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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’s visual effects supervisor, John Knoll, took the stage at GDC today to reveal how Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 allowed his team to approach filming the movie in a way they couldn’t previously.

Knoll spoke at length about how Epic’s engine allowed the ILM team to render the beloved, sarcastic droid K-2SO in real time, bypassing the pre-rendering process. As a result, the team was able to see K-2SO on the screen during a specific scene instead of having to implement the rendering and editing after the fact. Knoll explained that achieving final pixels on screen helped with the production of Rogue One — and it marked the first time the studio was able to work with CGI in the moment. The technique was developed by a team at ILM, modifying Unreal Engine 4’s source code.

Knoll was on stage to showcase just how the technology worked and how visual effects editors used it on the film. It can be seen above.

“We are committed to simplifying the integration of Unreal Engine in content creation workflows across animation production, AR/VR and visualization,” says Enterprise GM for Unreal Engine Marc Petit. “Real-time production—with the ability to iterate interactively without render farm delays — is the future of content creation.”

In addition to the Datasmith plugin, a new Alembic-based creation pipeline allows for the real-time creation of animated content which can easily be added to existing production pipelines. These enhancements allow artists to integrate animated mesh transformations alongside skeletal deformations directly in-engine and in real time. The Alembic features will be available in Unreal Engine v4.17 (available now), and the Datasmith plugin is currently available as a private beta.