Unreal Engine 5.4 Preview 1 | State of Unreal | GDC 2024

hi everyone it's been a busy year since the last GDC back in October we shipped u53 then in December we launched fortnite chapter 5 along with Lego fortnite rocket racing and Festival in our big bang event and now we're about to ship u54 everything we shipped over last year has made UI a better engine for you and the entire community of unreal developers so let's take a look at what's coming on the rendering side we just saw some of the beautiful scenes in the sky Dan demo they showed what can be achieved with Nite desolation there were also nice volumetric effects using Aral genius volume feature in 54 you'll also get other features like local fog volumes and Niagara lightweight emitters just to name a few but most importantly we've made a lot of performance improvements we now have faster loomin shadows and rate racing we've added variable rate shading for Nite we massively improved instant skulling and we significantly improved parallelism in the renderer you name it we made it faster with a city sample demo that shipped in 5 our console test showed that the render tread time was reduced by 50% and the GPU time decreased by 25% now now let's talk about animation over the past year our team has been hard at work on a worldclass update to our animation systems and I'm happy to share that our motion matching technology is now production ready motion matching is a simple yet powerful way to animate characters in games instead of handcrafted State machines motion matching continuously selects the best frame of Animation to play from its motion database it aims to closely match the current pose of the character as well as it past and future movement our implementation scales with the size of your data set to reach the High Fidelity you need and it uses posw warping algorithms to fill in the gaps but motion matching is a tool for more than just Locomotion as you can see here it's used for jumping falling and complex for traversal we usea 3D trajectory prediction to produce seamless transitions with anticipation and long follow truths and this results in much more believable animation we've also built world-class authoring and debugging tools like the rewind debugger that allows you to record inspect and edit your motion databases to understand and improve your transitions the motion matching system has been battle tested and is ready for prime time it has been in use in fortnite since the launch of chapter 5 in December running on all characters on all platforms and to help you get started started we will be releasing a sample Project based on what you've seen today this project will include over 500 AAA animations created from highand motion capture data with the local motion and traversal data set used in this demo best of all it will be free for all Unreal Engine developers and compatible with the metalum [Music] rig now a lot of about creating a game is about telling a story to bring their ideas and Visions to life storytellers must iterate constantly and efficiently they must be able to get the right animation the right camera angle and the perfect lighting that completes the scene we've been investing in our animation altering tools with control rig and sequencer and we've now reached a very important milestone for the first time a full game production Lego fortnite was rigged and animated entirely in engine with no external DCC used and so far we've produced over 240 minutes of animation for Lego fortnite across gameplay emotes cinematics and trailers working entirely in Unreal Engine means there is no roundt tripping with an external DCC no exporting being able to see everything in context lighting camera animation iterating and making change es in real time with final pixels is a real game Cher but our animators always tell us that behind every great animation is a great rig in Unreal Engine 54 creating rigs becomes much quicker and easier than before with modular control rigs creators also have the ability to auor skeletons and skin weights and take advantage of our new suite deformers to help achieve fundamental rig features such as Squat and stretch these tools have changed the way we bring our stories to life and we're excited to share them with you with games getting bigger with more complex content developer iteration will always be top of mine we've significantly improved C++ compilation times with the help of our new Unreal build accelerator for highly performant distributed Cod Builds on our build Farm we now see that unreal editor compiles two to three times faster you'll also be happy to hear that we compile far fewer shaders in the editor as well as during cooks and finally we improveed the onboarding process for unreal Cloud DDC for large distributed teams we've been quite busy on Theo front 2o meta sounds was the foundation for oio in all our new experiences we had GR granular synthesized vehicles in rocket racing the sample accurate weapon overall in Battle Royale Dynamic Ambience and music in Lego fortnite Rhythm games and festival and jam and 3D user created Music in UE FN Patchwork and to help sound designer understand debug and create powerful next genio we're shipping a new experimental oio profiling tool called oio insights if you're a sound designer and want to make something truly unique and immersive meta sounds is the right tool for you now let's talk about our procedural content generation framework which we released as experimental as here with PCG artists can build vast worlds efficiently in a completely art directable way using a old graph to set up parameterized rule sets you can create fast iterative and deterministic procedure content even at runtime for 54 we added new features such as runtime AR cold generation attribute set tables feedback loops and the list goes on we use the PCG framework in our internal production including Lego fortnite in fact the team developed their own world creation system using PCG to craft their massive environments their system generates a vast amount of unique tiles which are then assembled on the fly to compose a unique world for each player to experience our learnings translate into new ways for you to use a framework develop new tools and create your own gameplay opportunities to get you started we are also releasing a PCG biome creation plugin as a concrete example of a flexible datadriven tool with a built built with a systemic approach featuring the latest Improvement so so we're happy to announce that the PCG framework is going with u54 and planning to be production ready by GDC 2025 speaking of Lego fortnite the game has been an amazing opportunity to battle test and improve some of our features chaos physics was heavily optimized to support large scale building and destruction with a new prediction model to create fewer and smoother Corrections for physics objects it's worth noting that the multiplayer physics sandbox runs server side and therefore provides coherent and performance simulation on all platforms our data oriented programming framework called Mass was put to the test to simulate and hold more than 6 million lightweight actors and finally we optimized the engine storage memory usage and pervs resulting in Lego fortnite working great across all platforms including mobile with all of this work Unreal Engine is now even better for your own ambitious crossplatform projects I hope you enjoyed this short glimpse of all the cool things our teams have been been working on I invite you all to check out preview one of Unreal Engine 54 available today with the full release coming in a month or so to get a deeper dive into our animation updates join us for our Tech talk later this afternoon and check out our talks at our learning theater in our booth over at Moscone and as always you can visit our road map to learn more about the future of Unreal Engine

Channel: Unreal Engine

Views: 77,405

Keywords: Unreal Engine, Epic Games, UE4, Unreal, Game Engine, Game Dev, Game Development

Id: vfY33rza9FI

Length: 9min 29sec (569 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024