RE Engine

The Reach for the Moon Engine, abbreviated as RE Engine and commonly nicknamed as the "Resident Evil Engine" by fans is the engine used to create Devil May Cry 5. It was developed by Capcom specifically for the making of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard.

Devil May Cry 5 uses photorealistic graphics thanks to the RE Engine, all models in the game were taken from real actors who were scanned via a 3D photoshoot. The clothing the characters wear in the game were also scanned from real clothing which were made in London and scanned in Serbia, then had the data sent to the development staff in Osaka. Nero's jacket in Devil May Cry 5 costed as much as a small car to make, the jacket was carefully selected so it would reflect well in-game however his accessories were not scanned. The Devil May Cry van took more than an year to make, the developers would even joke at the van feeling like a character due to how much time they spent on it, additionally, the writing on the van is the artist's own handwriting, including the neon sign.

For character expressions, Capcom used the latest facial technology developed by the Serbian company called 3Lateral, the movement in the game uses motion capture and after that's done, the voice actors record their lines based on the existing video, which makes it easier for them to understand the character's emotions. The same was done with the facial motions, they were also recorded separately from the body motion capture, so the developers had to sync everything together, which proved to be much harder than ever according to audio director Kakunoshin Atsumi.

Since the character models are very realistic, Capcom had to take special care of the animations in the game so they don't fall into the "uncanny valley of character movements", the new updated models would look unnatural performing the over-the-top animations, so Capcom had to tweak the animations to make them less "anime-like", because of this, some animations would end up having too much preparatory motions for some movements and again they had to go back and re-do the whole thing until the controls felt responsive.

In addition, the character's faces themselves were planned to be a complete digital double, meaning the character would look exactly like the model it was scanned from. However, Capcom then decided that in order to make the characters look more like their original looks, they needed to change them. This was done after the facial rig was built, so not only did they change the models, but also had to re-do some of the rigging.

Trivia

• The engine's full name is "Reach for the moon", which is referenced by its logo and name, with "RE" taken from the first two letters of the word "reach".
• Jun Takeuchi directed Hideaki Itsuno to use the RE Engine in order for Devil May Cry 5 to scream quality just by looking at it. Takeuchi wanted the game to be relevant for the present and not just rely on its past glory.

Gallery

The real jacket that was scanned to be Nero's new jacket.

ditto.

Director Itsuno wearing the jacket.

Emily Bador was 3D scanned for the character of Nico.

Nero's jacket on his statue at TGS 2018.

Dante's coat on display at TGS 2018.

Reuben Langdon wearing the coat at TGS 2018.

Michiteru Okabe on the RE Engine in Capcom's 2018 Annual Report - "The Heart of Value Creation"

Nero's 3D photoshoot.

Dante's 3D photoshoot.

Devil May Cry 5 - Design Philosophy

Official development video posted on the Devil May Cry YouTube channel.

Volume 249 of the CGWORLD magazine covered the development of Devil May Cry 5.