November 11, 2014

Download the UE4 Apollo Demo for Maxwell GPUs

By Dana Cowley

Conspiracy theories surrounding the Apollo 11 lunar landing have been quelled with NVIDIA’s UE4-powered Apollo demo, which just became available for download.

Powered by UE4 and Maxwell, the demo shows how light from the moon’s surface – and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s space suit – illuminated Aldrin, thereby proving the authenticity of photos taken on that historic day.

In the Apollo demo, you can:

  • View the scene with direct and indirect lighting;
  • Toggle on Armstrong to see how his spacesuit affects the play of light;
  • Shift the position of the sun or the camera; and
  • Adjust the camera exposure.

Using VXGI, the Apollo demo lets you reconstruct the way light moved around the Apollo 11 landing site. VXGI – or Voxel Global Illumination – shows the way light bounces from one object to another in real time. To do that, VXGI breaks a scene’s geometry into many thousands of tiny boxes called “voxels,” or 3D pixels.

Those who have the new Maxwell-based GTX 980 and GTX 970 cards are encouraged to check it out.