10 Hidden Unreal Engine 5 Features you NEED to Know About

so unreal engine 5 is finally here and with its release comes a whole boatload of new and exciting cutting-edge features but the sheer amount of new tech is pretty overwhelming i'll admit now i was super curious about some of the new features so i decided to filter through documentation presentations and articles to dig out all of the best and most exciting bits of unreal engine 5 and i'm very happy to share my findings with you in this video and show you all the wonderful new things you can do with this extremely powerful engine for free now if that interests you and you really want to learn unreal engine in depth feel free to check out my environment art course where we teach you everything you need to know about creating beautiful environments in unreal engine i'll leave a link in the description so let's talk about prototyping first normally when you start to create a scene or a level artists are limited to using simple primitive shapes such as cubes spheres and cylinders to block out your scene dragging all of these shapes into a scene and arranging them around can be annoying at best and if you want more complex geometry and shapes you'd normally have to import meshes from your 3d modeling software like blender or maya this is a technique i like to call a pain in the ass fortunately for us unreal engine 5 has a really awesome feature called cube grid that allows you to easily create block out meshes it's super fast and very very simple to use just press shift 5 to access the modeling function click on cube mesh and then just click and drag to select the area you want to create a mesh for and then use q or e keys to raise or lower the mesh you can also use ctrl and mouse drag to raise things up and down as well and it gets better than that to create ramps and angles just highlight the area you want to use and then press z to pick the corners you want to manipulate and then again you can use the q and e keys to change the angle of the ramp super simple stuff that allows you to create much more complex geometry in a very short amount of time if you guys want a tutorial let me know in the comments and speaking of modeling tools did you know that you can sculpt an unreal engine i was pretty shocked to find this too press shift 5 to get back into modeling mode and then select v-sculpt or d-sculpt with the mesh you want to sculpt selected and then you can adjust your brush size and just go to work now this feature isn't exactly going to replace a zbrush in your workflow anytime soon but it's a great way to adjust primitives and shapes you just use in your block out to have a more natural or organic shape for instance let's say you wanted to get a quick block out of a tree trunk or a rock a more organic shape instead of having to hop into it 3d modeling software model it and then import it back in unreal engine you can just quickly open up unreal engine sculpting tool and quickly create it on the spot oh okay here's a really cool feature most people don't really seem to be talking about when you create a base landscape in unreal engine normally you would paint the landscape and add the details yourself but there's an easier way now i mean come on guys it's 20 22. just press shift 2 to access landscape mode and create a basic landscape instead of using the sculpting tool like you would normally do click on blueprint brush and select custom brush landmass and you can now create shapes using splines by moving and extending the spline you're actually creating new landmasses and shapes in a non-destructive manner instead of painting your landscape with the sculpting tools the coolest thing about this feature is how you can add noise and distortion to your shapes to create a much more natural look without having to use anything like height maps in the third party software most people already know about quixil's integration into unreal engine but i wanted to take a second just to talk about how easy it is to implement now let's download a simple material by selecting it pressing download and the add button from here we can just drag and drop our new material onto any surface we want you can do the same thing for meshes too just drag and drop anything you want into your scene the the options are literally limitless there's so much stuff on here by the way one of the big features you've probably heard about is nanite and all of these meshes are nanite meshes meaning they all have millieds of polygons which means a lot of detail in your scenes now if you have a lower end computer or rig worry not because unreal engine 5 actually automatically loads in lower poly count meshes if it detects older hardware the future is here you may have noticed that my sky and atmosphere setup is pretty impressive right i can control the sun dynamically with just one button and i even have dynamic volumetric clouds that react to the sun and lighting in real time you're probably thinking this took me hours to sign up but in reality it took me about five seconds to make let me show you how to do it unreal engine 5 has streamlined their sky atmosphere system and it's super simple to add into your own project just go to window environment light mixer and select everything except atmospheric light 1 and you're literally done you can now control the angle of the sun by holding ctrl l and dragging around your mouse and that's literally it it's just an awesome feature to have that makes everyone's life just a little bit easier thanks unreal if you've messed around with unreal engine 5 already you have probably already noticed that the quality of lighting is extremely realistic this is thanks to a new powerful feature called lumen the default global illumination and reflection system now available in unreal engine 5 by default to show you what i'm talking about let's create a small room with a few holes in it using cube grid to demonstrate lumen's effectiveness whenever i open up a new hole in the mesh of the room the room is dynamically filled with bounce light just like in real life upping the volumetric fog density really allows you to see this effect in full detail and create some really cool beams of light in your scenes lumen also affects emissive materials on meshes and vfx particles as well meaning you'll always have accurate indirect lighting no matter what you put in your scene no baking required take a look at this small emissive sphere i created and watch what happens as i move it around the room you can see how its emissive material is affecting the lighting and creating bounce lighting all over the scene i honestly i can't believe the software is free very very cool stuff the interaction of lumen has also created really interesting opportunities for 3d artists and developers with this pretty simple node setup we can create localized volumetric fog that we can place anywhere in our scene that interacts with lumen's global illumination all we have to do is create this simple material which i'll provide a download for drag it onto a mesh and you've got volumetric fog you can put anywhere you want and use in any of your projects yes if you really want you can even use cube grid as well to create simple meshes for the fog although i feel like there's probably better ways to do that volumetrics and atmosphere are really really important for adding depth and mood to your scenes so having a quick and easy way to add fog in the middle of a road or at a cutscene in your game will do wonders for your viewers immersion and it is all in real time again no baking required unreal engine has always had very powerful particle simulation features whether using cascade or the more modern niagara but when it comes to fluid stimulations like water or even smoke normally we would have to go into a third-party software like houdini to get the job done properly but that is beginning to change built on top of niagara unreal engine 5 ships with built-in fluid simulation functionality normally to get to this level of detail we'd have to create a flip book from houdini or another simulation software to help save memory but with unreal engine 5 you can create fluid simulations for smoke water or whatever else you can think of on the fly this has opened up a whole world of possibilities especially for vfx artists and the cool thing is you can also bake these simulations down into textures to save even more resources unreal engine 5 ships with a bunch of really cool samples for you to check out for yourself just make sure you enable fluids in the plug-in settings create a new niagara system from the templates and just drag it into your scene and then you can go ahead you know stare at four hours that's what i did i will definitely be doing tutorials about these in the near future after i wrap my head around the pipeline properly so please keep an eye out for those it's gonna be fun now just like the lighting and atmosphere setup the next one i'm going to show you is pretty complicated so please bear with me as i set this up okay we're done now hidden in the plugins unreal engine 5 ships with an amazing automatic water body system which will allow you to just simply drag and drop bodies of water right into your scene and they're ready to go after enabling the plug-in all you have to do is type in water up in the option up there and then you get several options of bodies of water to use just grab the ocean and drag it into your scene and you've got a beautiful cutting edge body of water ready to go all of this water comes with a ton of features you can dig into as well so mess around with the settings read the documentation and see what you can come up with all of these amazing cutting edge features are available for completely free and even beginner artists can use them to create incredible environments games and vfx so instead of creating your 400th donut in blender i would highly recommend giving unreal engine 5 a try so yeah unreal engine 5 is pretty cool

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 454,256

Keywords: unreal engine, epic games, game engine, unreal engine 5, game dev, game development, unreal engine 5 graphics, unreal engine 5 demos, unreal engine 5 superman, unreal engine 5 spiderman, unreal engine 5 tutorial

Id: tgOqgZIpZpE

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Mon May 02 2022