Unreal Engine 5 | Is it Ready for Next-Gen VR?

[Music] hello everyone and welcome back today's video should be quite a fun one [Music] so it's been about three weeks or so since unreal engine 5 was released out for early access testing and the last three weeks have been an absolute blast i think both for developers and just fans of video games to watch and see some of the new things that have been built and made so i'd say that overall it's been a generational leap it really has in terms of what developers are able to create the levels of complexity that they might be able to make for future games and even current gen games is really really impressive especially compared to what's on offer right now but for me as a virtual reality developer the big question that i've been wanting to ask since ue5 was first announced is what could it do for vr so today we're going to be prototyping a short virtual reality experience i wouldn't really call it a game because it really is only just a couple of days and the aim of it is to try out a few of the new ue5 technologies stress test them a little bit and see how they work for vr see what kinds of workflows and options virtual reality developers are going to have to make next generation games so let's begin by grabbing a few of epic games as mega scans assets these are really good for a few reasons but the main one is they're a great demonstration of medium to high poly 3d models designed for real-time games and they use 4k even 8k textures so in ue4 typically that would be quite a lot but ue5 offers ways to get this to work properly the biggest one being nanite now i personally feel that nanite is unreal engine's secret weapon at the moment it allows instead of millions or maybe tens of millions up to billions tens of billions i've seen even hundreds of billions of polygons to be shown on the screen at any given time and to maintain really really good frame rates now right now in virtual reality we have to be really careful with the number of polys that we show on screen to maintain high frame rates and i'm not expecting vr apps in the future to be able to have the same level of polygons as some of the new experiences especially the unreal engine 5 prototype or a demo project at the moment but if it could still give an increase a few million extra a few tens of millions extra they really transform what we're able to show and the kinds of worlds and the levels of complexity that we're able to build so the core of this quick project was basically just to build a relatively detailed relatively complex world using medium to high poly assets and high resolution textures usually i'd be optimizing all of this for ue4 games i'd ship but for this i just wanted to go all out but there is a little bit of bad news night doesn't work yet for vr [Music] so i've heard on the grapevine that nanite should work with virtual reality at least for pc vr i think in principle it can but right now it just hasn't been written to work with rendering to two different eyes and i hope that this is something that will come in the future but for now even though we're testing out ue5 nanite is out and obviously lumen the real-time global illumination system is definitely out it just can't maintain the frames and i'm not sure whether or not i'm religion 5 will actually provide any benefits using a traditional polygon handling system but we're going to push it to its limits anyway and see what that does we're also going to use a few other slightly more next-gen solutions we're going to be playing around with things like virtual textures for the light maps and basically just seeing everything that epic games has put together in the last couple of years that's coming together inside unreal engine 5 and testing whether or not it's ready for vr so now let's fast forward just a little bit so what you can see that i'm doing here is basically drawing on a library of assets that i've built up over the years and i'm just combining things in a way that makes a bit of visual and a bit of narrative sense to generate some really cool spaces it's also about pushing again the engine to its limits i'm not really worrying about polygons i'm not really worrying about texture budgets as much as i usually would i'm just modeling and freestyling and it definitely felt really liberating to do now usually especially for the architectural elements for a commercially shipped project i like to craft as much as i possibly can myself to give a lot more richness and control and precision in the worlds that i'm building and then i'll use mega scans to kind of bridge out into things that would otherwise take a bit too long like rocks for example but for a project like this which is basically just a kind of fun experiment you know you want to save as much time as you possibly can and drawing on pre-made libraries especially the mega scans library was firstly a lot of fun to work with also you know it turned what would have been a couple of months worth of 3d modelling into a couple of days just for a fun weekend project which was you know i think the right way to do things and thanks to this approach it didn't really take too long to get to a point where i was quite happy with the sorts of spaces that i was creating so you can see that the rough concept of this environment is really just a road that runs uphill and takes you past a really interesting number of views and city elements again drawn from a number of pre-made assets that were actually a pleasure to work with they were really nicely made i was very impressed with the level of detail that mega scans was able to bring to the table i thought it worked really really well so now we've got some interesting geometry and there's a lot more that i could do to you know really kind of bring it together but in the interest of time let's move on to lighting [Music] so there we go we've just brought in a much darker more moody sky box and combined it with some really nice warm city lighting and i think that works really well to show off a lot of the complexity and richness of the different models so we're using unreal engine's new gpu light mass rendering solution so what this is is it's a much better quality of baked lighting i don't think it's completely ready yet for production but when you can get it working like i have managed to for this really simple scene the quality of lighting is so so good and i think it's one of the biggest contributors to making things look next-gen without using all of this new high-tech lighting technology such as lumen right so we've got the majority of an environment that we can work with now i think once we put together a few small finishing touches like this crypt starting area we can start beginning to figure out what we're actually going to do with the space now at the beginning i said if i had time i was going to start prototyping some really basic gameplay and i still am although it really will be just super simple and super quick and i basically want to give the player a reason to move through the space so in the interest of speed i thought it would be quite fun to quickly prototype out an assault course style level so i very quickly modeled and textured a spring-loaded target and then dug deep into my archives and found an old sidearm that i'd modelled years ago and just kind of hooked them up all together it was really quick and it was just meant to be a bit arcadey and a bit cartoony it was quite a lot of fun to make in the end so now let's test it out and see how it all works together [Music] it really is very simple but i think that'll be enough for today now let's get it all laid out across the scene and then we'll give it a go [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so that was actually quite a lot of fun to make and play obviously if i was trying to make this as a real video game a proper project i think i would do just about every single thing differently but it would also crucially take much much longer it'd be much more resilient for a full commercial game a lot more scalable but it would take weeks and weeks and weeks so if you're just messing around and trying to stress test some geometry pushing this was a you know really fun way of kind of just moving through the space and i actually found myself returning to it a couple of times to see how fast i could get but let's not forget the original point of this test now if you recall the entire reason i'm doing this experiment is because i want to know how unreal engine 5 is going to help the next generation of virtual reality games to get better and better and better and ue5's biggest contribution for now seems to be visual the majority of the backend workflow just for developing and writing blueprints was pretty much the same although i do believe that there is a brand new scripting language that unreal is releasing to bridge the gap between blueprints and c plus this should be coming out well at some point whenever it's ready and it looks really really exciting to give a lot more power and functionality to people like me who have started by learning blueprints and are then working their way into more complex types of programming but on the question is unreal engine 5 ready for virtual reality i think the answer is probably not quite yet obviously nanite doesn't work yet and i think that's going to be the biggest thing but apart from that things like the gpu light mask that i used when you try to scale this up to more complex types of levels it doesn't quite work because it doesn't work with what's called h-lods or the proxy models that you'll put into the background of your scene wherever the player isn't you know there are so many really amazing components that when you squint looks like a uh element of what next-gen vr might be at least visually but then it doesn't just quite mesh together with everything yet and to be honest you know it's in early access it's undergoing development so it's all par for the course and it's just how it is i think it's pretty important to do quick little tests like this here and there as a developer firstly just to kind of push how you see developing and to open your mind up to a few new options for doing things but also to stay on top of the latest tech and the latest options even if it's not ready and even if you're not going to be completely changing the way you work doing this can be a really valuable resource for just you know making sure that you're always prepared to advance your workflow as things progress as well as that i think it's really important just to bear in mind that the question of what does a next generation virtual reality game look like that is a huge question and there are thousands and thousands of components to it just off the top of my head we've got things like eye tracked foveated rendering we've got next-gen physics and interaction we've got a faster frame rate we've got adding more complexity and detail to worlds we've got new kinds of ways of making content and modeling worlds uh we've got a hundred other things as well that would you know be really precise but when applied properly will just allow people to build faster better uh more immersive worlds so i personally feel that although ue5 is probably going to be the tool that a lot of people use to build next generation experiences it's not going to do all the work for people and the majority of the next gen of virtual reality games is going to still come down to design that is just more empowered by a better quality of bass engine and for me the moment that i feel unreal engine 5 is ready to be developed on i'm going to switch from unreal engine 4 and start using ue5 because it is really a large amount of fun to use um and if some of the really key tools like nanite can start working with vr properly i think it'll be uh pretty pretty game changing but for now i'm going to stick with ue4 and i'm just going to keep my eye on ue5 and keep playing with it in my free time but for now it's back to unreal engine 4. i've still got a fair amount of modelling and developing to do over the next couple of months and i can't wait to show you more about the main project that i'm making but if you have any questions comments hopes dreams about the next generation of virtual reality leave them in the comments it's always a great place to chat and i'll try to get to them if i can and also try to make a follow-up video in the next few weeks but until then once again thank you so much for watching and i'll see you soon take care [Music] you

Channel: Alistair Hume

Views: 91,005

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, Lumen

Id: WQDPtQOuMmM

Length: 14min 9sec (849 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021