Unreal Engine 5 | How Powerful is It?

[Music] so yesterday something absolutely amazing happened for the first time in a good few months we got some more information about unreal engine 5 and what's more epic games made it freely available for us to explore in early access so like many tens of thousands of people across the world surely did i got it downloaded as soon as i possibly could and started to play around with some of the new tools and features and i have to say although i was optimistic i was still absolutely blown away by a few of the things that the engine can now do now since we all saw the demo last year i think a number of people have had a lot of questions about unreal engine 5 and what it's actually going to be like to work with i think there's been particularly two things that have been on everyone's mind two technologies that epic games really showed off called nanite and lumen now nanai is a new uh polygon handling system inside ue5 and what it basically allows people to do is have not just millions or tens of millions but hundreds of millions even billions of polygons in a scene and lumen is a new global illumination system for real-time gi and last year during the demo they both looked absolutely amazing but this happened once before when numbering legend 4 was first shown off with the elemental demo almost 10 years ago uh they had a real-time gi solution as well and it looks really good it looked production ready but it never actually made it to the final engine i believe it was called svogi or screen space voxel occluded global illumination don't quote me on that can't actually quite remember but basically uh ue4 promised to have real-time gi as well and i think because it didn't perform well enough it was cut so i was absolutely expecting nanite to be really good because it looks amazing but the gi system i was a little bit skeptical of how it was actually going to work and i was pleasantly surprised that not only was it good it was very very very very good it genuinely just made things look naturally lit and i remember when i first started playing around with a few of my own assets and laying them over the scene i started to uh just kind of move the light around and there was no baking there was no uh kind of clicking of render i just dragged something in and it looked like it belonged there it looked like it was in the world being lit by the world with light coming off from all different directions and to be honest my mind was blown just a little bit i think every single 3d creator has always had these kind of dreams of ultra far future technologies that allow you to basically just very quickly and naturally create any world you could possibly imagine and it always looks absolutely amazing don't know how it works don't know how it does it but i think everyone dreams of this kind of thing just a little bit at least i know i do and as amazing as unreal engine 4 is and as amazing as some of the new 3d modeling tools like blender are it's always been quite far away from that dream of just raw creation and when i tried unreal legend five i almost felt like a caveman in a spaceship for a few minutes at first because just just for a minute i kind of got a sense of that rapid perfect convincing creation a little bit when i started dragging dropping things into the scene it just did what you wanted it to do so that was for me one of the coolest experiences i've had with a 3d tool in quite a while but how powerful actually is unreal engine 5. now don't forget this is a question that's going to take months and months and months to answer for a number of reasons firstly this is early access so everything is still i'm sure subject to change but more than that these are brand new features and at the time of making this video the majority of the community at least in a public sense has had maybe 24 hours or so to explore what ue5 can do it's going to take a long time for people to really get to grips with the limitations and the possibilities of these new tools and that's completely normal that's completely fine now although it seems more and more every day like we might be living in some kind of crazy techy future it's worth remembering that tools are still tools they're not magic ones and there is going to be just as many pitfalls and limitations of a lot of unreal engines new methodologies as there are amazing new opportunities and it's up to artists and creators and developers and tech artists to figure out how to best use these tools and when and why to use different options for example for me my question is okay unreal engine looks absolutely amazing it's doing some really cool stuff but for my own virtual reality projects do these new tools provide benefits for me to move into umbrella engine 5 and use them or have i already got my workflow set for this next commercial project that i'm working on so for me i'm already pretty sure that lumen the real time gi is completely out of the question for vr as far as i've seen from some of the epigame staff and what they've said it's not set up to work in vr for performance reasons but it also doesn't work with stereo rendering yet or forward shading and that's fine but for me it's nanite that i think has a lot of interest and that's where i'm going to spend a lot of time research and exploring to see if nanai is better than current lod systems for a vr scale project but for the context of a high-end current generation or pc-based development i think these new technologies are an absolute game changer and what i would encourage people to do now that want to learn a bit more about unreal engine 5 is to get it downloaded and just have a play around as always it's amazing to have super super powerful tools to help you do things and every day that passes at the moment with the amount of technological development we're seeing in real time an artist can do something that they couldn't do the day before and don't get me wrong that's amazing and that's you know where a lot of the growth and development comes from but it doesn't replace having to learn about how to craft worlds or learn about how to tell stories or learn about how to use these tools in an effective way so for all the hype we're gonna see and all the amazing things we're gonna see uh don't let it form an excuse to stop learning if anything this is the time to really start asking big questions and finding ways to answer them because you can now do some amazing new things and the question is how now i absolutely can't wait to see what a lot of the virtual production world does with unreal engine 5. i'm sure a number of big companies have been using ue5 already in you know special agreements but i think a lot of other companies have been using ue4 for virtual production a great example would be corridor they have uh done some amazing things with ue4 over the last few months and i can't wait to see what ue5 does for their sense of lighting and environmental richness i think it could really you know take them to that next level [Music] apart from that unreal engine 5 does look like a really competent continuation of ue4 when you start really digging into it things like the blueprint editor looks for now at least pretty much the same as unreal engine 4. same for the materials editor so this is a massive massive increment but it's not a complete rewrite if you've used ue4 ue5 should make a fair amount of sense to you [Music] but in spite of that i think for me uh trying on my engine 5 and seeing the demo yesterday and seeing what some other people were doing with it even in the first 24 hours felt just a little bit monumental it felt like something to be remembered i think it must have been the same with ue4 back in the day but it felt like staring across the horizon towards a new generation of well possibility for content creation new ways to tell stories new ways to craft worlds and that's you know that's that's my thing that's that's what i'm about so i had a great day yesterday i had a great time playing around with unreal engine and whether or not this forms the new basis for the way that i'm going to make virtual reality projects at least in the time being or whether or not i'll stick to a really stable unreal engine 4 build it doesn't really matter ue5 is here and the game world isn't going to be the same again and that's pretty cool as a side note it's also finally time to really learn zbrush i think high poly might not be the new low poly yet but it will be one day so get it downloaded see what ue5 is good at see what it's bad at be level-headed about it but um i hope you'll have a good time as you do it i know i certainly will and until next time thanks for watching and take care

Channel: Alistair Hume

Views: 419,086

Rating: 4.8744702 out of 5

Keywords: Epic Games, Unreal Engine 5, game trailer, gaming, video games, video game trailers, upcoming video games, new video games 2021, upcoming video games 2021, unreal, unreal engine, unreal engine demo, PS5, Xbox, VR, Virtual Reality, UE5 VR, Valve Index, Ready Player One, Metaverse, VR Metaverse, Future, SWO, UE5, UE4, Game Engine, Game Development, Gamedev, Environment Art, World building, VR Game, Next gen, next-gen, next gen game, sci-fi, scifi, Oculus, future city, new features

Id: 1DvptS0pcm0

Length: 9min 8sec (548 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/triton100]

How easy or hard is it to learn unreal if you’ve never used it before.

[u/PandaCommando69]

I've always wanted this tool, but didn't know it existed and I could just download it :-) Thanks OP!

[u/ordinaryBiped]

As powerful as your GPU is