Why Unreal Engine 5.1 is a Huge Deal

the first major update for Unreal Engine 5 just released called 5.1 and it is a huge deal the reason why is one word and that is foliage since Unreal Engine 5 came out it introduced a revolutionary new way of rendering geometry called nanite to briefly sum up nanite every object you see in computer Graphics is composed of tiny flat planes of geometry called polygons and the more polygons you have in your environment the longer it will take to render this is why video games have developed a system called a level of detail or LOD for short the further away an object is from the camera the less polygons it will use to render that object this makes games run faster since there's less polygons that have to be rendered but it is very time consuming to create all those lods nanite replaces lods because it uses Dynamic level detail this means you can have an object with millions of polygons without any lods because polygons dynamically deform lowering the amount of polys on the object a good example of nanite end use is this this desert if I come up to LIT nanites triangles we can see nanite in action every color is an individual polygon and there are millions of them without a single LOD being used the biggest issue with nanite is that it did not work with foliage this means we still have to rely on level of detail for foliage like shrubs grass and trees trees generally use Billboards as the lowest level of detail which is just a flat plane with a texture that as you can see does not look very nice here is an example of what a billboard looks like I have Unreal Engine 5 opened up and in this environment all the trees are using level of details because that was the only option now if I move my camera far away you can see that the trees change lods until they are using Billboards and the transition looks pretty bad notice how even the Shadows disappear because Billboards only block light if it's facing it now in Unreal Engine 5.1 we finally get Nani foliage to enable netidon foliage is pretty simple you want to open up the static mesh and within here make sure enable nanite support is turned on and this is unique for foliage select preserve area that's how if we aren't too far away the object won't disappear and then press apply changes I went ahead and did the exact same process to all the trees in this environment now when the camera flies away there is no LOD transitions or Billboards the trees retain the same quality as if they're being viewed up close and the Shadows do not disappear at long distances there is no loss in performance in fact we gained an extra five frames so it is more performant than lods so nanite not only looks better it runs better in certain scenarios here is another example showing the power of nanites this is what it looks like without nanites the level of detail is noticeable because you can see that in the distance the trees are just textures also the lighting is casting incorrect shadows and this is the same environment but with nanite enabled the trees far away are no longer being faked by inaccurate textures all the trees are real geometry that exist in the world and we did not lose any performance I wanted to push the limit of Nani foliage so I create a force that is four square kilometers in total there's over one hundred thousand trees in this environment and I'm still getting decent performance and as a reminder this is all in real time this level of density was only possible in pre-rendered movies also it makes life easier we don't need several different versions of an object for lods anymore on top of nanite Polish now interacts with light accurately in Real Life Light passes through or bounces inside of leaves creating subsurface scattering previously this did not work with ue5's lighting but now it does this is foliage and Unreal Engine 5.0 notice how the Shadows are way too dark and unrealistic and here's foliage in Unreal Engine 5.1 now light is passing through the leaves and Illuminating the ground which looks a lot nicer this is a subtle change but it does make a big difference they also added nanite Landscapes but it is feature incomplete and still in Early Access hopefully the next version of unreal we get proper nanite Landscapes of course foliage is not the only major change when unrelated 5 release it introduced a new lighting system called Lumen which gave us high performance Dynamic bounce lighting and while it was revolutionary there was one big issue and that is it did not work with translucent materials so glass and water Reflections were pretty much broken it was so bad that I was recommending people to not use glass since the reflections were completely different from the environment right now I have a previous Unreal Engine version open up and this House's Windows Reflections make no sense you can see that we're getting Reflection from nowhere and same thing for this glass jar and this is the same environment in 5.1 but you will notice that there is no change yet in the reflections and that's because we have to go into our post process volume and under Reflections Lumen Reflections make sure high quality translucency reflection is turned on now we get a one-to-one reflection with our environment we could better see this in the glass cupboard there is an accurate reflection of the broom we can even see the table and windows within that reflection the only downside is that the setting does lower performance so there's a cost but nothing is free and now Reflections work water isn't broken anymore because of this new setting before this update to get true reflection we would have to use planar reflection and then manually move it to lining up with the water now I can just enable translucent to get realistic wall Reflections without having to use a reflection capture this also fixes Reflections for large bodies of water notice how on the side of the viewport we have weird Reflections this is because by default unreal is using screen space for translucent Reflections so that's why we get this artifacting and to get rid of it now just within the post process volume activate high quality translucency reflection so now we get accurate larger body Reflections without any artifacting also besides Lumen Reflections working with glass and water Lumen Global illumination has seen massive improvements luminao has a much more accurate bounce lighting because it is bouncing light from the object's surface instead of a voxel approximation what this means is that our environment is indirectly illuminated more and there's less noise right here is a simple room with a point light in the old version and here it is in 5.1 the Shadows are more illuminated and we got rid of the weird occlusion in the corners here's another example of just indirect Sky Lighting in version 5 and here it is in 5.1 you can tell that the secondary bounces are more accurate and powerful and finally there's a lot less noise when using a missing materials in this example there's a lot of noise when I move the light around and here it is in 5.1 there is no noise you can't even tell that this is real time it looks past traced Lumen wasn't the only lighting system that got approved now the path Tracer supports sky and atmosphere just make sure in your post process volume under path tracing reference atmosphere is enabled also path racing now finally supports decals and light functions for those who want to use traditional light baking the GPU light Mass has seen massive Improvement first off the light mask works at release it was crashing but now since it is more stable the quality of the lighting is better and the denoiser has improved in dark areas also the GPU light mass now supports sky and atmosphere right out of the box besides lighting there's also an interesting change to how large unreal levels can be in past versions of unreal if you are really far away from the world origin Unreal Engine starts to break for example I'm in Unreal Engine 4 and I'm very far from the origin the widgets are starting to break apart because unreal can't calculate what is happening that far away now in 5.1 the recommended area for an environment has expanded from 22 kilometers to 88 million kilometers so as you can guess we can create some pretty large worlds now and finally the last major change of note is animation with the sequencer animating anything in unreal is done in the sequencer with keyframes and if you want to move a sequence of keyframes earlier or later in the timeline you have to select each one individually for example let's say maybe I want this ship to fly off earlier what I'm going to have to do is hold down shift and select every single keyframe and then move them back that's how the animation starts the ship is already flying off 5.1 makes this process a lot easier with layer bars which make retiming keyframes a breeze instead of selecting each keyframe individually I can select the bar as a whole which will move all the keyframes of the objects with it so with one click I can re-time the animation that's how it's sooner instead of selecting all of them those were all the most important major changes of Unreal Engine 5.1 now this was just my opinion of course there are hundreds of other new features and Bug fixes so if you are curious I recommend you check out the release notes in the description below if you want to keep up to date with everything Unreal Engine make sure to subscribe to this channel unreal is more important than ever because half of all announced next-gen games are being made on ue5 there's no better time to learn Unreal Engine than now luckily for you I have an entire free course right here on YouTube which goes over all the essentials to learn UE you can check it out in the description below

Channel: Unreal Sensei

Views: 4,387,040

Keywords: Unreal Engine 5, UE5, Lumen, Nanite, UE5.1, Unreal Engine 5.1, Foliage, Landscapes, Epic Games, Unreal, Engine, Tutorial, 3D, 3D Game, Game, Development

Id: FUGqzE6Je5c

Length: 9min 54sec (594 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Rhed0x]

And their Vulkan renderer is still running at half the speed of the D3D12 one...

[u/cspadijer]

Wow. Some major improvements. Thanks for sharing.

[u/alien2003]

OK, now release Unreal Tournament 5

[u/josh4789]

Is this unreal specific or could other engines implement something similar?
The eradication of LODs would bring me joy.

[u/mbriar_]

What about SM6.6 instead of vendor extensions for nanite by default?

[u/offlein]

"FO-LI-AGE"

[u/take-a-gamble]

Fuck Tim

[u/linkedlist]

Why Nanite is useless for foliage: They haven't worked out a way to animate it yet.

[u/Arylcyclohexy]

I feel like I've been hearing about Unreal 5 for years, what's the hold up? I wasn't exactly impressed by anything I saw in the Matrix city demo, so I shouldnt care except I could run Unreal 4 on Bill Gates personal gaming pc and it would still stutter.