Here's the First Ever Glittery Rivian R1T, Only Exists in an Unreal Engine Jungle

Shaped like an evolved regular pickup, unlike the Cybertruck monstrosity, the R1T was so well received that in February this year, it was awarded a prize for “most satisfying ownership experience among Premium Battery Electric Vehicles” in the J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Electric Vehicle Experience Ownership Study.

Owning such a truck requires people to pony up at least $73,000, but that doesn’t seem to discourage those who want to own a machine with all the EV perks wrapped in a beautiful truck body.

Speaking of body, R1Ts usually come in LA Silver in their standard form, but Rivian offers a choice of other colors as extras: Glacier White, Rivian Blue, Compass Yellow, Forest Green, Red Canyon, Midnight, El Cap Granite, and Limestone.

But now, after video game giant Epic Game’s presentation at the 2023 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, a new color has joined the lineup. Sadly, it's only available in the virtual realm, but that's enough to get people dreaming about it: glitter opal.

Rivian’s involvement with Epic Games dates back more than a year, after in January 2022, the carmaker announced it would use Epic’s Unreal Engine to power the high-tech screens that make up the instrument cluster, helping them show animations, including 3D visualization of the vehicles. This time though, it was Epic Games who used a simulated R1T to demonstrate the capabilities of the Unreal Engine’s latest version, 5.2.

The company decided to test the limits and show what the new technology is capable of by placing a virtual Rivian electric pickup in the middle of an equally virtual jungle and having it travel the unbeaten tracks there.

The truck is not just a hastily simulated version of the real one, like we get most of the vehicles in Fortnite, but an exact replica created with help from Rivian. Aided by the Unreal Engine, it moves and interacts with the environment around it in incredible ways.

As you can see in the video below, as the truck moves trees bend out of the way, water reacts as it would in real life, the truck’s suspension moves up and down as it would in a real forest, and even the tires of the thing compress as you’d expect them to.

The glitter opal on the R1T is not visible from the start, but only comes into the spotlight as Epic introduces a new framework to replace shading models (two minutes in). Called Substrate, it should allow developers to create, among others, impressive visual effects on surfaces, but also change and modify them at will.

So there you have I, the first-ever glitter opal Rivian R1T. It only exists in Epic Games' computers, for now, but we bet it already got someone’s wheels spinning, and ideas are already being cooked up.