Andy Serkis expanding Unreal Engine partnership [UPDATE]

UPDATE: Some clarity on the Imaginarium / Imaginati situation. The Imaginarium, Serkis’ visual effects production house, has its own games division. This is headed by Gina Jackson and will act as publisher for the Unreal project created by Imaginati Studios. The latter is a completely separate entity, which just happens to share a large number of letters with Imaginarium. 

Original article: In 2015 Andy Serkis founded a new games studio to sit alongside his Imaginarium VFX house. The somewhat confusingly named Imaginati Studios focuses on games and is working on a new project in partnership with Epic Games. 

This won’t be Serkis’ first foray into the world of Unreal Engine though, as The Imaginarium made use of realtime rendering in UE4 to create the first virtual actor on stage at the Royal Shakespeare Society’s impressive production of The Tempest last year. Serkis has also been involved heavily in games such as Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, in which games he lended his considerable motion capture experience and likeness to characters in the game. 

Other developers took to the stage to show how they’re taking advantage of Unreal Engine 4 in their games, including Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford who showed off the look of the next Borderlands game and how they achieve their newly remade edge outline graphical style. Along with a great Silicon Valley joke.