scenes, without the need for costly physical shoots. Unreal Engine’s flexibility speeds up the creative process, enabling quick adjustments to visual assets and providing marketers with immersive, engaging content that can be adapted seamlessly across multiple platforms.

The first project we trialed in Unreal was a 30 TV commercial with a huge list of characters and environments, delivered in a handful of days, with tweaks being made until the very last minute. This would have been impossible before our move to realtime.

4. Immersive & Experiential: Crafting Memorable, Interactive Experiences

Brands and event organisers are increasingly leveraging Unreal Engine to create immersive and experiential environments that captivate audiences. Whether it’s for live events, interactive installations, or virtual experiences, real-time 3D technology enables the creation of engaging, high-impact visuals that allow users to fully interact with digital content. Unreal as ever, offers hands on creativity during this process, allowing for strong directorial impact, as well as the ability to deliver on demanding time scales.

We produced a 2 minute multi-screen immersive experience for Pride charity Galop in only 5 days for a campaign experience at Outernet London thanks to our understanding of Unreal Engine’s capabilities. This project showcased the flexibility and power of Unreal Engine, resulting in a vibrant, emotionally impactful experience that seamlessly blended real-time 3D visuals with powerful storytelling. This project exemplifies how Unreal Engine allows for creative freedom without sacrificing speed or quality, making it the perfect tool for high-stakes, time-sensitive projects that require both innovation and efficiency.

5. Just About Anything You Can Think Of!

Since 2020 and our move to realtime, we now use Unreal Engine for 99% of our projects and find that our expertise within this software as well as its flexibility and creative control allows us to deliver work of increasingly higher quality. Not only this, but since winning Innovate UK’s Creative Catalyst grant in 2023, we’ve been building our own custom tools to make the engine work for us in even more powerful ways. We’ve tried just about every visual style there is, exported a huge variety of formats from phone screen to huge immersive experiences and are yet to

Conclusion

Real-time 3D animation powered by Unreal Engine is transforming the way industries work, from speeding up project timelines to enhancing creative capabilities. Whether you're designing a new building, showcasing a product, producing a film, developing a game, or creating a training tool, Unreal Engine's power in real-time rendering opens up endless possibilities. If you're looking to integrate this cutting-edge technology into your next project, our studio has the expertise to deliver results, fast.