Unreal Engine 5 is released: New Tomb Raider & Wizards, next-generation real-time rendering

Reports from the Heart of the Machine

Editors: Du Wei, Chen Ping

The goal of Unreal Engine 5 is to "empower teams of all sizes to push the boundaries of vision and interaction and unleash their limits."

On April 5, during the Unreal Engine State Of Unreal live event, Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games, announced that Unreal Engine 5 is officially available for download. Unreal Engine 5 brings greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility to help game developers create the next generation of real-time 3D content and experiences.

At the event, game developer Crystal Dynamics said that a sequel to Tomb Raider using Unreal 5 is in development, and developer CD Projekt RED also announced that it will use Unreal 5 to create a sequel to The Witcher.

At that time, the Unreal Engine development team released the demo video "Lumen in the Land of Nanite", which ran in real time on the PlayStation5, and showcased two core technologies of Unreal Engine 5: Lumen, a full-motion global illumination solution that does not require specialized ray-tracing hardware to solve the problem of truly virtualized geometry, Nanite technology that creates rich geometric details, and reacts in real time to changes in scenes and lighting.

Characters from previous demo videos.

Unreal Engine 5 has since introduced Early Access and Preview. With the arrival of the official release, the new features and workflow of Unreal Engine 5 have been produced in game development for Fortnite and The Matrix Awakening: Unreal Engine 5 Experience demos. However, some important new features such as Lumen and Nanite have not yet been validated in non-gaming workflows, which will be a goal to be achieved in future releases.

Currently, all creators can still use UE 4.27 supported workflows. They can also benefit from other features in Unreal Engine 5, including the following:

Redesigned Unreal Editor

More powerful performance

Artist-friendly animation tools

Richer mesh creation and editing toolset

Improved path tracing

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Downloading Unreal Engine 5 releases has certain requirements for your computer system, as follows:

Windows 10 64-bit, quad-core Intel or AMD 2.5 GHz or higher processor, 8 GB ram

macOS Big Sur, quad-core Intel or AMD 2.5 GHz or higher processor, 8 GB of memory

Linux Ubuntu 18.04, quad-core Intel or AMD 2.5 GHz or higher processor, 32 GB ram

Download address: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/download

Unreal Engine 5 is used in different scenes of movies and games

While this is the first time the engine is intended for game developers, some major UE5 projects have already been released to the public through Epic Games. The Unreal Engine 5 experience went live last December, set in the Warner Bros. movie The Matrix, and directed by Lana Lee. Wachowski served as writer and director, Keanu Wachowski Reeves and Kerry-Ann · Moss again played Neo and Trinity, and played his own role in the film in the virtual world.

After watching this demo, players have said that Unreal 5 is too powerful to see any difference from a live-action movie.

Now, players are finally waiting for Unreal Engine 5 to be released to the world, not just in the demo to preview.

"I think we're going to see something really great," said Epic CTO Kim Libreri.

In addition, Epic released a multiplayer shooter called Lyra, which is built into UE5 and looks a lot like an Unreal Tournament first-person shooter, with a simple pair of blue and red avatars pitted against each other in the arena. But beyond the technology demonstrations, Lyra aims to be a starting point for developers.

In addition to gaming, engines like Unreal are also gaining popularity in other applications, especially movies and television. For example, the Mandalorian uses an illusory virtual scene. With tools like UE5 and next-generation gaming hardware, we believe we'll see more of this crossover between mediums.

What are the features of UE5

Next-generation real-time rendering: Unreal Engine 5 introduces a series of groundbreaking features that render real-time scenes in stunning high-fidelity detail.

The first is Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination solution that reacts in real time to scene and lighting changes without the need for specialized ray tracing hardware. According to the Unreal Engine team, the system is capable of rendering indirect specular reflections and diffuse reflections that bounce infinitely in large, detailed scenes, as small as millimeters and as large as kilometers, and Lumen can handle them. Artists and designers can use Lumen to create more dynamic scenes, such as changing the angle of lighting during the day, turning on a flashlight, or making a hole in the ceiling, and the system adjusts the indirect lighting as appropriate. The solution saves artists a lot of time by waiting for lightmap baking to be done or editing lightmap UVs because they moved a light source in the Unreal Editor. The lighting effect will also be exactly the same as when running the game on the console.

Since the launch of Unreal Engine 5 Early Access, Lumen has made the following improvements (including but not limited to):

A full hardware ray-tracing pipeline is provided for Lumen global illumination and reflections

Far Field Hardware Ray Tracing supports a large field of view

Feedback-driven Surface Cache, based on feedback, provides higher quality reflections

Use Lumen visual view mode to debug content

Improved Reflections denoiser, especially for glossy reflections and behind moving objects

Translucency Final Gather improves global illumination quality for translucency and volumetric fog

Terrain support

Lumen settings are provided in the user interface to make quality/performance trade-offs

Supports subsurface/double-sided vegetation shading models

Unreal Engine 5's new virtualized micropoon geometry system, Nanite, is no slouch. Nanite virtual micropolymer geometry allows artists to create every geometric detail visible to the human eye. Its presence means that cinematic art consisting of hundreds of millions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—whether it's sculptures from Zbrush or CAD data scanned with photogrammetry. Nanite geometry can be streamed and scaled in real time, so there's no need to think about polygon quantity budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw times budgets, and there's no need to bake details to normal maps or manually edit LODs, and there's no loss of picture quality.

Since the launch of Unreal Engine 5 Early Access, Nanite has made the following improvements (including but not limited to):

Optimized control to reduce the footprint of Nanite meshes on disk;

Improved compression methods to reduce the disk footprint of the same quality Nanite mesh by approximately 20%;

Nanite meshes are reflected in support for regular view modes such as Wireframe and Shader Complexity Optimization;

Improved Nanite meshes to support the generation of lightmaps without lightmap UV seam artifacts.

Stunning Pixels: The Path Tracer was introduced in Unreal Engine 4.27, a DXR-accelerated, physically accurate, progressive rendering mode with no additional setup. When creating still images or linear content, it allows you to produce images of comparable quality to offline rendering in a fraction of the time with Unreal Engine.

Unreal Engine 5 enhances the stability, performance, and functional integrity of the path tracer so that characters' hair, eyes, light reflections, and more look more realistic.

Built-in character and animation tools: Previously, in order to adjust and iterate on animations, developers needed to constantly switch DCC software, which was inefficient. In Unreal Engine 5, there's no need to go through the hassle of animating in the author environment, reusing existing animations, and tweaking the animations to fit the runtime game.

The Unreal Engine team has introduced a new set of powerful tools that allow artists to create animations directly in Unreal Engine, including the ability to quickly and easily create rigs with enhanced control rigs that you can use for production, share that rig across multiple characters, and then animate them in Sequencer, where you can save and apply poses using the latest pose browser, and then use the Tween tool to apply blended keyframes with front and back proximity points.

Unreal Engine 5 avoids unnecessary effort for developers: it has a new set of redirect tools that help you quickly and easily reuse and enhance existing animations. With the IK Redirector, you can transfer animation between characters with different skeletons and proportions, for example, you can even redirect human animations to wolves.

These are just some of the features of Unreal Engine 5, so for more information, please refer to: https://www.unrealengine.com/zh-CN/blog/unreal-engine-5-is-now-available