This Is The Kirby Who Lives In Your Nightmares

A popular artist and designer in the modding space has been implementing Nintendo characters into Unreal Engine 4 demos. His latest effort sees the cream puff Kirby running around in a giant open field with photo-realistic deer and real-time, physical based rendering. Check out the video below from CryZENx.

Uproxx points out how creepy Kirby's mouth looks in the demo above. Commenters at the bottom of the article also point out how creepy Kirby's mouth looks in the demo. In the YouTube comment section, many of them also point out how creepy Kirby's mouth looks.

I think it's safe to say that Kirby's mouth looks creepy in that Unreal Engine 4 kite demo.

There's nothing really different about the demo compared to the original, as far as rendering techniques go. For comparison purposes you can check out the original below.

The demo was made to demonstrate the Unreal Engine 4's physical based rendering capabilities. We can see how there is a great amount of detail in even the most miniscule of objects, such as the grass having proper shadow lighting, and how the overcast from the clouds above cast soft shadows over the environment.

The demo also highlights the Unreal Engine 4's capabilities for handling physics-oriented foliage on a mass scale.

But don't think this is something that will run on any low-end PC. Even Kirby just running around, flying around and attempting to suck things up are extremely taxing on the hardware. You can see how the debug code at the top left hand corner of the screen shows the high-performance percentage that the demo is raking up on an octo-core CPU setup running at 4.8Ghz.

However, despite the near photo-realistic environments, Epic has scaled the Unreal Engine 4 to handle optimized LOD scaling in a fantastic way. You'll notice that there's nary a hiccup in the frame-rate as Kirby flies high into the sky and then immediately drops back down to the earth. You can see how the engine scales the rendering of the grass on the fly to keep the performance in check. That's really impressive stuff right there. It's just unfortunate that we don't see games taking advantage of these features for high-end PCs more often.

And while Nintendo has their own visual art-direction for their characters and games, it's cool to see the community take those characters and put them into different environments to see how they would look with a vastly different art-style.