This is pretty cool to see … watch the second view at the bottom that shows you how they did it. So very cool.
That didn’t look realistic enough though. Why not just render it?
It’s not about looking realistic, it’s about letting people like the director see the approximate composition of shots as they are being filmed.
This isn’t exactly new though, this has been the done thing for years.
It’s cool and all… but for things like this, it will never match the millions/billions of light rays computed by offline renderfarm technologies.
Real lighting is just too much when you need to achieve the fidelity required by a film; most of the time all CGI gonna look real bad…
Sorry for the necro, but I just came across this and I’ve got to point it out… As Ambershee also said, it was a milestone - I think - when Avatar pulled it off properly with their full-mocap setup in 2008, but since then the technique has been applied in lots of ways. The only difference being that it just looks better at this point, but that wouldn’t really be a milestone. That’s just polishing someone else’s idea to make it look better. Still cool, but not as special as they’re claiming for it to be.
For my first post on this forum I just wanna say this is so cool 
I directed/filmed a movie myself last year, got it on Amazon Prime with the help of an IP MGMT group, and I’m looking forward to using this technology when I film my next movie!
I was about to name-drop the talent I’ll be using but that’s definitely bad form.
This is exciting.
What I’m most looking forward to is two actors playing CGI characters who can wear VR headsets and SEE the OTHER CGI CHARACTER to react to in real time! This is gonna be sickkkkk.
<3
Edit: oops, third post. Neeeevermind
We come from an extensive VFX also directing background in both feature films, a few shorts and years of shooting ads, and I can tell you all this is just mostly a show. Pampering further to mostly spoiled hollywoodian directors with no imagination and who want to look “cool” while shooting (yes so many egos out there you wont believe) and producers (who want some publicity) which they got. I would understand on a film like Avatar where James Cameron has to see whats going on as a rough real time pre-viz sequence (they use their own tools here) and they use basic shader setup with some boxes in some places for compositional reasons only, the way it should be, but to try to put the effort to put lights and materials and tracking and animation and additional import/export pipelines and rigging for something like this is just nonsense in reality and a waste of time and money, especially when VFX artists are getting the back end of the stick when it comes to overtimes and Directors/clients still changing their minds countless times regardless if you give them a time machine and the best real time engines to foresee their unplanned shots or not, not to mention their fixed bids in general.
This is just a PR stunt (good for Epic) but in practicality its just a show and the people working at the Mill know it, you can absolutely bet on that.
And regarding UE becoming a render of choice in VFX is just Fantasy and wishful thinking by real time enthusiast and fanboys (sorry that’s exactly how it comes out). Not even Pixar or ILM or Disney considered GPU (let alone real time) when they re-wrote their new engines ground up based solely on CPU as it has always been.
UE belongs in its own category and that is games and maybe some sideshow Archviz or other such visualizations and there is nothing wrong with that.
And IF one day (non real time) GPU rendering get fast enough with all and i mean ALL the features of a CPU in VFX, The Moore’s law will equally apply to CPU’s and software and
you will see the catch up game played for a very long period of time.
It would be such a perfect world if everything was real time but i just can’t stand when some people are so easily impressed and clap and go “Wow” saying the future is here (like they did for VR when it first came out) based on something that is so obviously advertised to receive such a reaction (especially from people outside the field) while in reality it is just another real time car Viz reel for Epic which is OK enough for what it is but misleading in so many ways for those working in the trenches who actually get the real shots out using every other tool except UE.
I think for the small film industry, the unreal engine is a blessing. In our last project, we have saved hours of rendering time. Realism plays a subordinate role. For “B” and “C” clients it is much more important to save time.
We also are testing realtime connections for live studio productions. Motion capture driving with a crane and so on.
UE helps us in many products to get results quickly.
We are very thankfull for this “time saver” tool! 
This is the future! Real-time everything!! 
https://www.herr-der-ringe-film.de/v3/media/galerie/hobbit001/hobbit_17/mocapsmaug.jpg
great, it is our making of! look at the last 3 seconds of our video