Find out the details about new features in UE5 and more awesome news from Epic Games
Epic Games has revealed the first look at Unreal Engine 5 and shown off features that are going to be game-changing for the game development workflow. Unreal Engine, known for it’s potential to help make highly photo-realistic games, has provided a stride forward in the right direction with its upcoming Unreal Engine 5. Listed below are some of the feature sets and also some more great news from Epic Games.
Nanite
Games need to be optimized for running in real-time and it’s always a trade-off with quality and smooth performance. It has always been the concern of the developers to produce the best looking games with the most optimized performance and is always a balance between both. For this, a lot of work goes into making the game assets as optimized as possible. This includes intense sessions of retopology to clean up the model to be rendered in real-time as there is a cap on the number of polygons a GPU can handle at a certain time. With Nanite, Unreal Engine 5 proposes to change this all.
Nanite Virtualized Geometry gives artists the freedom to import film quality high poly assets comprising of millions or billions of polygons directly into Unreal Engine 5, including direct Zbrush sculpts or CAD Models, without any loss of performance and it works seamlessly. This is a Game-Changer as this would take 50-80 % of clean-up work off the asset creation time and give artists to concentrate on what is the most important – Art.
“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.” as stated in Unreal Engine Blog.
Lumen
Another optimization used for running the games in real-time is the baking of light maps for lighting a scene that isn’t that dynamic and it creates a constraint for the artist to use light Dynamically. With the advent of Real-Time Raytracing, a lot of realism was added to the games recently. With Lumen, Unreal Engine 5, promises a fully Dynamic Global Illumination that reacts immediately to the environments in runtime which give artists the freedom to provide Dynamic Lighting set-ups for their games. Artists can now see the scene exactly the way they’d look in consoles and also create dynamic scenes as the light reacts instantly to events like a sudden opening of a hole in a cave roof or turning on of a flash-light.
As stated in by Epic Games, “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.”
Other Improvements
There are also great improvements to existing systems like Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering and has been showcased in the demo.
Watch the demo.
Update in Unreal Engine Royalties
Starting now, Game Developers can make games with Unreal Engine for free and royalties are waived off until their gross revenue is $1 Million. These license terms are retroactive from 1 January 2020 which provides an unprecedented advantage over the licensing terms of other engine license models.
Epic Games Online Services.
Epic Games has now provided Online services for Multiplayer games including services like - Friends, matchmaking, lobbies, achievements, leaderboards, and accounts. They are now providing the service they built for Fortnite for free to all the developers with cross-platform support and a simple multiplatform SDK.
With Love From VOiD1 Gaming
**VOiD1 Gaming is not sponsored by any of the above companies. All trademarks appearing above are registered trademarks of the respective companies.**
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