Unreal Engine 5 is finally here! Neo's face is super realistically rendered with folds, and the light and shadow details are immersive

Reporting by XinZhiyuan

Editor: Yuan Xie, La Yan, Peach

【New Zhiyuan Introduction】After waiting for 2 years, Unreal Engine 5 can finally be downloaded. Today, Epic Games officially released UE5, and netizens exploded another wave.

Unreal Engine 5 is finally here!

Nearly 2 years after first blowing the public, Epic Games released its next-generation game engine, Unreal Engine 5, which is now publicly available for download.

The updated engine provides developers with many improvements including performance enhancements, UI upgrades, and more, but the most significant change is in the technology designed for more realistic visual effects.

These technologies include Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination solution that generates more realistic lighting environments; Nanite, which creates Nanoite with a lot of geometric detail; and World Partion, which divides parts of the open world, to make it easier for members of the development team to work independently.

With the blessing of these technologies, it is simply a feast for visual food.

What are you waiting for...

Real-time rendering, it's very emotional

Today, Microsoft's The Coalition Studios released a demo video of the new Unreal Engine 5 technology.

The video showcases the effects of using the UE5 engine to render tens of millions of polygons, real-world lighting and reflections on XSX consoles in real time, resulting in a huge improvement in game image detail.

As you can see, the details of light and shadow are visible, comparable to the realism of the physical world!

So, how good is Lumen global illumination processing?

Perhaps the biggest feature of this technology is that it is flexible in scale and responsive.

Scale flexibility refers to the combination of scene construction/detail portrayal. Specifically, scenes rendered in large games are generally wide, but this breadth does not compromise the presentation of details.

From kilometers to millimeters, all lighting details can be realistically portrayed.

In the vast expanse of the environment, where an infinite number of diffuse and specular reflections are fully rendered, Lumen can react immediately to changes in the scene and light.

Designers can use this to design more dynamic scenes and render more details.

For example: the change of light and shade caused by the different angles of sunlight at different times of the day, turning on the flashlight for illumination, or punching a hole in the ceiling to let the light shine in, etc., indirect lighting can be quickly adjusted adaptively.

This technology erases much of the waiting time from traditional techniques, allowing creators to remove light from Unreal Engine, and when the game is running on console, the effect is exactly the same as the lighting designed with Lumen.

After saying Lumen, let's talk about Nanite. In a word, "Lumen is to light up the scene, Nanite is to portray the details."

Nanite depicts countless miniature polygonal geometries, and creators can use this technology to freely create countless geometric details that are visible to the naked eye.

This means that cinematic effects made up of hundreds of millions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine. Whether it's sculpting with ZBrush, photogrammetry scanning, or CAD data, it's fine.

Take the Unreal Engine 5 demo video released in 2020, where there are more than a billion original geometry triangular faces in each frame, and Nanite roughly compresses them into twenty million lossless triangular faces.

Nanite geometry flows and expands in real time, so there are no polygon limits, storage limits, or drawing limits. At the same time, there will be no loss in quality.

A large number of development teams and countless new technologies have come together to advance Unreal Engine development with quality and quantity.

In order to use Nanoite technology to build a grand scene, the research team made extensive use of the Quixel Megascans database, which has a film-and-television product composed of hundreds of millions of polygons.

In order to support larger scenes than before, as well as more detailed portrayals in the scenes, the PS5 also significantly increased their memory size.

What else?

In addition to the two main technologies of global illumination system Lumen and micro-polygon geometry system Nanite, Epic also mentioned other technologies and tools.

New open-world toolset

The new world partitioning system changes the way levels are managed and streamed, allowing teams of all sizes to create open worlds faster, easier, and more collaboratively.

The system automatically divides the world into a grid, streaming only the necessary cells.

With the new One Actor One File (OFPA) system, collaborators can also work in the same area at the same time without any conflict.

With the data layer, you can create different variants of the same world that will exist in the same space as the data layer.

For example, daytime and nighttime versions, or versions with full geometry and versions with broken geometry.

Unreal Engine 5 also supports Large World Coordinates (LWC), which uses double values at the bottom layer, allowing people to create a very large world in which to lay the groundwork without having to reset the base or use other tricks.

Nick Penwarden, vice president of technology development at Epic Games, said that while Unreal Engine 5's biggest advantage is for high-end consoles and high-end PCs, Unreal Engine 5's World Partition tool can break down the giant open world into different parts. This tool will benefit a variety of mobile devices with less computing power.

Built-in character and animation tools

You know, tweaking and iterating on animation to constantly switch dcc software is a time-consuming and inefficient thing.

Unreal Engine 5 now lets developers animate in the creative environment, reuse existing animations, and adjust animations to fit runtime gameplay.

In addition, Unreal Engine 5 has a new set of redirection tools that help developers quickly and easily reuse and enhance existing animations.

With the IK redirector, developers can also transfer animations between characters with different skeletons and proportions.

For example, human animations can be redirected to wolves. IK bindings, on the other hand, also allow you to overlay adjustments on character animations, such as having a character gaze at a target as it moves.

In addition, Unreal Engine 5 enhances the stability, performance, and functional integrity of the path tracer, including support for the Hair Primevalis and Eye Shader models.

Unreal Engine 5 also improves sampling, bidirectional reflection models, light transfer, supported geometry, and more.

Will the metaverse be far away?

All in all, these tools make it easier for users from various developers to make large games with high-fidelity graphics.

Major gaming companies have also announced the adoption of Unreal Engine 5. CD Projekt Red had earlier announced that the company would use Unreal Engine 5 to make the next installment in the Wizarding series, instead of its own engine.

Crystal Dynamics has also now announced that the next game in the Tomb Raider series, which is just starting to be developed, will also be made using Unreal Engine 5.

Dallas Dickinson, general manager of the Tomb Raider series, said of the upcoming game, "Our goal is to push the limits of graphic fidelity and provide fans with a cinematic, high-quality action-adventure experience."

While this is the first time the engine has been widely available to game developers, some of Unreal Engine 5's major achievements have been shown to the public through Epic Games' own products.

In December 2021, Fortnite launched Unreal Engine 5.

At the same time, Epic released a demo short of The Matrix Awakening, showing the characters of Keanu Reeves and Kelly Anne Moss generated by Unreal Engine 5, with graphical details almost indistinguishable from live-action shots.

And the same level of detail for the digital human character will be filled with an open world of larger, higher-quality, lighting effects, and larger landscape renderings created by developers using Unreal Engine 5.

Kim Libreri, Epic's chief technology officer, said, "It's great that we can try the user experience process before other companies do. This is very valuable to our customers because it means they don't have to do it all over again and we don't sell them untested, immature products."

As part of Unreal Engine 5, which is released today, Epic also comes with samples of city scenes from The Matrix Awakening without the protagonist characters for game developers to try out.

Epic's launch bonus also includes a multiplayer shooter called Lyra, built into Unreal Engine 5 and much like Unreal Arena, which the developers call a "hand-in-hand learning sample asset" for game creators.

Outside of gaming, graphics engines like Unreal Engine 5 are also gaining popularity in other industries, especially film and television. For example, the TV series Mandalorian used Unreal Engine to build its virtual scenes.

With tools like Unreal Engine 5 and next-generation gaming hardware, Libreri believes the public will see more of this intersection between the mediums in the future.

In the past, he said, creators would build "components of cinematic quality" that would then have to be scaled down to be used in games. Now the line between film and game is starting to blur, opening the door to possibilities.

Kim Libreri said, "It does mean that whether you're making movies, TV shows, or even enterprise apps, you don't have to think about cross-media boundaries anymore." On the new generation of hardware, it is definitely a game changer. Scenes from the industry's highest-resolution Netflix or Disney streaming shows now have every chance of appearing in the game. As we move into the future, the metaverse will be shown and experienced using Unreal Engine 5."

While gamers are a little unclear about how the new game development tools will affect the quality of the game that ultimately arrives, Unreal Engine 5 was advertised as a killer toolkit for consoles like the PS 5 and Xbox Series X before they were launched.

In mid-2022, when metaverses are mentioned more than any tech phrase, Unreal Engine 5, which is most successful in the details of image rendering in the open world, could lead to a new wave of more impressive metaverse experiences.

In some ways, open-world games can be seen as entry-level stand-ins for the metaverse. Epic Games is really taking advantage of this connection in user impressions, especially the Demo Of Matrix Awakening and the metaverse-like, open city scenes that can be explored.

Resources:

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-5-is-now-available