About a year after its initial reveal, Epic Games has given a fresh look at Unreal Engine 5 and the many groundbreaking tools it will bring to game creators. The video is largely aimed at developers and shows the actual UE5 user interface and new technology like Nanite, Lumen, customizable animation systems and open-world streaming solutions, but regular gamers will still want to watch it as Epic shows all of this through a new impressive “practical example project” entitled “Valley of the Ancient.” This is essentially a playable extension of the ‘Lumen in the Land of Nanite’ demo we saw last year as we see hero Echo making his way through an ultra-detailed desert environment, switching between a light and dark world and eventually battles a giant laser shooter boss. Oh, and yes, for the first time ever, we’re seeing a glimpse of all this on Xbox Series X hardware. Watch the full video below.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of the new Unreal Engine 5 feature shown in the new video:
Nanite
Nanite is a virtualized micropolygon geometry system that allows you to create games with huge amounts of geometric detail, eliminating time consuming and tedious work such as baking details on normal maps or writing LODs manually.
Imagine directly importing film-quality source art made up of millions of polygons – everything from ZBrush sculptures to photogrammetry scans – and placing them millions of times, all while maintaining a real-time frame rate and without any noticeable loss of fidelity. Impossible? Not anymore!
Lumen
Next up is Lumen, a fully dynamic global lighting solution. Lumen allows you to create dynamic, believable scenes in which indirect lighting adapts directly to changes in direct lighting or geometry – for example, by changing the angle of the sun with the time of day, turning on a flashlight or opening an outside door.
With Lumen, you no longer have to write UV light maps, wait for light maps to bake or add reflections; you can easily create and edit lamps in the Unreal Editor and see the same final lighting as when the game is running on the console.
Open worlds
We have an ongoing mission to make creating open worlds faster, easier, and more collaborative for teams of all sizes. Today you can try out some of the steps that will get us there.
First, there is a new world partition system that automatically divides the world into a grid and streams the necessary cells when needed. And then there’s a new One File Per Actor system that makes collaboration easier: you and your team members can now work on the same region of the same world at the same time without kicking each other’s toes. Finally, Data Layers allow you to create different variations of the same world – such as daytime and nighttime versions, or specific datasets enabled through gameplay – as layers that exist in the same space.
Animation
Constantly stepping outside of Unreal Engine to create or edit animations is time consuming, painful, and hinders iteration. That’s why in Unreal Engine 5 we’re expanding our animation toolset so you can write incredibly detailed characters in the right context.
Artist-friendly tools such as Control Rig allow you to quickly create rigs and share them with multiple characters; pose them in Sequencer and use the new Pose Browser to save the poses and apply them as assets; and use the new Full-Body IK dissolver to easily create natural movement. Meanwhile, Motion Warping allows you to dynamically adjust a character’s root movement to align with different targets – for example, by jumping walls of different heights – with a single animation.
MetaSounds
Have you ever wished you had the same amount of control and flexibility when writing your audio experiences as when developing your look? With UE5 we are introducing a fundamentally new way to create audio. MetaSounds is a powerful system that provides full control over the generation of audio DSP graphs from sound sources, allowing you to manage all aspects of audio playback to drive the next generation of procedural audio experiences.
MetaSounds is analogous to a fully programmable content and rendering pipeline, adding all the benefits of procedural content creation to audio that the content editor brings to shaders: dynamic data-driven resources, the ability to map game parameters for sound playback, massive workflow improvements, and much more.
Perhaps most excitingly, Epic has announced that anyone can now download a free early access version of Unreal Engine 5 and the Valley of the Ancient demo project (which weighs about 100 GB) via the Epic Games launcher. If you’re really interested in jumping in, you can check out a very long FAQ detailing everything included in the early access version of UE5, here.
What do you think? Impressed with our latest take on Unreal Engine 5?
Check all Gaming News here: Gaming Ideology
