CHANCE: Hi, I'm Chance Ivey, Senior
Technical Designer at Epic Games. GALEN: And I'm Galen Davis, Producer
and Evangelist for Quixel at Epic Games. CHANCE: Last summer, we revealed the first look at
what's coming in Unreal Engine 5 the next generation of
our real-time technology, and our demo "Lumen
in the Land of Nanite". Since then, the Engine Team has been
working hard on preparing the tools and technology for creators around
the world to get their hands on so that they can explore the new
features and provide us with feedback. GALEN: Now, just a few months ago, we
assembled a small team of developers to see what they could build
using these new features. The result is a new practical sample
project called "Valley of The Ancient". And today we're excited to give
you the very first hands-on look at some of the new tools and
workflows that we used to build it. CHANCE: Now we've got a
lot to get to so let's get started. GALEN: When setting
out to make our demo we wanted to push the boundaries
of what's possible with UE5 today while targeting next-gen
hardware specifications. Here are sequences running in real-time
on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Okay, welcome to the brand
new UI in Unreal Engine 5. While a lot of the same
features and functionality that you come to know in UE4
are still present in the new UI, we've added several new systems to put
you at the center of the experience. For example, the Content Browser can now be
accessed like a drawer using hotkeys, allowing you to keep
a clean workspace while still having access to
all the content that you need. We can also collapse and restore
editor tabs to and from the sidebar, maximizing the
viewport experience. And you're going to
see a lot more of the UI when we get further
into this presentation but we can't wait for you
to get your hands on it. Now, one of the main features
of Unreal Engine 5 is Nanite. Our virtualized micropolygon geometry
system that frees artists to create as much geometric
detail as the eye can see. Virtualized geometry supports orders of magnitude more
triangles without compromising speed, and replaces the traditional
system of mesh LODs, handling all detailed
transitions seamlessly, without any additional setup. In other words, Nanite lets the artist create
while the engine does the work. Switching to this
Nanite visualization, you can see individual
triangles rendered out as different colors
here in the viewport. And because the
geometry is now virtualized, you can feel free to place assets
like these all throughout your scene to fill out a massive
player space. Using this debug view, you can see individual instances
represented by different colors from swatch to swatch. Each instance in
this environment contains around 1
to 2 million triangles, providing enough detail
for the camera to roam with complete creative freedom. Now,
UE5's new anti-aliasing solution, Temporal Super Resolution, keeps up
with all this new geometric detail, to create sharper,
more stable images than before with quality approaching true
native 4K at the cost of 1080p. While highly detailed
assets are great on their own high quality lighting that realistically
reacts to your scene is what opens the door to more
dynamic worlds and immersive gameplay. Lumen is our fully dynamic real-time
global illumination solution that immediately reacts
to scene and light change, making for more
believable experiences. And the GI hooks in directly
with our time of day settings, allowing for true physically based
setups for photorealistic environments. The Megascans library has meticulously calibrated
physically based services and objects in the thousands of
assets as of today. And the assets that
we're highlighting here show just how powerful
it is to have Nanite and Lumen working in tandem. Also thanks to the new
Sky Atmosphere system, it is incredibly simple to quickly
simulate realistic time of day, carefully art direct
volumetric clouds and make modifications
to things like atmospherics, sun position and fog. And for this example,
we wanted a fully dynamic scene No light baking, and realistic interpolation
between the different times of day. Of course, when in development, having access to high quality
content that's easy to use helps you iterate quickly and saves lots of time that can be
better spent elsewhere on your project. With Quixel now being a
part of the Epic Games family we've made the full
Megascans library free and open for all
Unreal Engine users. Bridge, our online browser
for Megascans assets, has historically functioned
as a standalone application for quickly exporting assets
in bulk directly into the engine, albeit separate from Unreal. Today, we're happy to announce that
Bridge is now natively integrated directly into the engine UI. Now, you can simply drag and
drop assets directly into your scene for a more intuitive and
connected experience And simply logging
in with your Epic ID gives you immediate access to
thousands of assets to use for free in your Unreal Engine projects. We are constantly looking to enhance
the value of the Megascans library and today we're
excited to announce that we're adding a brand new
asset type called Mega Assemblies. Mega Assemblies are
the natural next step for us in removing even more barriers for
artists in crafting their worlds. By combining existing assets
from the Megascans library our Artists are
pre-assembling elements that can be quickly accessed and
leveraged to populate your scenes. Using the Moab set,
let's add an assembly to our scene. And just like that, we were able to quickly change the
composition of this area in our map. With UE5, we are reimagining what
collaboration looks like for teams and projects of all sizes. A common challenge when
collaborating on large worlds is deciding how to
structure map content so that everyone on the team can
easily work without asset contention while also avoiding
painful merge conflicts. A new system
called World Partition makes traditional
world-building workflows obsolete by changing the way that
we think about map files. Rather than requiring artists
to build out map content as a series of streaming levels. World partition allows
teams to think of a single map as one large world that gets
broken down automatically into many smaller,
streamable cells on a grid. These cells can be selectively
loaded or unloaded in the editor to save on edit-time resources, allowing artists to only load up the
sections of the map that they need. On top of that changes to
Actors in a World Partition map are tracked at the actor
level not the map level. This "One File Per Actor" approach
empowers different team members to work on different
actors in the same map without having to worry about their
changes getting clobbered in a merge or having to revert to
get someone else's edits. Now, this approach means you could
have artists lighting, set dressing, and reworking the
landscape simultaneously all within the
same virtual space. Managing this much
content at runtime typically requires a ton of thought
about how to stream relevant content in and out to stay
inside performance budgets. Fortunately,
World Partition handles that as well. At runtime, only this cells in a user-defined
radius from our player are loaded, and as we move,
new cells are streamed in while cells no longer
needed are replaced by their lower resolution
Hierarchical Level of Detail, or H-LOD, version and since all projects
have different requirements, the cell size and loading
radius are fully configurable to match each project's
content streaming needs. Another feature that comes along
with World Partition is Data Layers. Data Layers are a way
to categorize map assets and collectively
enable or disable them when you want to alter
the state of the world. Working in Data Layers, a separate group of artists was able to assemble a mythical
re-imagination of the environment with more interactive
elements for our demo. At runtime,
we can swap between these two modes, streaming thousands
of actors in and out, and enter into the Dark World Let's see this in action
as we go back to Chance. CHANCE: Thanks Galen Many runtime and
interactive frameworks in Unreal Engine are getting
significant updates in UE5. One thing we've
added for animation is an experimental
new Full-Body IK solver, which is designed to give you
better results with less work. Here you can see it in action
as a rig for our player character, Echo, corrects itself to adjust for
variations on the ground below her. It's deterministic, reliable and
around 10 times faster than before. To build and maintain more
scalable gameplay systems, we've also added a new framework
called Game Feature Plugins that will allow you to build and ship
game content in a more modular way. With Game Feature Plugins numerous core gameplay
features can be built in parallel with better encapsulation
and finer content organization. Game Feature Plugins allow developers
to add activation instructions to extend base
game functionality, register new input
actions for players, and interface with other
frameworks such as animation. When we shifted
into the Dark World, we also activated a new
game feature to give Echo a brand new attack ability. All of the assets and
logic needed for the ability, including new animations, input controls, Blueprint code, VFX, and audio are contained inside this plugin and core gameplay
classes have no idea that these assets
exist until we activate it. We've also added a feature
called Animation Motion Warping which allows you to manipulate
root motion animations to adapt them to the world. Echo's vault animation was authored to the specific
dimensions of this rubble. Leveraging Motion Warping, we were able to
add notify states in the vault animation asset
that can react to transform data passed in via Blueprints. This allowed us to
reuse the same animation to vault over other assets
of different dimensions like these pieces of debris by sending information
about their size into the Motion Warping system. Before triggering the
vaulting animation, a Blueprint script
determines her rotation, how high up she jumps, how far she needs to
move to get to the other side, and where her feet should land. Motion Warping then adapts the
root motion of the vault animation to match this data. Also,
for the Rift Interact Animation, we use Motion Warping to
place Echo in the perfect position in order to ensure her hand
would always touch the rift. So, on the topic of Animation, Unreal Engine 5 also includes
our in-editor rigging tool, Control Rig. Meet The Ancient, A film quality creature
imagined and built by our friends at the Aaron
Sims Creative Company. We partnered with Aaron Sims and his group of talented
artists to concept the Dark World and to bring it to life through an
enormous, mythical adversary. Now, every single
animation for The Ancient was authored wholly in-engine
by the Aaron Sims Creative team using Control Rig and Sequencer, our linear cinematic
animation tool. Also just to push
the boundaries a bit they even built it out of a
collection of Nanite meshes totaling over 50 million triangles
attached directly to the skeleton. Control Rig was designed to
keep artists close to their creations without having to bounce back
and forth between software packages allowing them to quickly iterate all inside Unreal. While imagining the battle
between Echo and The Ancient, we wanted to give the
creature a heavy laser attack that Echo would have to avoid. We needed it to track
Echo's location in the Arena and fire a slow,
sweeping blast towards her. Taking advantage of the Full-Body
IK Slolver mentioned earlier, we were able to influence
the direction and distance The Ancient reaches out
during the firing animation based on where
Echo is in the scene. Let's see the results. Here is what the base
firing animation looks like... And here it is again, with the Full-Body IK
post-process layers enabled and our info about echo
passed into Control Rig. With Full-Body IK,
and Control Rig, designers and artists can now author fully dynamic
animations that react to gameplay without having to build complex
animation state machines composed of numerous
animation assets. In Unreal Engine 5, we've completely
overhauled the audio engine, centered around MetaSounds, a new asset type used for
every sound effect in our demo. MetaSounds bring the power and
flexibility found in material editors to audio creation, providing fine control for
authoring procedural game audio. With full audio synthesis capabilities
and a rich audio function library, MetaSounds give unprecedented
control over sound effects and runtime applications. Using MetaSounds, we built The Ancient's laser attack
out of a combination of sound samples and synthesized audio. Let's briefly break
down how it was set up. Using the stereo mixer, let's isolate and play just
the synthesized charge sound. This effect is made by using a
handful of sound wave generators and multiple modulation widgets. Now, let's mix back in our sound
samples to hear the final result again. All right,
let's take down The Ancient! CHANCE: Now, everything we've
been showing you in today's demo focuses on some of
the new features in UE5, but many of your favorite
UE4 features such as Niagara Particles
and Visual Effects, Chaos Physics, Blueprint Visual Scripting,
and more have also received numerous
updates in Unreal Engine 5. GALEN: Plus, all your UE4
projects can be upgraded to UE5 so you won't have to worry
about forward compatibility for what you're working on now. CHANCE: Here at Epic, we are passionate about building
great tools and new technology, and a big part of our excitement
is being able to bring you, the developer community,
on the journey with us. So today we're making an Early
Access build of Unreal Engine 5 freely available on the
Epic Games Launcher and the Unreal Engine GitHub so you can explore and
test out these tools yourself to get an early look at what's coming
later in the full release of UE 5.0 GALEN: Also we're releasing the project
source for "Valley of The Ancient" so you can check out
how we use these features to build everything you've
seen in today's demonstration. We've got a series of deep dive
conversations on these topics lined up for Inside Unreal,
our official weekly livestream where you can hear from the engine
dev team and ask your questions CHANCE: Now, these are
still the early days of UE5, and you can expect more news
and features to be announced as we move closer to a
production-ready release targeting early 2022. GALEN: Follow the Unreal Engine
social channels for more information, and feel free to download
the Early Access release of Unreal Engine 5 and the "Valley
of The Ancient" project today. CHANCE: Thanks
everyone for watching, and welcome to Early Access!
Really looking forward to the upcoming gaming generation, hoping to see some major leaps forward as these sorts of tools get in developers hands.
Nanite and Lumen basically look photorealistic to me at this point. I hope it also looks good with more verdant environments, not just deserts.
Very exciting stuff, Seems like UE5 demo has been released alongside an early access preview of the engine, so it's only a matter of time before benchmarks start rolling in and we'll be able to see how it performs.
Nanite is the most amazing thing to me. No more LODs? Seriously?
One thing everyone should keep in mind as well is nanite is designed for mostly static content, like environments. According to Epic it's not really designed around foliage which still uses more traditional methods. There's a reason all of their UE5 demos atm are showing rocky desert lands with very minimal foliage.
I haven't been this excited for a new generation of tech since the Xbox to 360, this is wildly impressive
Anyone else not looking forward to the upcoming merge of a major engine revision into their project? lol
"native 4k at the cost of 1080p"
Is this just sales speak or could visual fidelity really make that leap without requiring more powerful computers just from the next iteration of an engine?
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This looks so incredible. The games that teams will be able to make because of these tools will truly be next-next gen.