Why Unreal Engine 5.2 is a Game Changer

the second major update for Unreal Engine 5 just released called 5.2 and there are two reasons why it is a big deal they are procedural content generation and substrate materials procedural content generation is a powerful tool that allows you to use random generation to create complex models and environments it is artist friendly programming that lets you define rules which perform specific actions procedural tools are common in a lot of 3D programs substance designer allows a user to generate materials procedurally without any textures and blender has geometry nodes a powerful node-based Editor to create complex animations and models quickly procedural tools are essential if you have any repetitive tasks when epic games made the Matrix City demo they generated it procedurally since the city is made up of millions of unique objects it isn't practical to hand place every single asset instead they set rules to determine which streets to include where buildings should appear and the size of those buildings What would take months for an artist to create can now take seconds to generate and they can pick from an infinite amount of randomized cities but in order to generate the city they had to use a program called Houdini Houdini is a powerful software that is used in most movies and games but if you ever use Houdini then you know it is really complicated if you wanted to create your own procedural tools for Unreal Engine you had to use Houdini until now procedural content generation or PCG for short brings the power of procedural tools into the engine we don't have to use another program we can do all our work directly in ue5 for example let's create a simple Forest on the right is a PCG graph to do so we first have to add points to the landscape use a surface sampler in order to preview the points press the D key now I think there's a little bit too many points so what I'll do is drag from out and use a density filter to remove the points I can increase the lower bound which will slowly start to get rid of points to add random rotation and scale use a transform points node absolute rotation so the trees are always facing up set a Max rotation of 360 so each point faces a different direction and for the scale be a random range from 0.8 to 1.2 finally to spawn static meshes use a static mesh spawner and Spawn Two meshes one will be a tree and the other one will be a different tree I'm able to move it around and those trees will automatically generate randomly for me and if I want this to affect my entire landscape within the surface sampler check unbounded just like that we could create a massive Force quickly using the power of procedural tools while this example is simple you can make these graphs and rules as complicated as you want this graph right here creates an oasis let's say you were creating a desert environment and you want to add an oasis well all I have to do is drag in the Oasis PCG and it has automatically created for us I did have to hand place every asset thanks to the rules I set up it spawns instantly I can even move it around and it will generate a new Oasis each time on top of the landscape or I can make this a really long Oasis and if we feel like this Oasis has to be huge then I could scale it up in all the axes so we have just a massive Boris of palm trees that the player can explore I can even change properties directly in the editor that's why I don't have to jump into the PCG graph every time I want to make a change for example I expose the property tree amount and if I want less trees I could just bring this down to something like 0.05 or less trees in the Oasis or if I want a lot of trees then I could bring this to something high like 0.8 which will create a super dense environment obviously Oasis are not Square they do not look like that in real life so I can also use splines to control the shape of PCGS let's say if I want a roundish Oasis then by just moving the splines scaling and rotating them I'm able to get the exact shape of the Oasis that I want splines are not just for created shapes I made one that will cut a path through the PCG removing rocks and trees so if I just drag it out right there grab one of the edges and drag this out you'll see that I'm slowly cutting through the Oasis environment so maybe Travelers always go through this path when they're cutting through the Oasis they can also interact with the environment it wouldn't make sense for trees to grow from the water so the PCG knows where the water is and does not add trees there we're not just limited to Natural environments you can generate pretty much anything even completely new 3D models and in a demo released by epic they generated this entire world really the possibilities are endless also unlike Houdini procedural content duration runs in real time that means you can have gameplay elements affected for example the player can press a button and the whole world changes the second big addition is a brand new material system called substrate which makes the process of combining materials a lot easier and more realistic oftentimes objects are not made up of one material they're made up of several materials layered on top of each other for example this sphere is made up of two materials metal and dirt on top of it if we look at the materials graph we have metal down here and dirt above the only problem is that we have to use lerp notes to combine them and lerp nodes do not take into account count which layer is on top or their thickness which can lead to unnatural materials substrate changes this allows us to combine materials on top of each other and to set a layer's thickness this means each of these materials are calculating their own reflection here's that material combining metal and dirt in 5.1 and here's a similar one in 5.2 5.2 material looks a lot better with substrate glasses now easier to render and we could combine two materials in unique ways like with this orange material on the bottom and blue on top a material like this was impossible before substrates you can create Advanced Materials like opal which epic game showed off it is combining four different layers which are all realistically interacting with each other notice how there are multiple layers of reflection of course there are other improvements to the engine when Unreal Engine released introduce a new lighting system called Lumen which gave us high performance Dynamic bounce lighting it also introduced a new Shadow rendering system called virtual Shadow Maps virtual Shadow Maps allow for soft shadows and shadows at far distances this was impossible using Unreal Engine 4's cascaded Shadow Maps which would disappear at far distances and while virtual Shadow maps are great they are not as accurate as Ray Trace Shadows which shoot thousands of rays from a light source to create Shadows just like in real life if you want to enable raytrace Shadows you can enable them on any lights in the advanced settings in 5.2 Ray Trace Shadows got a major upgrade now they're a lot more accurate and can cast smaller Shadows it is most noticeable on area lights there are Ray Trace shadows in 5.1 and here they are in 5.2 notice how the Shadows look more natural and sharper other changes to lighting include more accurate Reflections and meta-human occlusion which was improved on thin surfaces and hair which was glitchy before 5.2 another big addition to ue5 is the ability to create your own custom tools with scriptable tools and unreal under modes we have all these useful tools for example modeling mode gives me access tool tools to edit and create models the only problem is if we want to create our own tool we would have to code it in C plus which is really complicated scriptable tools changes this it allows us to create custom tools without a single line of code and blueprints and while it does look complicated it is a lot easier than coding it for example why this is useful a common workflow especially when placing natural objects is I drag out the mesh I then rotate it randomly so it doesn't face the same direction as other meshes and then I scale it I I create a tool that automates most of that process to get it all I have to do is Select scriptable tools and then I get to select my own custom tool I'm able to set it to mesh so let me go add in the Rock and now I get a preview of what that rock will look like in the world and to place it hold down the left Mouse button and then drag to then increase or decrease its size so very quickly I'm able to add a different size rocks in my world and I can even add a random rotation in the settings so now this rock has a random rotation each time I set it I also added the option to place a random mesh from a list so if I just select that now it's going to pick a random message to spawn each time I work a lot faster with this tool and in the future I can create more tools to speed up my workflow scriptable tools can also interact with procedural content generation and geometry script which means we could pretty much create any Custom Tool speaking of tools for most of the modeling mode tools we now get this little widget in the bottom left hand corner which allows us to input accurate changes for example if I bring this up and I want this to be exactly 300 meters then I could type in 300 right here before this tool we had to guess now we know exactly what we are doing those were all the major changes of UE 5.2 these were just the ones I thought are important of course there are hundreds of changes of bug fixes with this release so if you are curious you can check out the release notes or the Unreal Engine roadmap 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: 2,095,862

Keywords: Unreal Engine, UE5, Procedural Content, Unreal, Engine, Unreal Engine 5.2, UE5.2, Procedural Content Generation, PCG, substrate materials, Substrate, Real time, 3D, Tutorial, Rendering, Epic Games

Id: 6DIEZhk_ES8

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023