New Features Coming To Unreal Engine 5 in 2024

2024 is going to be a big year for Unreal Engine 5 epic games has released their road map for next year and in this video I will cover what I think are the most important new features one of them being substrate which is a brand new way to render services that will change the way we create materials since Unreal Engine 4 materials have been rendered through a process called physically based rendering or PBR for shorts the majority of materials you see in video games and movies are using PBR a simple PBR material is usually made up of four different textures a color texture which defines what color the object should be a refence texture which is how rough or shiny the material is a metallic texture which defines what parts of the object are metallic and what parts are not and a normal map which artificially adds fake Shadows to give the appearance of the object has more detail than it actually does together with these four textures you can represent the majority of materials from rocks to traffic cones and all the way up to large buildings and cities all of their materials are defined by those textures if you have the textures creating a PBR material is easy you just drag the textures into the material graph and then hook up color to base color metallic to metallic roughness to roughness and normal to normal and just like that we have a finished material ready to be used it is the same process for other programs like blender they're all using PBR textures to create materials but Unreal Engine 4's material system has its problems specifically when we blend between two different materials it might not look like it but this object is blending between two materials we're blending between a dirt material up here and a metallic material down here and they're being combined with this node that is how we currently combine materials and sometimes like right here it looks terrible that's because unreal thinks this is one material it doesn't know that these are two different materials that should be calculated separately the reason why this transition is bad is because we're transitioning between a metallic material and a non-metallic material whenever we combine metallic with non-metallic materials we get bad transitions here is the same material in substrate it is a game changer because it allows materials in a single graph to render separately from each other materials now blend realistically here's the old material and here's the brand new substrate material it looks a lot better the highlights are noticeable and the colors are no longer washed out it is the next generation of material rendering substrate is still PBR but it gives us access to more options previously not available to us we now have more control over our materials than ever before because of this new layering system not only can we transition between two different materials realistically we can also add materials on top of each other here are two different materials layered on top of each other at the bottom we have a cliff material and then above that is an ice material now we can layer the ice on top of the cliff and we get both materials combined the layers are rendering separately from each other with their own specular Reflections and shadows this was impossible before substrates substrate also improves glass rendering is now possible to get frosted glass it was hard to get a material like this before substrate now the glass is real and we can control how frosted it is the downside is that substrate is more complicated because we get so many more options to customize the material luckily for us we still have access to use traditional PBR textures with the u4 default shading node here we get back access to our texture Maps so the complexities of substrate are optional substrate will most likely release in 2024 and replace unreal's old material system when it does you will learn more about it on the channel another big feature is next Generation landscapes in the newest version of unreal UEI 5.3 Landscapes now support n displacement this gives us the ability to get small height detail onto the landscape it takes our Landscapes from looking like this to this a lot of the detail that used to be handled by objects can now be built into the landscape ape if you're an unreal developer I release this landscape material with nanite displacement you can check it out on the channel but Landscapes still have a long way to go and is one of the oldest parts of the engine the biggest limitation is that it is not 3D of course Landscapes are in a 3D world but they're Limited in the Z Direction they can only go up or down it is impossible to build horizontal caves and crevices into the landscape whenever you see caves in unreal like this one the cave isn't a part of the landscape is a collection of meshes faking being part of the landscape if I hide the landscape and the trees you'll see that the cave isn't a part of the landscape instead is a bunch of static meshes I slam together to make a cave and then if I hide everything but the landscape you'll notice in the landscape that I cut a hole directly in it which is where my static meshes go to fake a cave this is a problem because in real life Landscapes are 3D nature can give us unique shapes like caves or crevices that are impossible to create just with unreal's Landscapes we have to use objects to fake them amazing tools for unreal like the voxo plugin allow us to create 3D Landscapes using the voxo plugin we can dig holes into the ground or create arches dynamically epic gam says they are working on making Landscapes 3D we are most likely going to see a tool similar to voxo plugin built directly into the engine which will allow for more advanced Landscapes the second biggest feature besides substrate is procedural content generation which will continue to be updated and improved procedural content generation or p PCG for short is a new way to quickly create environments with PCG we are able to set rules to tell unreal how to use random generation to scatter objects it is very similar to blender's Geometry nodes or programs like Houdini but built into the engine the most popular examples of procedural generation is Minecraft and no man's Sky the worlds are not handcrafted each one is randomly generated from a series of rules created by the developers this environment you're looking at was generated entirely in PCG I did not hand place any of these assets they're all procedurally placed based off of the algorithms I created and what's really unique about this is that the way that I set it up I'm able to very quickly change the entire environment so let's say I don't like a forest maybe I want a snowy environment then I can just flip a switch and immediately the entire world will change or I can select a desert and then we get an oasis like biome just like that we're able completely change my environment because of the way that I set up the PCG and if I switch it back to the forest you can always change specific values like if I want more trees then I can bring this up to 0.8 and now we have a really dense environment PCG is an experimental tool so there are some issues for example let's say I want to put a building right here and this tree is in the way there's no way for me to individually select this tree without selecting the entire PCG as a whole I'm unable to move it or delete it unless I turn the PCG into a stamp and you can do that by scrolling all the way down here selecting PCG and then selecting clear PCG link the downside is that once we do this now this environment is no longer a PCG so I can't make any more changes I can't switch to biome or change the density of certain objects I'm stuck with this environment that I'm in it's a destructive workflow PCGS will soon get a feature similar to the foliage select tool for example whenever I'm painting down objects if I don't like the placement of a specific asset then I can come up here and press the select button and now I can select any individual asset that was painted with the folage tool and I can move around scale it rotate it or I can even delete it if I don't want it PCG will get this level customization so we get the exact environments that we want all also if you have ever tried to use PCG before it could be very complicated and requires a lot of programming in 2024 a lot of new nodes and features are being added to PCG to make this process a lot simpler so everyone can use it as PCG graphs become easier to use we will see the community of procedural tools grow to something like blender's geometry nodes geometry nodes are a good example of the possibilities of procedural generation there's a thriving community of tools made using it everything from trees to entire buildings can be generated procedurally using geometry nodes we will see similar tools develop around unreal's PCGS soon we will be able to generate entire open worlds procedurally without manually placing each asset we are also going to get more AI features in Unreal Engine 5.3 epic games added neural networks directly into the engine this means that we can use machine learning in unreal they plan on adding more features in 2024 that use machine learning neural networks are the backbones of AI all the major AI tools like chat BT and stable diffusion use neural networks without it these AI companies wouldn't be possible this is a big deal because epic games has just added a neural network engine directly into unreal this means that we could train AIS in unreal without having to rely on servers machine learning is already being used to improve metahumans one of the coolest new features to introduce is metahuman animator which is heavily using machine learning it allows us to capture facial movement from our phone it takes the video and depth data and creates a 3D replica of our face to map our facial movements onto we can take this motion and apply to other metahumans another feature not possible without neuron networks is the machine learning deformer some of the hardest simulations we can render are muscle simulations using machine learning we can now train our characters on a deoration with flesh whenever we pose or animate the character the AI will guess how the muscles would deform the model it is like there's a layer of muscle below the skin without all the costly calculations allowing us to get muscle deformation in real time this is just the beginning at the unreal convention epic revealed their plans for more features to leverage AI a cool feature is automatic asset labeling which will make finding the right asset in the content browser a lot easier the most practical feature is a machine learning based Den noiser past tracing is the most accurate way to get Global illumination but obviously it is not real time we have to wait for the power Tracer to render a clear image a machine learning based en noiser would fix this by predicting what the pixels will look like before it is finished rendering and finally unreal will get a massive performance boost in 2024 because it is becoming a multi-threaded engine your CPU is a powerful piece of hardware and one of the reasons why is multi-threading it allows us to use different cores in your CPU at the same time as each other so one core of your CPU can can make one calculation while another core is making a separate calculation at the same time right now unreal is only using two threads so you will barely notice the difference between a 16 core CPU and an 8 Core 1 a lot of modern games like cyberpunk use all your cores to render the fastest possible in the next version of unreal UI 5.4 we are getting multi-threaded rendering this means for everyone with powerful CPUs with a lot of cores we're going to see a massive Improvement in frame rate cyberpunk benefits heavily from multi-threading there is a 50% increase in frames per second when switching from four cores to 16 we can expect similar gains in unreal all this will make Unreal Engine 5 run a lot better than Unreal Engine 4 these are the features we are getting next year that I think are the most important you can check out the unrealed row map to see a complete list of upcoming features and if you want to start creating in ue5 I have an entire course here on YouTube that goes over the essentials to learn on real you can check it out Link in the description

Channel: Unreal Sensei

Views: 256,487

Keywords: Unreal Engine 5, UE5, Lumen, Nanite, Foliage, Landscapes, Epic Games, Unreal, Engine, Tutorial, 3D, 3D Game, Game, Development, landscape, landscapes, UE5.4, Unreal Engine 5.4

Id: CZtoCMm910c

Length: 12min 3sec (723 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2023