UE4 to UE5 - Impacts & Changes to your workflow

unreal engine 5 is out you can download it it's in early access you can download a sample project and really check out a lot of the cool tech that's happening with it but probably the more pressing question is does this really change your workflow and second to that is do you have to relearn the engine so that's we're gonna cover today in this video so let's go ahead and jump in so the first question and probably the most important is with ue5 do you have to relearn the engine the short answer is no in fact all of the the tools and uh even some of the the workflow that we're predominantly used to with unreal engine 4 still apply in fact it's still there just to give you an idea so i docked my content browser but we still have we've under window we've got our content browsers we can do multiples in fact our windows exactly the same we can access a lot of the exact same tools in here um if anything this is more just kind of a ui refresh on top of it now one thing that is slightly different but again is there is that you'll notice that we now have these create buttons et cetera et cetera but you can even if i do i place actors have you can see that i start to get something very similar feeling to what ue4 was so the short answer is without going panel by panel um all of the controls parameters and everything that we've had before in unreal engine 4 all of it exists it's all still there and in fact for the most part outside of just kind of the visual refresh nothing has really changed that much all right let's go to point number two which is does this change my workflow not really um importing your objects creating your objects manipulating them uh making adjustments etc all that is pretty much the same um in fact if i go into here and just select an object you can see that i've got my details panel i can scroll down all of that is exactly the same now the two biggest additions to unreal engine 5 which are huge is nanite and lumen nanite being the system that kind of processes geometry at extremely high detail and lumen being this realistic lighting uh that we have that is just kind of just works out of the box um it is literally a proverbial easy button um now with that being said um going back to the thing about does this change your workflow uh with nanite and lumen um i think it's best to kind of um approach these as more like they are shortcuts uh what that means is that you're still gonna have to place some lights you're still gonna have to import geometry however a lot of the um kind of post systems that you have to do for example build your lighting to go into light maps and stuff a lot of that gets kind of um erased when working with uh nanite and lumen so with that just think that you still have to kind of go through a similar workflow but nanite and luma just help you get there a lot faster all right uh which kind of goes to the third question is you know can i still use real-time ray tracing um technically yes um while you know there is there are options inside of unreal engine 5 for both lighting and reflections to be able to switch between you know traditional lumen or real-time ray tracing lumen is technically designed to replace real-time ray tracing so something again to note here is that you can actually selectively toggle between lumen and real-time ray tracing in both the project settings and your post processing volumes all right all right let's go number four nanite okay this is cool this is awesome now i can import my zbrush models technically yes you can however there are some considerations to keep in mind um one of the really cool features about nanite is that it can process extremely high density meshes and a lot of them so in the scene here this is the uh the value of the ancient which is the um uh the example project you can download i mean you can see if i go down to this rock level i mean we have um amazing fidelity here in fact the the near clipping plane actually um hits before i can even get down to this level so um the scene itself i mean if you were to go down to you know how many tries and stuff i have no clue it's it's ridiculous um but uh something uh that you should keep in mind here is that uh for nana to really work as best as you can a couple things to keep in mind now the first thing is is this idea that um in order to take advantage of the nanite system when you import your static meshes so your objects into your scene there is a new checkbox inside of that import setting which says convert to nanite so what is happening is underneath the hood nanite is basically a system and an algorithm for crunching this massive data set of information of triangles polygons etc and it does it without you really needing to interact with it so again that is the easy check box of just go ahead and say make sure your static mesh will convert to nanite now if you have a scene already set up and say for example you're converting that scene from ue4 to ue5 um or you just forgot to check that box in the import setting you can go into any of your static meshes and just check that box that says use with nanite now a couple things to keep in mind when do you want to use nanite as opposed to just using a static mesh um if the mesh itself contains a lot of triangles or it's going to be very very small on screen so you've got a higher density of polygons and a smaller kind of pixel area if you have many instances of the same thing in the scene or if it acts as like a major occluder of other nanite geometry so if we kind of look over here you can see we've got kind of our um our quiksil scan geometry over here which is occluding quite a bit so that could be a use case where uh nanite would be very good for that uh now something else to take note of with nanite that slightly does change your workflow nanite handles all of the level of detail automatically uh traditionally if you're familiar with the way lods work traditionally you have very distinct states so you'd have your base model your lowest lod and then you'd have another one that's a little bit lower res etcetera etcetera nanite handles that differently and this is why kind of the when you check the box you don't get to go in there and tweak it too much uh nanite actually handles and the way that it processes this density of meshes is in clusters is the easiest way to think about it so you don't really have to go in and create lods nana does it automatically which is beautiful and it does a great job and it's almost imperceptible when you start going in and out of your draw distances another point about nanite 2 is there there's probably this conception that if you're importing uh geometry so in fact when we when the the community saw ue5 kind of demo for the first time um and you know it was the kind of showcasing uh same character that we have on on screen here um when uh when you you know it kind of revealed this big open temple and you had basically zbrush scopes and you had i think it's like 50 or 500 of them i can't remember exactly but the whole concept one of the one of the biggest questions that raised there was okay does this dramatically increase my packaging size because i'm basically you know putting in a zbrush mess no um it isn't this is the first thing that you know i think is really important to understand about nanite is even though your visual fidelity is substantially higher than it has ever really been in the past one of the really cool things about the nanite system is that it's able to compress this information down pretty heavily in fact to kind of quote from the documentation right now because of the micro detail that nanite is able to achieve it's assumed that it means it's a larger increase in geometry data resulting in larger game package sizes however that's really not the fact in fact nanite's mesh format is significantly smaller than the standard static mesh format because of nanite specialized mesh encoding one of the things i thought was really interesting about an example here is that a 1.5 million triangle nanite mesh can look both better and be smaller in terms of packaging size than a low poly mesh with a 4k normal map so that one is a huge change to workflow because now that you're increasing your mesh sizes your information there it's important again that you check that nanite checkbox and now you may actually be able to drop your gpu calls because you're not having to compress normal maps out too much or you've got you know you know your your polygon mesh which means you may not have to run ultra ultra high normal maps so something to keep in mind um uh professional tip i'll tell you guys on this one is you'll still need to make sure that you profile and run like your size map and your size audits to make sure that the final output hits with your um your target hardware um okay this brings me to point number five um kind of breaking this down by industry first question kind of being what is the impact on game development specifically for creating games for platforms like pc uh consoles etc um in short you can achieve amazing results in a shorter amount of time kind of going back to i said that you know lumen and nanite are kind of shortcuts to getting to a you know visual fidelity or information being processed in the engine much faster than we have before in the past um however you know still be mindful that you need to uh you need to be cognizant of all the normal stuff right your packaging size your target hardware limitations uh your texture memory um et cetera again the the beautiful part about this especially for game development is that unreal engine is doing all of the heavy lifting which means you get to focus more on the experience the story the look the visuals the fidelity et cetera so that is that's awesome and especially with lumen now too you're really you aren't boxed in like you have been in the past with limited hardware support with real-time ray tracing for example real-time ray tracing really works on series 2 and series 3 cards from nvidia amd kind of the equivalent on that well now with unreal engine 5 you aren't locked down to having to use real-time ray tracing in fact it will just work which is which is crazy um one of the other things too which is great is no more light making um if you've ever had to do large maps or anything or try to do production and having to click that build lighting that's always kind of been a pain now it just does it um which is which is awesome all right so point number six kind of sticking with our industries here what is the impact on arcviz so where you know you really want the best fidelity you're not super concerned with having to achieve 60 90 120 frames a second uh biggest thing first and foremost is the workflow boost so what we're talking about here is less parameters to adjust right in the past you may have had to do a certain lighting but say for example you know you're working like an interior uh the apartment one always sounds kind of you know an apartment scene or something so you have a big window light is streaming in uh traditionally in the past you could go to bake lighting but sometimes you would get dark spots in the room um and you'd have to kind of go in there and do boost uh filler lights you'd have to do kind of kicker lights and stuff uh to really get that balance well now with with lumen in particular you can drop that directional light have it stream in a window and using just a slider of intensity or the indirect lighting intensity itself so you're talking two sliders now you can literally light that entire scene in fact if there's you know adjacent rooms light will spill into there as well so um absolutely a huge time saver and less having to adjust a lot of parameters um now something else too whereas in the past uh data smith uh really helped to ingest volumes of information so if you ever use that workflow coming from you know like a cad dcc program to import it into unreal uh data smith is a great interchange either that doesn't mean that data smith is going away in fact it's still completely 100 applicable uh but in the situation with arcviz uh one of the things that it helps out a lot is that with nanite in particular uh you don't really have to try to compress things or get things exactly perfect or have to worry about that nana jcp says i got you bro um go ahead and just you know pump the information that you need it will handle in all the lods etc so again you don't have to worry too much about the optimization step in it to get it to function really well um and kind of last thing kind of sticking with the arc fit stuff is you know on your your smaller scenes especially those with um uh you know like like fewer meshes uh nanai automatically handling the lods um is great with lumen automatically handling you can literally just focus on framing that scene and making it look beautiful all right uh kind of going uh number seven out here too which is what is the impact on product vis um honestly the pretty much the exact same benefits that we're seeing with game development and we're also seeing with arcviz apply to productviz um so very very self-explanatory there um and then finally kind of last thing i want to hit is um uh what is the impact on virtual production um visually speaking i i feel like some of the things are immediately will duh this makes sense uh but kind of break it down again we have fewer parameters that we have to mess with right like we can drop in literally just a sunlight angle it adjusts the intensity and the indirect lighting intensity and the entire scene is completely lit including the ambient bounce in there which is incredible this also means with lumen in the way that light is interacting behind the scenes we get a much more physically accurate representation of that lighting which again is going to get us closer and truer to how light would respond in the real world which you know now means your virtual sets are going to look that much better um another thing here too especially with uh nanite is that it means that we have less reliance on lods and other kind of performance um adjustments that we can make in the engine uh to achieve you know typically if you're gonna be doing like 24 frames a second or higher depending on what you're in uh in frame capture in camera capture frames per second is so from that i mean you're talking about now we're seeing uh better lit stages and we can pump a lot more information in this scene which means that that that uh that kind of digital divide where we see oh this is digital this is not it's probably gonna dissipate extremely quickly if it hasn't already um so with that being said um hopefully this is this dispels some myths again i think the biggest thing that i do want to reinforce in this video in particular is that all the information all the workflow that you've been learning up to this point with ue4 absolutely 100 completely applies to working in unreal engine 5 in fact you'll find a lot of the same windows controls and panels everything exactly where they were in unreal engine 4 just re-skinned slightly different and then the second thing with this too is to understand that with lumen and nan again the the two biggest things kind of um immediately that we can see with the engine they don't necessarily replace anything they're not going to they're not going to nix out having lighting artists or anything that no no that's that's still completely applicable again this is just a tool the most important thing is that you know a tool doesn't tell a story artists do um and so with that um you just now have a faster way of getting from the idea to implementation which is incredible so um it's going to be exciting especially to see some of the other things that i know are slated for unreal engine 5 start to come out as the tech is being built and stuff like that um but it is an amazing tool it is a game changer um no pun intended on that one um and super excited to see kind of a lot of the cool things that come out of being able to use this tech i know myself personally i'm really enjoying and have been enjoying working in it so uh that will kind of cover this uh with kind of the ue40 ue5 workflow so i hope this helps so stay safe out there we'll see you guys in the next one

Channel: Ryan Manning

Views: 21,073

Keywords: UE4, Training, Game Dev, Tutorial, Unreal Engine, UE5, Unreal Engine 5, Workflow, Early Access, Virtual Production, ArchViz, ProductViz, Lumen, Nanite

Id: Ea7ylWIVsn0

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021