Shotgun Integration into Unreal Engine

WithCGI productioncontinuing to increase in size and complexity, it has become more important that artist workflows be optimised to get projects done. An artist's time needs to be spent crafting stunning visuals to meet the high demand, so performing manual and repetitive task needs to be reduced where possible.

Epic Games have been working on this and are pushing real-time pipeline development and are pleased to announce with the release of Unreal Engine 4.20 that Shotgun, one of the leading production tracking, reviewing and asset management systems in the industry is now fully integrated, making this the first game engine supporting Shotgun's Toolkit platform, a selection of useful pipeline tools.

Epic Games CTO, Kim Libreri said that "Shotgun is used by lots of major film studios and VFX companies, and integration in-engine is a huge asset for our customers in media and entertainment. You can assign a task in Shotgun and attach it to an Unreal Engine asset so that the engine, content and associated data are all interconnected and speaking to one another, ensuring that artists and supervisors alike are aligned on the latest version of a shot in review". Framestore, Weta Digital and 1000's of other studios will be looking to reap the benefits of this integration.

Manne Ohrstrom who is Autodesk's Technical Lead on the Shotgun Toolkit stated that "Unreal Engine integration is a feature that our clients have been asking about for some time. The real-time workflows that Unreal offers opens up new and extremely interesting opportunities in media production. We are really excited about the Shotgun integration in Unreal 4.20, and look forward to seeing the Shotgun community starting to adopt it".

Here are just a few of the features that are supported with this integration:

Shotgun Panel: Quickly locate project information within Shotgun without leaving the Unreal Engine interface.

Loader: Easily import asset data created by other artists in Unreal Engine and neatly organize it in the Content Browser based on Shotgun information.

Unreal Publisher: Share asset files in Shotgun directly from Unreal Engine and complete renders from Sequencer for instant feedback in Shotgun.

Maya Publisher: Export an asset as FBX data for import in Unreal Engine with the Loader and automatically render a turntable of that asset with Unreal Engine, from Maya, for review in Shotgun.

This new plugin is now available in the latest release of Unreal Engine, 4.20 and be configured in Shotgun Toolkit with ease.