A first look at Unreal Engine 5
One of our goals in this next generation is to achieve photorealism on
par with movie CG and real life, and put it within practical reach of
development teams of all sizes through highly productive tools and
content libraries.
Introducing “Lumen in the Land of Nanite,” a real-time demo running live
on,
NANITE
Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much
geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means
that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions
of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from
ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works.
Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more
polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets;
there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs;
and there is no loss in quality.
LUMEN
Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometers to millimeters. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time savings when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console.
Numerous teams and technologies have come together to enable this leap in quality. To build large scenes with Nanite geometry technology, the team made heavy use of the Quixel Megascans library, which provides film-quality objects up to hundreds of millions of polygons. To support vastly larger and more detailed scenes than previous generations, PlayStation 5 provides a dramatic increase in storage bandwidth.
The demo also showcases existing engine systems such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering. Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021, and in full release late in 2021, supporting next-generation consoles, current-generation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS, and Android.
THIS WILL DEFINITELY CHANGE THE PHASE OF MOVIE & GAME INDUSTRY
