Now Games Can Look Like Pixar Movies - Unreal Engine 5

this video is brought to you by skillshare hi welcome to another episode of cold fusion where i cover anything in science technology business or history imagine a future where playable video games look as good as pixar movies imagine if they had lighting that's realistic and creates presence what about details that are as crisp as real life unreal engine 5 a software that allows people to build games is getting pretty damn close to making this a reality it shows us a future where photorealistic games might exist a lot sooner than we think more importantly it also makes the process of making games much easier when unreal engine 5 was announced last year i had an immediate feeling that this was going to be big i got that strong sense that the company was seeing the direction of an industry and choosing to act before anyone else earlier this year unreal engine 5 was made available to developers and in this episode we'll take a look at why so many people are finding unreal engine 5 so fascinating tv so just quickly to bring everyone up to speed what is unreal engine 5 exactly in simple terms it's the latest generation of a game building software developed by epic games it first debuted in 1998 and has since been used in games such as fortnite gears of war and rocket league to begin let's just visually take in what's just become possible with unreal engine 5. [Music] i want you to note how the light looks and how it makes the scene feel and also the level of detail in the scenes [Music] so why does it look so good well it's because of two key components that epic games has come up with number one is nanite this allows for ultra high textures in games without paying a massive performance cost and number two is lumen a revolution in realistic real-time lighting we'll come back to lumen shortly but let's start with nanite according to brian carris the creator of nanite the demo you're seeing on your screen only needed three gigabytes of system ram to run and four gigabytes of video memory so just take a look at this demo it feels almost like a pixar or dreamworks movie [Music] the detail and the lighting just seems to stand out as different to what we're used to in games we're going to explore exactly why it looks different a little later in the episode so usually game graphics demos always look great but when you get down to it often what's promised is far from reality i was skeptical when i saw this demo of unreal engine 5 last year but now that it's released and everyday people are using it for themselves you can see that this is indeed real [Music] here's some further explanations um it runs great this is on my my pc obviously i'm an editor right now so full screen it here so what i was talking about before with that sort of detailed shadows um they they get very very sharp and detailed which is great to be able to show off that sort of intricate geometry anyways [Music] it's let's there there was some uh some misconceptions that we put this like crack in here to like hide streaming uh i i have the whole level loaded in memory right now it was actually so that we could just show the camera getting like really close to this rock this is an excuse to put the animation there it wasn't really to hide any sort of streaming things the second major improvement is lumen a global illumination system that approximates ray tracing but also without the huge performance cost looking closer at the lighting aspect many current games fake the effects of how light moves in real life this is often referred to as pre-baking although the end results can look good sometimes light baking can take tens of hours for complex scenes and if you want to rotate a single light source you're going to have to wait a long time to render the entire scene again in movies by say pixar the digital light is modeled in rays so it can reflect bounce be absorbed and generally behave closer to reality this gives it a more realistic appearance the only issue is that it can take a computer minutes or even hours to draw a single frame in a movie scene in video games however this isn't feasible for obvious reasons one frame per minute gameplay wouldn't be all that fun in recent years the advent of ray tracing has brought the possibility of cinema quality lighting to games but it still requires specific expensive and beefy hardware from nvidia to run and because of this it's limited it's clear that there needs to be something new for the average user the lumen system offers lighting that's accurate but without the performance cost the developers that i've talked to have been very excited and i am too and by the way i am in no way sponsored by epic games or anything like that i just think the technology is really cool [Music] arguably more important than graphics is the step change in the ease of producing video games in the future games will benefit a great deal when technical limitations greatly reduce once this happens game developers can stop worrying about the tedious parts and focus more on important aspects like gameplay and story so how does unreal engine 5 fix this problem the first way of doing this is by virtually removing the polygon limit in games everything that you see is made out of polygons usually triangles with traditional methods there's a limit to what you can put into a given scene because of this game designers have to think carefully about how they build a scene and have to sacrifice quality in some areas the more objects and detail you put into a scene the laggier it gets but now this is no longer the case nanite makes it possible to put billions or even trillions of triangles or polygons into a scene and still have things running at 30 frames per second everything can be as detailed everywhere youtuber callum upton explains further features of unreal engine 5 is nanite our virtualized micropolygon 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 right now for those of you who aren't game developers this might not mean much but i'm going to tell you what this means currently in unreal engine 4 and other game engines is a limit on how many polygons you can have in one scene uh that's not a thing anymore they've completely changed the way that the game engine renders things there's no longer a limit of one to five million polygons before your game starts to lag and get a bit iffy you don't need to make things in the distance less detailed anymore which is the main step that is time consuming in game development because you don't just have to make one rock you have to make that rock and then a lower detailed rock and then an even lower detailed rock and then a picture of a rock for in the background that's but it's it's a time consuming process that is gone you just make a rock you throw it in doesn't matter how detailed it is you don't have to worry about keeping the detail low instead of one to five million polygons per scene you can go one to five million polygons per pebble on the floor and that again is not an exaggeration that's crazy as a rule of thumb on average computing hardware the limit is around 5 to 20 million polygons per scene before performance begins to drop this ceiling has been completely removed just to demonstrate that fact take a look at these one instance of this dog is around 10 million polygons reddit user ionized games put a thousand of these dogs or 10 billion polygons into a single scene and were still able to zoom around at 60 frames per second with no issues this was never even possible before here's another example a reddit user created a fly-through of the death star with lumen enabled [Music] [Music] just note the amount of detail and also how the lighting makes the scene feel more like a movie than a game so so far nanite only works on static immovable objects so characters are out of the question for this high detail however epic games are working on getting the limits of nanite lifted if we take a look at some other limitations that have been removed in games there's no longer any pop in the draw distance is ridiculously far and you can see everything all the time with games becoming easier to make interesting things begin to happen a youtube user re-ups remade the simpsons hit and run complete with a functional first mission built in unreal engine 5 in a matter of days also been an overhaul of character animations removing countless hours of work from developers so i'm going to quickly explain this those lines is the game calculating how wide an object is that you have told your character to jump over this animation is not pre-configured so you don't need 10 different animations for jumping over and objects of different sizes so like if an object was this big you wouldn't need the same animation as an object this big because you don't need the full jump it doesn't even matter anymore you just tell it measure that object jump that far like it's insane print 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 that is the same animation played in different ways and not having to be edited and recalibrated by developers this is a game changer because again this eradicates pretty much an entire person's job which sounds great and terrible at the same time but for the gaming industry as a whole this is great how about motion graphics completely done in unreal engine 5. you might be starting to see by now that this software not only has implications for games but hobby animators as well as we start to wrap up the episode let's take a look at some implementations for cinema entertainment amazingly the previous version of unreal engine was used in the production of the star wars mandalorian series by disney if we're going to design the whole set and game engine ahead of time maybe we could have some in-camera effects everything in the volume is designed to both light the actors and to be a background that we can directly photograph so you end up with real-time final pixels in camera being able to see the actors point at things and see what they're looking at was pretty transformative it gave everybody context with the added benefit that if you want to move a mountain from there to there you can do it instantly you could switch between the iceland location to the desert location all within the same day of shooting any sequence where you say oh this world's not quite right let's just move it a little bit an extraordinary number of benefits and advantages for shooting in that environment it's mind-blowing what that tool is here are a couple of snippets of some short films made with unreal engine 5. look around to see what your friends are doing so you guys can fall one at a time i mean this is a sci-fi movie we still want to keep it a little bit grounded and make it more believable so does anybody have any questions for me here where's ork uh yeah we didn't have the time to retarget him he came with a t-pose so let's get this over with uh [Music] huh oh [Music] so [Music] hey looking at some of those you may be wondering how the character models were done along with unreal engine 5 the epics game team has also created metahuman a character tool that according to the company can quote replace hundreds of man days and literally within minutes users can get results that they would otherwise take months to achieve youtuber timo helmus tries to create himself [Music] motion capture is also supported with some interesting results so in all of this we haven't talked about the cost so how much is it well interestingly unreal engine 5 is free to use and play around with and that's great news if you're looking to see what's possible with your creativity but how would you begin to use it if you're a complete beginner today's sponsor skillshare has you covered an unreal engine course by greg wundra takes you step by step on how to design and create a game level work with materials sounds lighting effects menu screens and more using unreal engine 4 which operates very similarly to the current version so it's still very useful skillshare also has countless courses on anything from personal productivity and business management to music production web development and photography the first 1000 cold fusion subscribers to click the link in the description will get a one month free trial of skillshare so be sure to check out the link below to get started okay so back to the video okay so this is all well and good but there has to be some negatives here right unreal engine is less flexible than its main competitor unity also the file sizes are very large the demo that we saw in the beginning was 25 gigabytes in size but they used cinema quality assets so that's kind of to be expected another negative is that the human models still need a bunch of work they're great for a more cartoony style but not so much for something realistic so to summarize unreal engine 5 unlocks a lot of possibilities for developers the lumen technology is a game changer and is also useful in architecture designs and real-time mock-ups nanite enables the removal of technical limits so this makes games easier to create with a lower barrier for entry and i think that's ultimately a good thing and even for the film and animation industry who knows soon we might start seeing short films that look pretty good from complete novices out there it's all exciting stuff so to sum up my feelings if you can't tell i'm very excited about this and can't wait to see what smaller developers and triple a game developers alike do with this new technology when it's fully released in early 2022 alright so that's it from me thanks for watching my name is dagogo and you've been watching cold fusion now i'm going to leave you with some images of how gaming will look like in the very near future really it's just amazing how far we've come cheers guys have a good one [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] it's me thinking [Music]

Channel: ColdFusion

Views: 1,166,638

Keywords: Coldfusion, TV, Dagogo, Altraide, Technology, Apple, Google, Samsung, Facebook, Tesla

Id: 47I2N_l47mw

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Devorlon]

Because it wasn't explained very well. Nanite (the system for polygons) works by dynamically increasing / decreasing the amount of polygons a model is comprised of depending on how close the player / camera is.

For example if you were to have a rock with 1 billion polygons using Nanite (and other rendering techniques such as only rendering what the player can see) you can calculate that since the user only has a 1080p screen (FHD) having any more that X amount of polygons at Y distance is unnecessary so you can dynamically set the model to render the minimum amount of polygons, and as the player moves in you can increase the amount to show more detail, and as the player moves away decrease the amount to save performance.

[u/ThorsHammeroff]

I got my first brand new NES at age 5 when it was state of the art, and now video game girls are getting naked on Chaturbate for money. What a time to be alive.