Why Unreal Engine 5 has Changed Gaming Forever

if you're interested in game art or game development in general you've probably heard of unreal engine it's one of the most popular engines for amateur and professional creators alike and finally after years of waiting we've gotten our hands on an early version of the newest iteration unreal engine 5. already users have been sharing their thoughts on the upgrade with some claiming that unreal engine 5 is ushering in a new generation of video games with the various exciting features being added what exactly is with all the hype and what is new about unreal engine 5 let's go ahead and take a closer look but first if you're really interested in learning unreal engine i also have a newly released course called the environment artist survival kit where you will learn how to create your own beautiful worlds using unreal engine all 13 hours of content are only 49 and the first 1000 people to sign up will be able to get the 3d coloring book at a reduced price so if you've been holding off now is your only chance i'll leave a link in the description if you like to consider getting the course one of the groundbreaking new features that has creators excited is unreal engine's new real-time global illumination solution lumen if you play pc games you may have noticed a growing trend of ray tracing support for games technologies like nvidia's rtx ray tracing has given us stunningly beautiful graphics across numerous titles such as cyberpunk 2077 metro exodus and minecraft unfortunately being able to use rtx in games requires specific expensive and quite frankly pretty beefy hardware enter lumen lumen offers unprecedented flexibility for creators with a fully dynamic global illumination system that can render bounce light indirect lighting and color bleeding accurately in real time no matter the scale of your world or how densely detailed the environment is lumen will adapt and render physically accurate indirect lighting that looks the same in game and in engine and best of all it's super quick and easy to set up to enable lumen start by editing your project settings and select lumen as the dynamic global illumination method as well as the reflection method then enable global illumination using lumen inside your post process volume in presto your scene is now filled with beautiful bounce lighting it's just that easy with lumen enabled it's now possible to move and rotate lights that dynamically impact the scene and see those results in real time this freedom allows us to rapidly prototype our scenes look and feel and the results are undoubtedly beautiful on top of this using lumen emissive materials now emit proper lights and shadows finally allowing you to create lights from your mesh this kind of material is perfect for making neon and glowing objects and with the power of lumen these objects will light up your scene even if there are no actual lights the dynamic nature of this solution erases the need to wait for light maps to bake saving artists more valuable time to create baking light maps at least in unreal engine 4 is a time consuming process that only gets longer the more you add to your scene sometimes baking lighting and building your level can take more than 20 hours imagine accidentally rotating a light five degrees and then losing an entire day's worth of work from it contrast that to the speed and ease of lumen and it's plain to see why artists are excited to get their hands on it as a side note unlike rtx ray tracing which is designed exclusively for nvidia hardware lumen supports both amd and nvidia cards that means the results you're seeing are equally impressive across all platforms the potential lumen is already showing to change how artists consider light in their scenes is impressive and we've only had our hands on the early access build of unreal engine 5 for a few months now already we've seen creators sink their teeth into the technology and experiment with the limits of real-time global illumination some great examples include a change in the angle of sun for a unique time of day creating intense reflective materials that update in real time or blowing a hole in the ceiling that floods down light into the scene and with the updated user interface in unreal engine 5 fine-tuning your lighting to give your scene the perfect ambient effect like stronger god rays is as simple as adjusting just a single parameter with the speed and ease of the solution it's safe to say the future of unreal engine is looking much brighter with lumen moving forward the other massive feature of unreal engine 5 that has the industry talking is nanite unreal's ground-breaking mesh optimization system but what is it exactly epic calls it virtualized micro polygon geometry and to understand what's going on behind the seeds in this footage you need to understand how mesh optimization works the classic way to handle mesh optimization is to create lods which stands for level of detail to put it simply lods are versions of meshes with progressively lower polygon density based on the distance from the camera the engine displays the lod with the appropriate level of mesh density this technique works pretty well and it has been the standard practice in the industry for a long time so why change it is there anything we can do better well for one it's often difficult to strike the right balance between the number of triangles and the desired quality there are also cases where errors or visual bugs impact lods leading to manual fixes which take more valuable time out of an artist or another creator's day nanite thinks differently nanite geometry is fragmented into several clusters each of which act like it's its own lod whose size and polycount varies according to distance the closer the camera is the smaller the clusters will be and the further away the camera is the larger the clusters will be this means that artists can now import highly detailed meshes with millions or even billions of polygons and let night automatically handle optimizing it on the fly this dramatically speeds up the asset creation workflow in numerous ways the most notable being the ability to sculpt models with as much detail as the eye can see that are production ready with no extra effort that means no more baking normal maps no more fiddling with cages and no more compromising on detail and while this all seems like magic there are some caveats first and foremost is the cost from this solution where nanite excels in optimization of on-screen details it compromises with large memory costs file sizes of nanite assets are significantly larger than traditional lod solutions meaning it's not feasible to fill up an entire game with hundreds and thousands of nanite assets also notable is that nan8 does not work on anything other than static or unmovable meshes so this means that an animated asset or assets that stretch like characters cannot take advantage of nanite also object materials must be opaque meaning foliage like trees and grass won't work with nanite with its current limit being solid unmovable objects it's starting to make sense why the unreal team decided to showcase this technology in a desert not in a giant forest considering all these aspects of nanite it is likely best utilized for large prominent models that need to be rendered with a high level of detail without compromising performance it's an interesting and versatile solution that will lend itself greatly to artists and creators who are obsessed with details nanite and lumen aside unreal engine 5 has a number of other features that are worth mentioning as well another huge feature of unreal engine 5 is the direct integration of the qixel mega scans asset browser into the engine something we at stylized station have been hoping for ever since the partnership between epic games and kwixel was announced if you don't know quicksilves megascans are a collection of highly detailed photorealistic models that are created by scanning real world objects using photogrammetry using photo scans such as these are perfect for rapid development of environments and scenes that let artists creativity from wild previously assets would have to be imported into unreal engine 4 using qixel's third-party software quixl bridge the pipeline from qixel bridge to unreal engine 4 was rather slow and i found the engine often crashed trying to import multiple models so even though the assets were there and available i found it cumbersome to work around the two programs and never truly utilize them to their full potential now with the power of unreal engine 5 creators can simply drag and drop any model from the library directly into their scene and best of all this entire library is completely free for all unreal engine 5 users [Music] and to help streamline the performance of those massive qixel and nanite landscapes is unreal engine 5's new world partition system a feature that has been long overdue with the unreal platform with world partition open-ended levels are split up amongst a grid and automatically optimized based on the player's area of interest although this feature isn't necessarily new as plenty of other engines like bethesda's creation engine have had this solution integrated for years however it's a step forward for unreal engine that will undoubtedly prove useful to game developers not to mention the extent of what's possible in unreal engine 5 isn't limited to just video games unreal engine has already been used in the film and animation industry to much acclaim the popular star wars show the mind delorean has been utilizing the power of unreal engine to rapidly develop photoreal environments that could be edited during filming to maximize flexibility on set it's easy to imagine the further impact features like lumen and nene will bring to the table for future shows and movies if what you've heard in this video excites you and you're curious about using unreal engine 5 but don't feel like learning a whole new game engine don't worry unreal engine 5 is strikingly similar to unreal engine 4 and the time to learn game development has never been more right countless tutorials guides and resources for learning unreal engine 4 are available for free across the web and not to mention the environment artist survival kit our new course which i've mentioned previously unreal engine 4 is already a powerful battle tested name in the industry and unreal engine 5 seeks to improve on that already well-established framework with a sleek modern redesign and a simplified interface apart from some minor tweaks every window and browser functions exactly as you would expect only faster and more streamlined the ability to dock panels allows users more control over how they expand their view of the scene to fit their specific needs the editor is also so customizable that you can create color themes and dock tabs that can pop out for quick actions just to personalize your own workspace the next generation of games and entertainment is upon us and unreal engine 5 is pushing the limits of what's possible in game development epic games is investing a massive amount of time and money into making unreal the best platform for creators with the constant outgoing support epic has been providing for creators and developers it has never been easier to start learning how to use unreal engine if you're at all interested in learning about what you've heard in this video download unreal engine 5 for yourself and try it out let us know in the comments what you think of the engine and share your experience with it if you enjoyed this video and want to support us a little more feel free to check out our patreon i've revamped the tier so everything is nice and simple for you guys as usual i'm thomas from stylize station and i will see you guys in the next video

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 137,602

Rating: 4.905159 out of 5

Keywords: unreal engine 4 environment tutorial, making a zelda environment in unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4 environment art, creating an environment in unreal engine 4, how to build environment in unreal engine 4, blender environment to unreal engine 4, unreal engine 4 environment course, creating environments in unreal engine 4, 3d environment unreal engine 4, modular environment workflow, ue5, nanite, world partition, unreal engine 5, lumen

Id: CUsOesagN80

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021