Unreal Engine 5.2 Tech Demo Full Presentation | State of Unreal GDC 2023

[Applause] 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 uses 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 depths 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 qixel 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

Channel: GameSpot

Views: 1,056,063

Keywords: unreal engine 5.2, unreal engine, ue, gdc, gdc 2023, epic games

Id: Dj60HHy-Kqk

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 22 2023