GAME ENGINE DEVELOPER Reacts to UNREAL ENGINE 5 EARLY ACCESS

hey what's up guys my name is achono and i am excited it's been about a year since we had that first glance at unreal engine 5 and here we are with 15 minutes of unreal engine 5 early access and in fact the source code for this is now available this new technology that we've seen has been exciting for a number of different industries for a number of different reasons for me as a game engine developer this has been something that i've been looking forward to seeing ever since we saw that first look and to be honest it's been out for like what time is it it's been out for like 15 hours at this point so i and i still haven't seen any of this because i've just been waiting to finally get the chance to sit down and record this video so for those of you who have no idea what's going on unreal engine is a game engine that i'm sure a lot of people subscribe to my channel have heard of they've been working on unreal engine 5 which is the next kind of big release of their technology and early access is finally here and available to try out and this is a video explaining what that is if you're new to this channel then welcome i am a game engine developer i used to work at ea on various game engines and then i quit to start working on my own game engine which is called hazel and that is what i'm currently doing as well as making educational youtube videos on the topic of programming and game engine development i'll have some interesting videos linked down there if you want more information but anyway without further ado honestly let's just dive in and take a look at this video because i i'm beyond excited hi i'm chance ivey senior technical designer at epic games and i'm galen davis producer and evangelist for quicksilver at epic games this is reminding me of the first video we revealed the first look at what's coming in unreal engine 5 the next generation of our real-time technology and our demo lumen in the land of nanite okay so lumen was the uh basically the the global elimination technology that they had lumen you know lights that make sense and then nanite was i believe the like the mesh kind of decimation whatever they had to reduce the massive amount of polygons that they had kind of in their source assets so like all of the incredibly detailed meshes that they had how they would be able to reduce that complexity so that we could actually render it on screen in real time since then the engine team has been working hard on preparing the tools and technology for creators around the world to get their hands on so that they can explore the new features and provide us with feedback now just a few months ago we assembled a small team of developers to see what they could build using these new features the result is a new practical sample project called valley of the ancient today we're excited to give you the very first hands-on look at some of the new tools and workflows that we use to build it now we've got a lot to get to so let's get started xbox series x cool when setting out to make our demo we wanted to push the boundaries of what's oh there's those shadows are looking so noisy around the edges look at that that is interesting anyway sorry i'm just pointing out what i'm seeing and that caught my eye immediately we wanted to push the boundaries of what's possible with ub5 today while targeting next-gen uh the amount of detail though this is just like quicksilver mega scans assets piled on top of this so much detail i love it here are sequences running in real time on playstation 5 and xbox series x okay playstation 5 as well i like that kind of turbulent displacement around the fire okay welcome to the brand new ui in unreal engine 5. oh well that ui looks nice while a lot of the same features and functionality that you've come to know when you before are still present in the new ui we've added several new systems that put you at the center of the experience for example the content browser can now be accessed like a drawer using hotkeys allowing you to keep a clean workspace while still having access to all the content that you need we can also collapse and restore editor tabs to and from the sidebar maximizing the viewport experience and you're going to see a lot more of the ui as we get further into this presentation that's by the way one thing that i've kind of felt with unreal engine 4 was that like there was just so much going on in the ui and i just wanted to focus on my viewport and it was just kind of difficult so this is nice i like that this is so i can't wait for you to get your hands on it that's actually one of the things that i really want to do with hazel as well is make sure that you can kind of easily snap to a view kind of like tab in photoshop i don't know why i'm comparing to that but that's something that i've been using lately just hitting tab to hide all the tool panels immediately so you can actually focus on kind of what you're actually working on rather than all the various tools because if you know the hotkeys and if you've already got all the meshes in your scene and maybe you just want to fly around see how it looks you don't need any of those tools nearby yeah one of the main features of unreal engine 5 is nanite our virtualized micro polygon geometry system that frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see virtualized geometry supports orders of magnitude more triangles without compromising speed this i'm super interested in additional system of mesh lods handling all detail transitions seamlessly without any additional setup one thing i want to quickly point out is that like the closer we get to a world in which artists can forget about technical limitations i think the further and the better games are gonna start becoming right because for anyone working offline in offline rendering or even even more offline like literally with physical media like a painting it just it becomes so clear how specific game development is and how it's so kind of different than all of those other art disciplines don't get me wrong if you're offline rendering like some kind of feature film and you're you know you don't need to process anything in real time you still very much care about performance you know you don't want frames to take days when they could take hours that's a big difference for a project however what i'm more talking about is you know when someone sits down to do a painting they don't worry about the detail level of stuff in the background like the mountains you know i can't put that many flowers there or i have to make sure that when the camera is far from those flowers they're still kind of there they don't rudely pop in but i can't have too many of them because then then like the performance is gonna suffer especially on like those that kind of lower tier hardware and then like but but i want it to look good from a distance what do i do and how do i gradually blend that kind of transition into being closer to it because now i want more detail all of these problems are so specific to real-time kind of interactive application rendering like what games are essentially and you know these new tools that are enabling us well supposedly this is i haven't not heard that much about this but based on what they're saying you know no laws no level of detail systems meaning we have basically multiple copies of a mesh or other asset i guess well i mean for textures it's called like a mip chain but in the case of meshes having multiple copies of it that we can kind of you know transition between as we get closer and we have to worry about that because we can't afford that kind of level of detail further away from the camera you know having to not worry about that and for artists to just be able to create the content as if it was a painting and then everything just works that is that's gonna that's amazing for the future honestly in other words nanites lets the artist create while the engine does the work yeah exactly visualization the drain you see individual triangles rendered out as different colors here in the viewport and because the geometry is now virtualized you can feel free to place assets like these all throughout your scene to fill up yeah that's incredible like you know me looking at all this stuff in the background just being there and the fact that like if we go back to that triangle visualization those are literally like triangles there they're not like some kind of thing that's painted in or like a texture or whatever they're literally geometry right each one of these little colors i imagine represents a completely unique triangle and a lot of them over there really are like one or two pixels big and the fact that like their nanite system is able to kind of work out the fact that this triangle contributes to this pixel supposedly i'm not sure how it does that but that's like that's incredible geometry is now virtualized like this is the real deal you can place assets like these all throughout your scene to fill out a massive player space using this debug view you can see individual instances represented by different colors from swatch to swatch okay each instance in this environment contains around one to two million triangles providing enough detail for the camera to roam with complete creative freedom not sure whether what they mean like by instance specifically if they mean like a separate kind of mesh or a submesh or if they're talking about like a material kind of group like a primitive or something i'm not 100 sure now they do look like meshes anti-aliasing solution temporal super resolution keeps up with all this new geometric detail to create sharper more stable images than before yeah just looking at this like the anti-aliasing seems i mean like it seems perfect i can't really fault it to be honest um this looks great i haven't really quality really heard of like temporal supers like super resolution so i guess it's some kind of super sampling that they're reducing resolution keeps up with all this and it's temporal so i assume it's like frame to frame more stable images than before with quality approaching true native 4k at the cost of 1080p while highly detailed assets are great on their own high quality lighting that realistically reacts to your scene is what opens the door to more dynamic worlds and immersive gameplay lumen is our fully dynamic real-time global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light change making for more believable experiences there is some direct shadow edges again settings allowing for true physically based setups for photorealistic environments the mega skins library has meticulously calibrated physically based services and objects in the thousands of assets as of today and the assets that we're highlighting that just reminds me of like tatooine or something from like attack at the clones i mean it's like it looks like a movie and that's incredible just how powerful it is to have and just to be clear the reason why like it it's sticking out to me right now the lighting is good don't get me wrong but at this level it's not even that important it's just the detail it's just the actual meshes the actual geometry and the fact that i know that based on what they've shown us it's all real it's all real geometry it's all real super detailed geometry that is really exciting nanite and lumen working in tandem also thanks to the new sky atmosphere system it is incredibly simple to quickly simulate realistic time of day carefully art direct volumetric clouds and make modifications to things like atmospherics sun position and fog and for this example we wanted a fully dynamic scene no light baking and realistic interpolation between the different times of day yep of course when in development having access to high quality content that's easy to use helps you iterate quickly and saves lots of time that's why qixel with quixote now being a part of the epic games family we've made the full megaskans library free and open for all unreal engine users bridge our online browser for megascans assets has historically functioned as a standalone application for quickly exporting assets in bulk directly into the engine albeit separate from unreal today we're happy to announce that bridge is now natively integrated directly into the engine ui yeah that's a good move drag and drop assets directly into your scene for a more intuitive and connected experience and simply logging in with your epic id gives you immediate access to thousands of assets to use for free in your unreal engine projects we are constantly looking to enhance the value of the mega scans library and today we're excited to announce that we're adding a brand new asset type called mega assemblies mega assemblies are the natural next step for us in removing even more barriers for artists in crafting their worlds by combining existing assets from the mega scans library our artists are pre-assembling elements that can be quickly accessed and leveraged to populate your scenes using the moab set let's add an assembly to our scene and just like that we were able to quickly change the composition of this area in our map with you live what is all that like a rubble pulling this area in our map wow with ue5 we are reimagining what collaboration looks like for teams and projects of all sizes a common challenge when collaborating on large worlds is deciding how to structure map content so that everyone on the team can easily work without asset contention while also avoiding painful merge conflicts yeah that that's too real i mean having multiple people work on a single project is just incredibly difficult to manage not just from like a kind of a management point of view but if like the actual project files right unless you end up splitting up the scene into chunks and having different artists work on different areas of the scene which isn't really ideal working on the same scene file is a problem that like the industry has been trying to solve like forever so so any improvement in that space is like pretty much always appreciated easily work without asset contention while also avoiding painful merge conflicts a new system called world partition makes traditional world-building workflows obsolete by changing the way that we think about map files rather than requiring artists to build out map content as a series of streaming levels world partition allows teams to think of a single map as one large world that gets broken down automatically into many smaller streamable cells on a grid these cells can be selectively loaded or unloaded in the editor to save on edit time like minecraft allowing artists to only load up the sections of the map that they need on top of that changes to actors in a world participation interesting contract at the actor level not the map level this one file proactive approach empowers different team members to work on different actors in the same map without having to worry about their changes getting clobbered and emerge or having to revert to get someone else's edits wow one this approach means you could have artists one file per actor that's a lot of files this is interesting because i was having a discussion with like some people in the hazel team recently about about exactly that like about how um maybe we should reduce the amount of files that we create because then that can be harder to manage with version control systems but part of the part of the appeal of not doing that i think and doing something like this is that you you almost move that whole kind of um i guess asset like committing and tracking kind of problem into like another system to a stable system like git or perforce or something like that that you can just kind of you know manage an external tool in a way that's obviously been proven to work for large scale software projects rather than for example you know having unreal engine have to manage all the writing into like serializing into like certain files and large files that contain like all of the actors because that's like your scene file maybe it contains all of the actual worlds they're called an unreal all of the actors inside that world are in that kind of world file and then you know what if someone as an actor then suddenly i have a merge conflict potentially and i have to make sure that when i kind of pull that updated world file i can merge all the actors together so i can still retain both actors having several files is as simple as just oh there's another file on disk now no one cares about that like that just works um and that's kind of an interesting approach as well now this approach means you could have artists lighting set dressing and reworking the landscape simultaneously all within the same virtual space yep that's that's very interesting i might have to take down some notes managing this much content at runtime typically requires a ton of thought about how to stream relevant content in and out to stay inside performance budgets yeah fortunately world partition handles that as well at runtime only the cells in a user-defined radius from our player are loaded and as we move new cells are streamed in while cells no longer needed are replaced by their lower resolution hierarchical level of detail or h-slot version and since all projects have different requirements the cell size and loading radius are fully configurable to match each project's content streaming needs another feature that comes along with world partition is data layers data layers are a way to categorize map assets and collectively enable or disable them when you want to alter the state of the world working in data layers a separate group of artists was able to assemble the imagination with more interactive elements for our demo interesting at runtime we can swap between these two modes streaming thousands of actors in and out and enter into the dark world let's see this in action as we go back to chance thanks galen many runtime and interactive frameworks in unreal engine are giving significant updates in ue5 one thing we've added for animation is an experimental new full body ik solver which is designed to give you better results with less work here you can see it in action so invest kinematics just refers to being able to position like skeletal bones correctly depending of course what your definition of correct is but essentially feet that move on the ground you know should react to the ground itself if we have a little hill on the ground we want like the knees to be bent and that's kind of what an inverse kinematic solver does it figures out where to actually place bones depending on like the surrounding obstacles or well it's not really it doesn't have to be specifically with like ground and walking and other things it could be like different constraints that you place on the bones that specify that you know my hand has to be here so therefore what angle is my elbow bent at and where is like the rest of my body and all of those kind of things as a rig for our player character echo corrects itself to adjust for variations on the ground below her yeah so that's all the terrain all the rocks stuff like that around 10 times faster than before to build and maintain more and that's actually also something that we saw i think in the uh previous kind of uh demo i guess the first look a year ago was i think she was like she was grabbing like walls and stuff that were around her so that's also an example of this system we've also added a new framework called game feature plugins that will allow you to build and ship game content in a more modular way with game feature plugins numerous core gameplay features can be built in parallel with better encapsulation and finer content organization game feature plugins allow developers to add activation instructions to extend this new ui looks great register new input actions for players and interface with other frameworks such as animation when we shift it into the dark world we also activated a new game feature to give echo a brand new attack ability all of the assets and logic needed for the ability including new animations input controls blueprint code vfx and audio are contained inside this plugin and core game classes have no idea that these assets exist until we activate it we've also added a feature called animation motion warping which allows you to manipulate root motion animations to adapt them to the world echo's fault animation was authored to the specific dimensions of this rubble leveraging motion warping we were able to add notify states in the vault animation asset that can react to transform data passed in via blueprints this allowed us to reuse the same animation to vault over other assets of different dimensions like these pieces of debris by sending information about their size into the motion warping system before triggering the vaulting animation a blueprint script determines her rotation how high up she jumps how far she needs to move to get to the other side and where her feet should land yeah motion warping then adapts the root motion of the vault animation to match this data also for the rift interact enemy i will point out it definitely does look a little bit unnatural like you can kind of see that slide up that's clearly more excessive because i assume it's not going to go in and start modifying like you know how much weight she's putting into that jump or anything but i guess as a as like a quick fix potentially it would probably work pretty well we used motion warping to place echo in the perfect position in order to ensure her hand would always touch the rift so on the topic of animation unreal engine 5 also includes our in editor rigging tool control rig meet the ancient a film quality creature imagined and built by our friends at the aaron's home company we partnered with aaron sims and his group of talented artists to concept the dark world and to bring it to life through an enormous mythical adversary now every single animation for the ancient was authored wholly in engine by the aaron sims creative team using control rig and sequencer our linear cinematic animation tool also just to push the boundaries a bit they even built it out of a collection of nanite meshes totaling over 50 million triangles attached directly to the skeleton control rig was designed to keep artists close to their creations without having to bounce back and forth between software packages allowing them to quickly iterate all inside unreal while imagining the battle between echo and the ancient we wanted to give the creature a heavy laser attack that echo would have to avoid we needed it to track echo's location in the arena and fire a slow sweeping blast towards her taking advantage of the full body ik solver mentioned earlier we were able to influence the direction and distance the ancient reaches out during the firing animation based on where echo is in the scene let's see the results here is what the base firing animation looks like and here it is again with the full body ik post process layers enabled and our info about echo passed into control rig with full body ik and control rig yeah so you can see it's kind of determining where it can actually place the bones obviously they can't go infinitely far because his arm's not infinitely long but essentially it's just solving you know for that particular point what do all of the other joints are along his arm and potentially his body look like designers and artists can now author fully dynamic animations that react to gameplay without having to build complex animation state machines composed of numerous animation assets yeah i mean that's good you know the more dynamic you have it the more the better it's going to look anyway um you know in a lot of cases it is better to just try and author assets you know yourself because certain things just it's hard to get them to look good dynamically but for a lot of other things having them be dynamic so they're going to respond to the world and respond to whatever the player is doing respond to whatever the terrain is you know stuff like that that's important so don't get me wrong i'm not saying like that you know moving into like a more dynamic state is better in general for pretty much every area of a game engine another really good example is ai so the way that i see kind of dynamic ai is essentially what machine learning is right instead of actually you know programming ai to do if you know if this do that or state machines or whatever you're actually giving it the opportunity to learn and thus it can actually adjust the behavior based on what the player what that specific player might be doing and that's really powerful for animation it's the same for lighting you know being able to dynamically have scenes change because the player is shooting out some kind of i don't know some kind of like roof or ceiling in a cave that's going to allow light to go in and then calculating the global elimination there that kind of stuff you know that just means that the world feels way more alive and less static because every kind of player experience is in fact going to be unique even though it might seem similar to like other players experiences you know you know in this case she ran to different points of the map than someone else would and therefore that experience is different and i think that's that's one of the coolest things that exists in video games and why why they are separate from like movies and other kind of you know static types of media i guess because you define the experience you as the player define the experience and having a kind of dynamic world with all of this kind of dynamics technology that stuff like really is the future and it's really exciting to see stuff like this in unreal engine 5 we've completely overhauled the audio engine centered around metasounds a new asset type used for every sound effect in our demo metasounds bring the power and flexibility found in material editors to audio creation providing fine control that's good that's good with full audio synthesis capabilities and a rich audio function library metasounds give unprecedented control over sound effects and runtime applications using mouse sounds we built the ancient laser attack out of a combination of sound samples and synthesized audio let's briefly break down how it was set up using the stereo mixer let's isolate and play just the synthesized charge sound this effect is made by using a handful of sound wave generators and multiple modulation widgets now let's mix back in our sound samples to hear the final result again [Music] all right let's take down the engine yeah better audio tools are always good i will say that smoke effect just doesn't really seem like it suits the scene at all i'm not even sure what it is because it does seem like it's lit and everything maybe it's just the fact that it looks like just a video of like some smoke um that's just been composited in but that's probably like the worst looking thing in this shot to be honest not that it's like particularly bad or anything don't get me wrong everything here looks amazing but you know i'm just saying i feel like it's almost maybe the way that it's blending between the layers or something like that is weird now everything we've been showing you in today's demo focuses on some of the new features in ue5 but many of your favorite ue4 features such as niagara particles and visual effects chaos physics blueprint visual scripting and more have also received numerous updates in unreal engine 5. plus all your ue4 projects can be upgraded to ue5 so you won't have to worry about forward compatibility for what you're working on now here at epic we are passionate about building great tools and new technology and a big part of our excitement is being able to bring you the developer community on the journey with us so today we're making an early access build of unreal engine 5 freely available on the epic games launcher and the unreal engine github so you can explore and test out these tools yourself to get an early look at what's coming later in the full release of ue 5.0 also we're releasing the project source for value of the ancient so you can check out how we use these features to build everything you've seen in today's demonstration we've got a series of deep dive conversations i'm gonna have to take a look at topics lined up for inside unreal good our official weekly live stream where you can hear from the engine dev team and ask yeah more questions yeah no that would be good still the early days of ue5 and you can expect more news and features to be announced as we move closer to a production ready release targeting early 2022. follow the still quite a while away and feel free to download the early access release of unreal engine 5 and the value of the ancient project today thanks everyone for watching and welcome to early access okay so i mean my biggest thing at the moment is i want to i want to see those deep dive kind of conversations i really am interested in more of the technical details behind this this stuff is cool it's not any um i don't know it's not any different potentially than what we've seen like a year ago so this was kind of i guess what i was expecting i can't say i'm blown away with some other new feature it is really cool seeing it kind of more usable and the fact that this is clearly something that they're kind of moving towards a production ready environment even even if that does take another like half year or so um i'm really i'm not so much interested in the global elimination as much i have some theories as to how they're doing that and i don't think that's that groundbreaking well to me at least personally but i am very excited about this nanite stuff being able to handle that massive amount of data um and then kind of i guess determine what's on the screen and not having to worry about laws and stuff i think that's that's really like the most powerful tool that that is going to come out of this so yeah i can't wait to see more of the technical kind of information on that in fact i think the source code is like already available so maybe i'll have a good read this evening anyway thank you guys for watching don't forget to hit the like button if you did enjoy the video let me know what your thoughts were about all of this if there's something that you want me to talk about or maybe take a look at then also leave a comment below don't forget that i do have a bunch of various kind of game engines c plus plus programming related content on this channel so feel free to subscribe if you're not already and check some of that out as well as follow the development of my game engine if that's something that you are interested in thank you guys for watching i'll see you next time goodbye [Music] you

Channel: The Cherno

Views: 218,787

Rating: 4.8629775 out of 5

Keywords: cherno, ue5, unreal engine v, unreal engine 5, epic, unreal engine, reaction, demo, game engine, game engine dev, rendering, graphics, amazing, early access, unreal engine early access, unreal engine 5 early access

Id: nyZnRxvSJrY

Length: 30min 6sec (1806 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021