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Photorealism for a Photography Simulator

Photorealism for a Photography Simulator

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Don’t like hiking but want to get lots of instagram-ready shot to impress everyone? Want to try practicing your photography skills without hours of walking or waiting for lighting conditions?

Matt Newell used Unreal Engine 5 to create a photography-themed game in which you walk trails and then take photos – getting to experiment with all the different camera settings. It’s turned into a sleeper hit – all from a guy that said during an interview for the Unreal Engine blog, he admits he learned Unreal Engine from scratch by using resources from the UE website and engaging with the development community. To create his effects, he utilized UE5 distance fields, contact shadows, and virtual textures. He also utilized free Quixel’s megascans.

You can read how he used each of the techniques in his interview on the UE blog.

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Chernobyl containment dome hit by drone attack

Chernobyl containment dome hit by drone attack

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Chernobyl’s destruction isn’t over. Besides being radioactive for 1000’s of years, now we deal with Russia crashing explosive drones into it. Can we all agree no matter how bad the war is going, nobody wants this kind of idiocy? B1M does great coverage of high profile buildings – and has a good article on this as well.

At 2am on 14 February 2025, a Russian drone struck the north-west corner of the Chernobyl containment roof. The explosion ripped through the outer containment and inner insulation layers, destroying insulation and exposing membranes to flame.

As the fire spread inside the roof’s cavity, firefighters faced conditions for which no manual had prepared them. Temperatures outside plunged to -16C. Water froze before it could seep down to smouldering insulation. For 17 days, hoses ran continuously, until finally, on 7 March, the blaze was declared out.

The relationship between Computing and its history is that of a willful amnesiac.

The relationship between Computing and its history is that of a willful amnesiac.

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“[…] pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future—it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]—and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made.

—Alan Kay, on Computing, Dr. Dobb’s Interview with Alan Kay 2012