State of Unreal Full Presentation | GDC 2023

[Music] foreign [Music] [Music] it's great to be back at GDC you know back in 2020 as the pandemic was ramping up we were the last major company to drop out of GDC we're the first to go all remote and then we headed into the pandemic it was a completely crazy time with thousands of people working from around their homes but the company thrived and so I'd like to go through some of the things that we've done since the since the last GDC first of all we launched project Liberty epic challenge the App Store monopolies yeah we're in front of the ninth Circuit Court Europe has passed major new legislation and the fight goes on for the freedom of all Developers mediatonic joined epic launched Fall Guys for free and brought in 60 million new players bandcamp the Indie music site joined epic bandcamp helps Indie musicians reach fans online today and we're going to build metaverse opportunities for all musicians in the future fortnite Thrive during this time we launched two major chapters lots of seasons and brought the fortnite audience up to 500 million player accounts Travis Scott launched the astronomical concert into fortnite Ariana Grande launched the rifter and so overall fortnite had a really great time with tons and tons of players enjoying and the world constantly evolving we also learned some hard lessons Epic into a massive settlement with the FTC it really brought home to us and to the whole industry that kids in technology are a pressing topic for all developers to take seriously and that the expectations of regulators here in the United States and around the world are much higher than ever before and so we've done a lot over the past few years to improve things we've had huge sets of new parental controls into fortnite and the epic games store and new child safety features like cabin accounts and being epic when we solve a problem for ourselves we like to bring it to all other developers so they can benefit from the work and to that end super awesome joined epic super awesome makes verifiable parental consent tools they are available to all Developers for free so it becomes much easier to comply with all the regulatory laws around children's access to games worldwide we also launched Unreal Engine 5 into Early Access during the pandemic we went through a year yes went through a year of Early Access followed by release we updated fortnite to Unreal Engine 5 and then we spent a whole year visually upgrading fortnite to the latest capabilities of Unreal Engine 5 and which we launched late last year and we'll be showing later in this show epic game store also thrived the player base has grown massively during this time to over 230 million players on PC um we've uh paid out more than a billion dollars to all developers and we've also just very recently launched self-publishing so it's easier than ever before to launch your game to all customers in the PC market with really straightforward tools and earn 80 88 of all revenue but that's a summary of the past and the stay of unreal is about the future so I'd like to invite Nick Penn Warden to come up and talk about Unreal Engine 5.2 thanks all right thank you Tim thanks Tim and hi everyone I'm excited to get to show you some of the new experimental features we've been working on for Unreal Engine 5.2 let's take a look [Music] all right so last year we added several new features to the engine to support foliage rendering and the fortnite team used those features to ship battle royale chapter 4. at the same time Jacob over there and the team at qixel were experimenting with what's possible for photoreal foliage environments as well as testing out the latest functionality that we've been building for Unreal Engine so Jacob's here with us today in the unreal editor let's explore the environment and what better way to do that than off-roading and what better way to off-road than an arivian r1t now rivian uses unreal to power their instrument cluster including 3D visualization of their vehicles so we worked with them to bring the r1t to life in this experience let's head on out Jacob sure thing on my way all right so we're building tools for interactive and dynamic worlds so here we have chaos physics simulating rocks that tumble as we drive over them leaves Bend out of the way and we also added some real-time fluid simulation we worked with the team at rivien to set up unreal's chaos vehicle model to simulate the suspension of the truck and how the electric motors Drive each individual wheel chaos also simulates how the tires compress and deform and meta sounds enabled the team to precisely re-synthesize the sounds of the electric motors and mix them with the ambisonics of the jungle so rivien provided us with a highly detailed model of the truck about 71 million polygons that were able to render in real time thanks to nanite now the rivian not only looks incredibly realistic because of lumen and nanite but also its materials and today we're introducing substrate our new material framework and the better demonstrate it let's swap the paint out for opal now of course you can't order a rivian with opal body panels but opal was the internal code name for this project and also a really great demonstration of substrate's capabilities the base layer models the iridescence refraction and Reflections that occur inside of an opal and on top of that is a layer representing the polished surface and how light is absorbed as it travels through that clear layer of varying depth and now we can add back on the dust and dirt layers and notice how the reflection changes when interacting with the dust layer and that there are no artifacts along the transition from dirt to dust to opal so substrate is more expressive enabling artists to create materials like this with different shading models and compose and layer those materials as they see fit all right let's uh head on out Jacob on my way in terms of performance substrate materials that are similar to the current Unreal Engine shading model cost about the same but now artists have the freedom to author more complex materials for extremely detailed use cases like in cinematics and in film so we're going to drive under this fallen tree here and everything that you've seen up to this point was painstakingly hand built by the environment team at quixel everything since that fallen tree has been built using our brand new experimental Suite of procedural content generation tools entirely an engine that are flexible deterministic and artist driven our guiding principle in building these systems was to empower artists to make tools for artists so Jacob's going to go ahead and add a procedural assembly to the world and the cool thing is that it communicates thank you yeah pretty cool and the cool thing is that it communicates with other nearby procedural elements in the scene like the creek bed so let's say a designer comes by wants to direct the player to drive to the left Jacob can simply move the assembly to the right and everything updates to accommodate that change game design is iterative so let's say the designer comes back wants to give the player the choice of going left or right again Jacob can simply move the assembly back over now the artist who created this assembly also added some additional handles that Jacob can use to Art direct where Rock slides occur allows them to customize the piece a little bit more make it a little easier for the ravian to drive by so we started by hand crafting that original part of the level to set the visuals in art direction for the entire piece and then built out procedural tools that allowed the team to create a much larger play Space much more quickly now let's see how we can use these procedural tools to make larger sweeping changes to the environment so Jacob let's start by removing some of the trees in this area absolutely that's easy enough actually all right a little too much let's let's add some trees back in okay and let's also add in some Cliff formations give it a little bit more variability so the procedural systems are all deterministic as Jacob is experimenting with different sets of input parameters once he finds a set that he likes he can always go back to it and get out exactly the same results and the procedural systems aren't just placing trees and rocks but also fog cards bugs birds everything that's needed to bring this environment to life and everything that you've seen here works at scale this environment is four kilometers by four kilometers if we hide all the procedural elements we can see that original hand-built area about 200 meters by 200 meters we believe that there will always be the need for hand building environments so we design these procedural systems to be tools for artists that work in concert with hand-built content both substrate and the new procedural tools will be available in experimental form in 5.2 and everything you've seen here is running in the unreal editor in real time on a developer machine with an Intel 13900k CPU and Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU so Jacob thanks for being here and helping us out today thank you very much Nick for having me it's been a pleasure all right so come visit us at the Unreal Engine booth on the Expo floor you can check out this demo for yourself and this afternoon here in the ybca we'll have a tech talk diving into the details behind this demo in addition the preview one build of Unreal Engine 5.2 is available now you can test out all of the experimental new features we showed today as well as numerous other improvements head over to the epic game store to download the binary build and also get the full source code from the Unreal Engine repository on GitHub I found that we make the best technology for developers when we use it ourselves when we really put the engine through its Paces both through Tech demos like this one as well as full game Productions so to talk about how the fortnite team used the latest Unreal Engine 5 capabilities to ship battle royale chapter 4. please help me welcome John laugh [Applause] thanks Nick for chapter four we wanted to show fortnite in a way players had never seen before we upgraded with broad Strokes using Lumen nanite and other ue5 Tech we work directly with the engine team to improve these features and ensure they scaled on all platforms fortnite ships on first up was lighting now our options in the past to improve lighting have been somewhat limited because fortnite is a really Dynamic game big lighting just doesn't work because the moment a player destroys a wall light maps are invalidated so we were really excited to give Lumen a shot it updates Global Illumination in real time as the environment changes early in chapter 4 development we captured a video of lumen enabled in a fortnight test build and the player in the video destroyed a wall and light just came flooding into the room and honestly it was pretty stunning it brought new life to the environment and the realistic bounce light worked great with fortnite's vibrant Style well initial results were exciting you know nothing is that easy in Game Dev and as we discovered Real World Lighting can create real world problems play tests revealed areas of the map like attics and basements that had no windows and were just too dark for gameplay and it was also the first time we were using Auto exposure and it was causing bloomed out areas when players were in dark Interiors looking outside we solved these issues using ue5 features like local exposure and some art directable controls within lumen that enabled us to provide a final image much better for gameplay while the art team refined content the engine team provided some new scalability options so that we could run Lumen on next-gen consoles at 60 frames per second in addition to lighting nanite opened the door for us to add an incredible amount of detail to the fortnite island it was introduced in ue5 as a virtualized geometry system that supports extreme mesh complexity so we spent some time experimenting looking for a good balance between stylized art Direction and detail so we could increase visual quality but still maintain fortnite's iconic Style now that artists weren't limited by triangle counts we scaled our content pipelines to support Nana on high-end Hardware Tech artists model new vegetation assets and the art team created some high detailed props and some amazing hero assets but this still left us with the large building library that needed a visual upgrade we resolved this using an offline process that took displacement maps from our materials and created high resolution nanite meshes it was really cool to see these Classic fortnite Materials like brick stone and wood get a high resolution facelift and pop off their surfaces now past the United demos have relied on static hard surface environments but fortnite's an animated World trees blow in the wind and buildings wobble when hit so we worked with the Nani team and they extended the material pipeline to include masked and animated materials on Nano geometry the island and fortnite is constantly evolving with major changes each season and complete reboots when chapters launch so it's essential that we evolve our workflows too during chapter 4 development we started utilizing two new ue5 features that changed how we build levels World partition and one file per actor World partition automates the level streaming and it allowed us to work in one large level we use level instance actors to group content logically like a building and all of its props one file per actor ensured our large Dev team could work in this space without Source control conflicts now these features hadn't yet been put to their Paces by a large Dev team so there were some early bumps in the road but rlds were in Daily communication with the engine team and we saw consistent improvements not long into production we were developing fortnite in a much more collaborative environment our goal for chapter four was to deliver an awesome experience to our players but we also hope by using and improving the engine's newest features we've improved your experience as well now with the look with a look at the amazing work developers are already doing in ue5 please welcome Dana Cowley foreign [Applause] tools and amazing content at your fingertips making games is hard and it gets even trickier when you're trying to ship while you're upgrading your features and we put a lot of effort into making sure that the trans the um the transition from ue4 to ue5 was as smooth as possible and you've proven that it worked and we've been impressed with all the teams who have made the jump ever so quickly you know many of you moved your games over right in the middle of development and quite a few of you have left internal Tech in favor of ue5 and as of last month 77 percent of all unreasoned users are on ue5 and that's rapid adoption and Mass and over 750 000 of you are actively building with Unreal Engine each and every month you've invested in us and we're investing in you and Beyond games you're telling Amazing Stories across live action and animated entertainment and to date more than 550 television film projects have been made with Unreal Engine in production now these are some of the leading Studios using ue5 today this represents a Brain Trust of talented game developers from all over the world and it's getting bigger every day you have validated that we're on the right path and we're blown away by how you've embraced the tools and shown us what's possible and now you're about to hear from several talented teams who are bringing their awesome games to PC console and mobile first up we have qubit Studios a small team whose game infinite testicles has not only received an epic Mega Grant but it's also coming to the epic game store with the help of Epic Games publishing here to give you an exclusive New Look is Michael forzard hi everyone I was invited here today to share our story with you QB Studios is a small Studio from Europe and we have one mission to bring the world of infinitesimals to life in our first game you play as Captain orkney rolling rig as yani's crew explore a mysterious planet filled with large environments now a universe is already big at our scale but when your main character is only a few millimeters tall it takes on a wall new meaning as a studio we have big ideas as a small team we need to make choices and that's where switching from uv4 to ua5 made a big difference for us it has empowered Us by giving us time back let me take you through a few examples is very small we want players to truly feel a sense of scale by having a large space to explore by using wall partition in ue5 we managed to save month of death time not just because of the size of the world but also because we can build on top of it it allowed us to specialize a lot of systems very quickly and with the built-in H lab we get strong runtime performance while being able to load the entire world visually in editor a large world is great but it doesn't do us any good if it's empty and that's where the new pack actors and level instances came in handy a level designer can use prefabs to quickly prototype ideas while artists can refine those prefabs in editor by assembling assets together and with one file per actor it all happens in parallel on the animation side motion warpings allows us to use a single animation for a large range of situations and with control rig we can quickly create those first pass animations in editor but the most outstanding features on a knight and lumen we don't need to spend time on topology optimization and can directly use hyper images lighting is more realistic and we don't have to use tricks for transition between exterior and interior all in all working with V5 has been a tremendous time server for us and upgrading from B4 was surprisingly easy we were up and running in a couple of days we can know iterate more quickly focus on gameplay and allocate time to riskier ideas but enough talking go on the epic game store and wishlist the game now thank you everyone enjoy the rest of the show your team has built a beautiful game Michael fantastic work now our next partner is one that needs little introduction Kabam develops and publishes world-class highly social multiplayer mobile games and today they are here to make a special announcement please join me in welcoming vice president of product Tyler black [Applause] [Music] thank you Dina for that kind introduction hi everyone at Kabam we've worked with the world's biggest brands and created our own stories to bring some of the most successful mobile games to players today we're proud to announce a new project one that ushers in a whole new era for Kabam King Arthur Legends rise it's a new cross-platform Squad RPG set in a stunning reimagined Arthurian world when we began this ambitious project we knew that Unreal Engine was the only solution that had the tools to bring incredible visuals to both mobile and PC at launch so here's how we put those tools to use King Arthur Legends rise allows players to explore campaign stages and interact with their environment using a variety of animations if we were to use traditional animation techniques the number of assets that we would need would be massive thanks to unreal's Advanced animation technology like ik rig retargeting motion warping and property access we can create high quality detailed and attractive animations with relatively few resources but that isn't the only way that we're using Unreal Engine 5's tools to deepen the player experience we're also making use of dynamic weather to affect character strengths and other stats and keep the battle gameplay fresh and immersive that's all from us today we can't wait to share more with you about King Arthur Legends rise in the coming months so check out our website playkingarthur.com and sign up to stay up to date on our newest game thanks Tyler now the next developer coming to the stage was founded a few years ago and they're already making a big name for themselves hexworks is a CI game studio and they are capturing the imaginations of fans of Dark Fantasy with their new action RPG Lords of the Fallen creative director Cesar bitosu is here to give you an exclusive look at how they're using ue5 to build one of this year's most highly anticipated games thank you Dana thank you Dana for the introduction and handling my name so graciously hello everyone I am very excited to be here and represent hexworks our incredibly talented multinational team behind Lords of the Fallen our upcoming dark fantasy action RPG and today we'll be sharing how Unreal Engine 5 has helped bring our highly ambitious and decidedly Grim Vision to life please enjoy welcome to the Lords of the Fallen technical showcase here at hexworks our goal has always been to create the most immersive game experience possible today we're journeying to Sky rest Bridge one of the game's early locations to demonstrate just some of the impressive ways Unreal Engine 5's state-of-the-art technologies have helped us deliver on this ambitious vision for our upcoming action RPG we want players to feel fully immersed in our world by playing as their own unique virtual persona to achieve this we've used a combination of Technologies including 3D scans of real people and ue5's own character customization Tech players can create unique faces and bodies by dynamically morphing between a huge range of shapes before finessing the finer details our extensive selection of armor sets seamlessly adapt to whatever shape the player chooses it's really important to us that we represent as wide a proportion of our audience as possible being able to customize your hero and Lords of the Fallen is only the beginning each and every one of our characters is incredibly detailed using high resolution textures get up close to any surface in the game like this tunic for example and detail texturing provides incredible levels of micro detail how these objects move and behave is also crucial for player immersion ue5's chaos physics engine facilitates Advanced simulations for clothes chains air belts and a whole lot more this helps to substantially enhance the secondary Motion in all our characters making their movements look much more lifelike [Music] the lighting in Lords of the Fallen takes full advantage of unreal's brand new Lumen GI we've been able to light our complex environments in real time meaning we can immediately see the effect of a light bounce for example without waiting for the traditional slow baking processes watch how the lighting reacts as we move our light source around this environment Global illumination like this can be quite demanding on processing so we also make use of emissive shapes to add additional details to the lighting of any space we can then fine-tune these light bounces on our nanite meshes providing our world with impressive levels of detail and minimal impact on performance perhaps the most important element of Lords of the Fallen is the ability to travel between two worlds a realm of the living Axiom and the realm of the Dead umbrella we've created our own custom tool set within ue5 it allows us to intricately craft these two environments side by side and seamlessly swap between them this means our artists and designers can ensure these worlds feel intrinsically linked like two sides of the same coin even if one side is decidedly more horrific than the other on behalf of hexworks thanks for watching today's brief Tech presentation the twin Realms of umbral and Axiom await Fearless adventurers later this year when Lords of the Fallen Launches on PC and current gen consoles looking awesome thank you this next team is known for making some of the world's most popular MMORPGs and recently they've been pushing the boundaries of cinematic storytelling and the results speak for themselves here with more is ncsoft's Chief strategy officer Dr song Yi Yoon [Music] [Applause] thank you so much for the introduction Dana good morning everyone I'm excited to share our latest production Project M with you today you may know ncisoft is recognized as one of the best MMORPG developers thanks to our Blockbuster franchises like lineage and Guild Wars however we're not content with this achievement we're always pushing for boundaries and exploring new technologies so let me introduce project MTU it is our latest Innovation harnessing the power of Cutting Edge Ai and Graphics technology to an unprecedented level with help of Unreal Engine we have achieved our vision for Project M with seamlessly integrating our foundational AI technology resulting in breathtaking detail so to give you a sneak peek we have prepared a video featuring our CEO and chief creative officer TJ who will personally guide you through our newest creation as a digital version of himself thank you so much for your attention and I hope you enjoy Project M [Music] [Music] foreign project in is one of ncsoft's most ambitious projects today [Music] what would it mean to you if the world was comprised of informational articles instead of physical particles oh I got a little ahead of myself I am TJ Kemp from ncsoft welcome to project him [Music] how are the fabric of simulated reality changed our Pursuit world if we could tamper with the arrangement of those particles very idea is what sparked Project M M the informational particles that shape project M's world can transform reality based on your choices and each choice you make will change your experience [Music] the information that exists in the present reality determines how the world will unfold [Music] value every encounter and every moment these will be essential in the world of project and this is where our journey ends from now I look forward to seeing you all again soon [Music] thank you Dr Yin Project M is looking amazing and it's unlike anything we've seen and thanks to all the teams that have given us a new look at your incredible games like we just saw the world's year building these are awesome looking characters with loads of detail and authenticity and our team understands that believable digital humans are at the heart of great storytelling and for more on that I'm happy to hand it over to our CTO Kim Larry thank you some incredible games to hi everybody wow it's great to be back after four years um it's good to see you all um so it's been two years since we released metahuman Creator This Cloud hosted tool allows you to create photorealistic digital humans for your game or experience with the Simplicity of an RPG character creator yet with a level of realism and customization that you've never seen before our community has created millions of metahumans for their unreal projects and the work we've seen has been unbelievably breathtaking and I'm sure a bunch of you in the audience actually making better humans as well let's take a look at some of this work thank you thank you amazing you know there isn't a day that thank you so there isn't a day that goes by that we don't see some post on LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever showing us amazing usage of metahumans and I think it's been a really big game changer for anybody trying to tell a story in their game or their experience um but today we want to take things to the next level so I'm going to actually introduce two of my most favorite friends um to the stage our head of digital human technology Vladimir masilovich and the actress best known as senua from Ninja theories fantastic hellblade series Melina Jurgens how are you both doing well thank you it's been a while since we were last on the stage in fact I think it was seven years ago that we went through this audio that's a long time ago triggering there but it was the first time we all came together Ninja Theory epic cubic motion free lateral to do something that we thought would wow audiences here and sort of set a template for the future of using characters in games so anyway um I think we're uh I think we're in a pretty good pretty amazing place right now with the industry but we do want to take things to the next level and what I want to do a little bit bit about is how things go into Ninja Theory how's that how's the new game going yeah the team and I are doing really good and we're just extremely busy working on the follow-up to the first hellblade which will be called senua Saga held late too I can't wait the first game was fantastic thank you I really can't wait to play it so get it out soon anyway I'm Gonna Leave the stage and let these two take over go and blow people's minds thank you hi everyone our guiding vision for metahuman has been the democratization of complex character Technologies allowing you to work faster and see the results immediately a character is only truly believable if it's motion Fidelity matches its visual Fidelity but animating at this level is a hard task for even the most skilled Studios some of our best work leveraged 4D capture but this took specialized Hardware in weeks or even months of processing time while meta human creature gave you the ability to generate high quality characters animating them still wasn't as easy this is why I'm very excited to announce a new capability to the metal human product meta human animator met the human animator contains the essence of our 4D pipeline but optimized to run on a single machine it is able to use iPhone as well as stereo professional systems and today we're going to demonstrate how it works for this we're going to need now our technician John Cook and just the phone now can you take your position please sure let me know when you're ready okay and action I need performance capture to work like a mirror I needed to capture whether I'm acting scared or angry and sometimes all I need is a look cut thanks Mel that was great yeah you're welcome okay our technician John is currently pulling Mass performance from the phone onto his machine where everything will be processed locally we have updated our live link face mobile app to capture all data at the best resolution possible with the device better human animator uses video and Dev data to convert this data into High Fidelity performance animation and it can even use audio to produce convincing tongue animation John is currently scrubbing through the take to pick the section that he wants to process John are we all good with the data awesome so from now on it's just a single button click to kick off the processing which for a performance of this length will take less than a minute to convert into animation so Mel well that is processing let me show you something else oh is that me yeah this is what we refer to as your meta-human DNA cool and this is generated by the capture we made earlier right yeah that's right so from only three frames of video and that data we can generate a rig that predicts all of your facial expressions in just a couple of minutes wow and do you only need to do this once for each actor yes that's right it calibrates the solver to your face so that we can produce the performance in in a way that faithful reproduces the original performance it sounds cool yeah so let's check back on the on the processing which today is on the latest CP and GPU Hardware from AMD meta human animator uses a custom epic facial solver and landmark detector we can interactively look at Innovation while it's being solved and compared to your original performance so it looks like it just it's almost finished after this is going to do one more pass to make the curves more stable it's really quick and from here on we can we just need to export the animation this takes only a few seconds and then John needs to drop it in the level and add the audio so that we can see the result so Mouse meta human should now be ready in the level well excited to see the results yeah I can't wait to see it I need performance capture to work like a mirror I needed to capture whether I'm acting scared or angry and sometimes all I need is a look thank you all so Mel what do you think I think it's incredible because it usually takes months between performance capture and getting any results back so this is blowing my mind and all of this is sold directly onto animator friend and controls in this case we are using a bespoke 4D rig which we created together with Ninja Theory for hellblade 2 but it's also ready to use on any meta human or any other rig that follows our new meta human standard let's have a look at that I need performance capture to work like a mirror I needed to capture whether I'm acting scared or angry and sometimes all I need is a look so the same thing works even on stylish characters thank you all these Technologies are completely redefining our creative process as they already find yours One release met a human animator to everyone in just couple of months we've got one more thing we'd like to show you we haven't forgotten about the needs for full performance capture shoots what you're about to see is animation that has not been polished or edited in any way and it took meta human animator just minutes to process start to finish it's one of my favorite lines from Ninja Theory's upcoming Saga helpline very much thank you so in Perth cut take 13. foreign [Music] [Music] will destroy them good you like it [Applause] [Music] man was that cool all right let's talk about the future of our creator marketplaces we all know one of the biggest challenges in game development is the time and cost associated with making great art and Visually stunning environments now we've seen that by giving you access to high quality game-ready assets like quixel Mega scans World building can be faster more efficient and more economical the resulting explosion of creativity that we've seen from our Unreal Engine developer Community has been awesome in fact it's inspired us to double down on a mission that started several years ago since the launch of Unreal Engine Marketplace in 2014 we've been working to Aggregate and organized all the world's best digital assets for you to use in your work in 2018 we joined forces with quixel whose Mega scans have now been downloaded over 40 million times in 2021 art station became part of the Epic family and we welcomed a community of the world's best digital artists who've since uploaded nearly 12 million projects to the site later that same year sketchfab joined epic and now has more than 10 million registered users who are using the platform to discover share and manage 3D models on the web now each of these businesses has their own unique superpowers incredible content of course vibrant communities and killer capabilities we're now working to bring all this together into a unified offering let's take a look [Applause] good morning [Music] [Music] thank you later this year we'll be merging our content offerings into a new unified creative Marketplace called Fab built on the strong Foundation of sketchfab.com we're going to drop the sketch and go all in on Fab will be an Open Marketplace serving the entire digital content creation industry that means we're going to offer assets for all game engines All Digital content creation tools and metaverse inspired open worlds so whether you're a studio making a blockbuster game or a movie or your player building your first island in fortnite our goal is to bring you everything you need to build your world in one place we'll have 3D models material sound plugins animations visual effects and more found me the new home of quixel Mega scans metahumans and other incredible epic content designed to push the limits of what's possible we'll also bring you the high quality assets and environment packs from leading art studios AAA game developers media companies and even musicians who are taking fan engagement to the next level but our primary focus is on bringing you the best stuff out there from millions of Independent Artists who will benefit from the lowest fees in the industry pocketing 88 percent of revenue from their sales so they can build real businesses and invest in making more great assets for you to use that's right now with millions of assets we have to make it super simple for you to find what you're looking for and get inspired along the way we'll leverage automated tagging to consistently and accurately describe content and will give you the ability to inspect 3D models before you download making it easy to understand the game Readiness of an asset so there are no surprises building on the success of quixel bridge the Fab plug-in will enable you to search discover drag and drop content right into your scene without leaving the game editor we want to we want to improve your workflows by connecting Fab to All industry-leading Digital content creation tools for example our partnership with Adobe will make it easy for you to export and publish models from Adobe substance painter directly to Fab and finally leveraging sketchfab's digital Asset Management capabilities Fab will be the place where you go to store manage and share assets either privately with teammates for collaboration or publicly on the web to Showcase your work with collaboration tools like this we want to help small teams do big things now it's no longer just major Studios who are driving our industry forward World building has become accessible to everyone and we're seeing this today with tens of millions of new creators building awesome experiences in fortnite Roblox Minecraft and other open worlds this is increasing the demand for ready to use content and it's creating an exciting new opportunity for asset creators to reach massive new audiences We Believe an open and fair marketplace where artists and developers can come together to buy and sell assets is essential to the creation of the emerging metaverse now we're going to keep you posted over the course of the next several months as this rolls out and we're looking forward to partnering with you all to make this an industry-wide success and now please welcome sax Pearson foreign [Applause] [Music] [Applause] we've been working towards this moment for a very long time this next segment is exactly why I'm here at Epic to move the industry forward and help make developers successful I'm here to introduce powerful new tools to existing fortnite creators powerful new opportunities for professional Developers fortnite is becoming an ecosystem that means new tools to design develop and publish games and a new economy that rewards Developers these updates bring us one step closer to epic's vision of a connected metaverse with billions of players enjoy high quality creations made by millions of Developers at the center of this all is unreal editor for fortnite available today in public beta on epic game store it's a new pc application that brings the power of Unreal Engine to the scale of the fortnite audience deeply integrated with the game with new workflows that allow PC and all other platforms to create together fast and fluid we call it uefn for short but first let's talk about how we got here fortnite changed when we released fortnite creative four years ago creative is an in-game toolkit for players to make sandbox games inside fortnite and because of creative fortnite is already much more than a game it's already a place where players find games and developers find players but why should you develop in fortnite well our players are highly social content hungry with over 500 million play accounts massive PC presents and the largest console player base is the best most vibrant place for developers to find an audience quickly and publish new games Islands built using creative tools already account for roughly 40 percent of play time in fortnite that's billions of hours a year and we expect that number to keep growing with uefn so this is a sample of games in fortnite today what we have noticed is that players are more engaged they have more fun when they play epic Zone games like Battle Royale and Community games made by creators like you like the combination is what makes fortnite special and what is going to help us all grow as we've shown it on Wheel engine epic's mission is to deliver an awesome Suite of tools for developers on Wheel editor for fortnite is for experienced game developers like many are you in this room but it's also for the growing community of fortnite Island creators that are ready for unreal engines proven PC editor workflow as you're going to see in the demo coming up uefn and the existing creative toolkit is already a great combo for developer and fortnite Creator teams to make incredible experiences of course a long-term goal is to make the entire feature set of unveil engine or bring the entire feature set of unveilment into uefn but also over time to expose many of the other services that epic offers build just announced Fab Fab is launching today also inside uefn in an alpha version and products like metahuman will be coming to uefn in the future to support your Creative Vision for the next stage of fortnite and ultimately the open metaverse we also need brand new tools that solve really hard problems interoperability scalability and resilience a real issue when you operate at this scale and in expect this level of durability this is what led us to develop verse it's a powerful new general programming language designed specifically for this purpose you're going to see us use it in the demo in just a moment the second thing we're working towards is high interoperability between uefn and Unreal Engine that'll enable you to take your work anywhere and by the way behind me is the new Creator portal also launching today where you can manage all your Islands one click publish them to the world and when you publish the uefn your original Ip annual assets are yours to take anywhere now let's take a closer look at uefn features and workflows we put together a short video and then we're going to do a demo thank you let's start with the basics unreal editor for fortnite runs on PC and is integrated directly with fortnite so you'll have access to over four years of content all for free to get you started what's special about uefn is what we call live edit live edit allows anyone on your team to join a uefn session from any platform that runs fortnite that means someone can join from a console using the normal fortnite client and they're able to work alongside and collaborate with PC users uefn has access to all fortnite creative devices our modular gameplay systems that work in the in-game editor this allows you to instantly add gameplay and quickly bootstrap your game from the hundreds of gameplay devices already available the uefn beta has many of the same features we use to create fortnite including the landscape editing tool set you can edit the landscape to change the look of your island or make sweeping changes to create something completely new and then quickly play it in game to check out the results so even though you have access to tons of fortnite content with uefn you can make content that looks nothing like fortnite this is a section from forest Guardian a tech demo built in uefn that we are launching today a big feature of uefn is the ability to import your own custom assets so we used a few 3D models textures and materials that we built just for the project and all the lighting in the cave was made possible thanks to Lumen our real-time Global illumination system you can also find more content like quicksomega scans and sketchfab models in our initial Alpha release of the Fab plugin for uefn all assets are curated and optimized for use in fortnite and the full version of Fab will launch later this year you can also create and modify materials so you can change the look and feel of objects easily and you can import skeletal meshes and then animate using sequencer and control rig everything you've just seen is available today in the public beta version of unreal editor for fortnite so it's a short video of just like the most condensed way we could show somebody in like the more important workflows but I think a much better way is to Temp fate and let's do a live demo on PC running on fortnite public servers right here on stage welcome Michael and Ray to the stage take it away [Applause] [Music] I'm glad that went well all right hey folks so let's talk about how all this was made Michael here has the scene open in unreal editor so we can take a closer look for the environment we built this level using quixel Mega scan assets many of which are available in the Fab uefn plugin we also used custom content that we built just for this demo for the gameplay you just saw we had we hand placed enemies using a creative device called a guard spawner which generates the aliens that you saw at specific locations however we wanted to do more and introduce Dynamic play that goes beyond what the current creative devices can do so to do this we used our new programming language called verse so in this short section of code every second we grab the position of the player and for each spot location we then calculate the distance to the player and if it's within a certain threshold we tell that guard to spawn into the level so we have gameplay that's more reactive to those actions this is just a short example of using verse but for a deeper dive check out the verse Tech talk later today now Michael is going to show us how we put the intro cinematic together hi everybody so before the gameplay section we played this a quick cinematic animation this was actually created entirely in uefn using sequencer sequencers are multi-track editor and it's been used in everything from in-game cinematics to Hollywood feature films so let's take a look uh now all of the stuff is available right inside uafn so let's take a look at this last shot from a slightly different perspective so the other thing we featured in this section was a bunch of Niagara Niagara is now available in uefn and it's our high-end VFX system so and just like in the movies you can frame up shots and have great effects so what we're going to do here is just set this up so just look at the movies you have slow mode too makes everything better right so this is just a sampling of some of the stuff that you can do inside sequencer but let's get back to the game all right so now that we're back in the game in uefn you have access to fortnite's time of day system or you could use what we did and do what we did and use a completely custom lighting solution and thanks to Lumen both daytime and night time look great now let's go to the final gameplay section and let's close out the demo but as a reminder everything that you're seeing here was created in the same version of uefn that we're releasing today I think I'm gonna jump in here and help you right I am all for that thank you thank you [Applause] thanks Michael and Ray anyone everybody that put this together the the demo came about when we asked the special projects team inside epic that came straight off the Matrix demo to why don't you put uefn through its paces and one amazing fact about this demo is that it's less than 400 Megs it downloads and plays in less than a minute and it plays on any platform that fortnite runs on like that is the promise of what uafn is so again unreal edit fortnite is available today in public beta in epic game store if you want an early glimpse of some other technical showcases that our internal teams made with uefn and verse check out assertive domination Forest guardian and the space inside all three available to play right now in fortnite discover so we've talked about brand new tools in the fortnite ecosystem now I want to talk about the next generation of fortnite's economy they're both epic and creators will participate in we call it Creator economy 2.0 here's how it works the money in the economy comes from player spending in the item shop fortnite generates billions of dollars a year in revenue from player purchases fortnite players who have fun engaging in Islands tend to spend more in the item shop creators who make popular islands are bringing real value to the fortnite ecosystem and we're going to share the resulting Revenue with them this is the engine powering a Creator economy 2.0 we believe this so strongly we will distribute 40 percent of fortnite's global net revenue to eligible creators who publish games in fortnite both independent developers and Epic anything we make like Battle Royale zero build all to participates in the pool shared with creators this will be the primary way that epic will pay for our own game development in fortnite going forward thank you I'm glad you feel it's a big deal that I I feel exhibited um this is this is transformative and a big gut check for us too we imagine thousands of third-party development teams building businesses and thriving with this model payments from the pool are based on performance of The Island we take into account data like Island popularity engagement retention attracting new players and the benefit of this new approach is rooted in player fun and rewards everyone's creative work both yours and epics there's no need to design cunning monetization Loops or extractive gating items you make an island that players love that is all you need to be part of the new economy Creator economy 2.0 is live right now for eligible creators who are currently publishing we are back dating the engagement payouts to the beginning of this month and for more details and to sign up go to create.fortnite.com everything you've seen today represents epic's biggest bet ever the release of advanced tools that publish directly into fortnite on PC console mobile and Cloud lowering the barrier for developers to be part of one of the biggest entertainment ecosystems we welcome anyone to join us in the future where Regional content is owned by its creators where developer earnings are function of fun and where ecosystem can be directly linked through Community language standards like verse so support to support developers who adopt uefn we're broadening the Epic Mega grants program to help teams bootstrap projects that use uefn and verse we're just getting started so we hope that you'll join us and help shape the future of development now we're going to give you a look at what uefn can do right inside fortnite after the video Tim is going to come back out to talk about epic's Future Vision thank you very much [Applause] thank you [Applause] thank you thanks we think this is going to be a really powerful combination putting together a fortnight 70 million monthly active users with the power of the unreal editor and a new Creator economy to share the revenue with creators who create engaging experiences and it's another Milestone on the path to a new kind of entertainment medium which science fiction literature caused the metaverse because there's a crazy amount of hype around this whole topic I'd like to step back and take a long-term look at what we see here and the core of it is some very real growth starting with fortnite 70 million monthly active users Roblox is 250 million monthly active users Minecraft's 100 million and pubg mobile and Apex Legends and numerous other metaverse inspired games is leading to an identifiable audience today of over 600 million active users in these Virtual Worlds Antonia growth trajectory they will put it at billions of users by the end of this decade and so he can set aside the crazy hype cycle around nfts and VR goggles you know these Technologies may play a role in the future but they are not required this revolution is happening right now and the core of it is something every gamer already understands it's you and your friends getting together online and going around as a group on voice chat having a fun time and social entertainment experiences and some of these experiences are serious games like Battle Royale some of them are going to a concert and dancing or chatting with friends and just having a good time we see this as the next big changing change in gaming and an epic's Evolution as a company you know we started out back in 1991 making 2D games uh we recognize the opportunity with 3D so we vote the first Unreal Engine and first Unreal Tournament game we evolved to make console games like Gears of War then we evolved to make online games like Paragon and fortnite but when fortnite shipped first in 2017 it was just our game uh but over time we recognized the audience the opportunity to bring it to a much wider audience so we built fortnite creative mode and then the unreal editor for fortnite coming out now but we see the future of this medium primarily not about epic's work but about the work of independent creators and we're building towards the sofa metaverse from two different directions first of all we're taking the fortnite audience we have and enhancing the development capabilities with the new tools and this Creator economy to support everybody's work but we're also helping Developers boning Standalone products evolve towards building metaverse experiences themselves the Unreal Engine is a tool for this the epic game store is a distribution vehicle for it epic online services has taken fortnite an epic 700 million player accounts and 5 billion social connections and open them up for free to all developers so they can plug into voice chat and participate in these social experiences in a very easy to use way and all of these are on-ramps to the Future metaverse we really think that over the next decade today's separate apps and ecosystems are going to join together to form tomorrow's open metaverse and yeah because the last couple decades have been about wall Gardens wall Gardens wall Gardens let's back up and talk about how open systems have successfully come about in the past you know this has happened really big time back in the early 1980s and 1990s when the open internet was built you know back in those days there were a bunch of closed networks at different companies and universities that couldn't talk to each other and so the industry got together and defined Open Standards connect these closed networks into one big open network they connected email systems by putting the at sign and email addresses the people online service could communicate with people on other services and then they began to Define Open Standards like JavaScript and HTML for the open internet so any user could participate and the rule at that point was that any company could connect as an equal into this system just by following the Open Standards now let's talk about what this means for the open metaverse of the future you know we have the opportunity to take all these different online ecosystems for gaming consoles and Publishers and connect them together into a single place where anybody can talk to anybody else we have the opportunity to turn today's game engines into tomorrow's metaverse browser engines if you take a look Unreal Engine and unity and Godot you have some very powerful 3D engines that have an increasingly common set of features in an increasingly adopting industry standards as ways of communicating with each other and with other tools there's the glotf content standards there's Pixar's Universal see in description format and then there are a lot of new standards bodies that have formed to help to standardize the metaverse there's Cronus group there's the metaverse standards form there's the academy software foundation and the open 3D Foundation and we have the opportunity for all developers to work together to define the future of this thing and there's also the opportunity to connect the economies of these different ecosystems you know what a user would really like is to be able to buy a cool looking outfit in one place and take it everywhere they go um and as we were designing this new fortnite Creator economy one of the things we were constantly thinking about is how this could in the future be connected into an open metaverse economy and there's no reason that the core model there in which revenue from item shops are shared with creators of experience based on engagement couldn't be turned into an economic model for the open metaverse at large with economic peering and overseen by governance groups to make this work in a safe way for all players and this gets us to a really key question here and that is who is going to build the metaverse in the future and we believe the answer has to be all of us together it has to be a combination of indie game developers together with double A and AAA game developers and fortnite creators and Minecraft creators and Roblox creators each bringing their best specialized knowledge to the to the new world and Brands like Disney and Ferrari and Ralph Lauren have already experienced the metaverse through crossovers with fortnite we think this is just the very beginning of a very long-term opportunity for all these companies tell that if a much larger presence in the digital world in which it becomes a major and first class business line for all of them uh future open metavers will be about musicians and music labels and film and television Studios who are using virtual production today to build world-class photorealistic content being able to bring it and launch it playly in the metaverse timed together with her film and television experiences in an in the Stream of awesome entertainment content that's open to everybody to participate in now epic has a long history of supporting developers this way you know we've built a lot of different services that are available to everybody to use there's the Unreal Engine there's epic online services which are open to all platforms and all stores there's the epic game store which is open to software built on all engines using all different online services and we believe the metaverse has to be opened it can't be another monopoly's wall Garden and epic is all in on this you know we went from the uh you know we went from the pandemic to the tech downturn the crypto implosion and now banks are failing and it's a really crazy time again but we're investing very heavily in the future with the belief that companies who invest now through these hard times are going to come out the strongest company in the future become the strongest companies in the future some of these Investments we're making in fortnite initially and then bringing the work to Unreal Engine some things were building an Unreal Engine taking to fortnite but the aim is to support everything the AAA game developers are doing today and more in this project to build this all out into an open system is going to take less than a decade and that is the journey from Unreal Engine 5 to Unreal Engine 6. that will happen over this time period it is the same Journey to the open metaverse but there's no need to wait because we're doing it live we're building all these systems and deploying them as we build them right into Unreal Engine 5 openly with Partners so we hope you'll download this stuff download on your editor for fortnite download the Unreal Engine and get started and come see some of our Tech talks where you talk about this in way more technical detail thank you very much for your time [Applause]

Channel: GameSpot

Views: 158,097

Keywords: unreal engine 5, unreal engine, state of unreal, gdc 2023, pc, epic games, fortnite, lords of the fallen, king arthur Legends rise, senua's saga hellblade 2, hellblade ii, metahuman

Id: akIqVM0gh4w

Length: 72min 17sec (4337 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023