It’s been a year since we saw the Unreal Engine 5 in action for the first time with the incredible “Lumen in the Land of Lanite” demo on PS5 and now, a new showcase has been announced for the 3D creation platform. The event will stream today on Wednesday, May 26, and as of the time of writing, it seems that it will focus on the engine’s development tools. However, our fingers are crossed for another demo.
In the Unreal Engine 5 reveal last year, Epic Games explained that its goal with the new engine is to achieve “photorealism at par with movie CG and real life.” Two core additions called Nanite and Lumen formed key parts of the engine. If you’ve forgotten what their functions are (which is understandable), here’s a breakdown:
- 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.
Unreal Engine also dropped a set of key videos that dive into the engine’s components as you can see above. They also detailed a node-based programmable visual effects system called Niagara which is supposed to give developers access to more complex simulations.
These simulations could be any particles, living or non-living, in the game’s world. For instance, beetles on the ground, through the implementation of Niagara, can be made capable of communicating with each other to presumably avoid collision errors and also enable more realistic movement.
If all this has got you hyped, make sure you check out the Unreal Engine 5 streamable event today, at 10 AM EDT. Click here to save the link. You can also read more about Unreal Engine 5 on their website.
About Unreal Engine
The Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter game Unreal. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of genres of three-dimensional (3D) games and has seen adoption by other industries, most notably the film and television industry. Written in C++, the Unreal Engine features a high degree of portability, supporting a wide range of desktop, mobile, console and virtual reality platforms.
The latest release is Unreal Engine 4, which launched in 2014 under a subscription model. Since 2015, it can be downloaded for free, with its source code available on a GitHub private repository.
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