Why Unreal Engine 5.3 is a BIG Deal

Unreal's newest update Unreal Engine 5.3 just  released and it is a big deal the main reason is   nanite Landscapes when unreal engine 5 came out  it introduced a revolutionary new way to render   geometry called nanite to briefly sum up nanites  every object you see in computer Graphics is made   up of tiny flat planes of geometry called polygons  the more polygons you have in your environment the   longer it will take to render this is why video  games have made a system called 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 but  we are limited in the amount of geometric detail   we could have Nanite fixes this because it uses  Dynamic level detail which means you could have   an object with millions of polygons without any  lods because the geometry deforms lowering the   amount of polygons on an object a good example  of nanite in use is this city if I come up to   LIT nanite triangles we can see nanite in action  every color is an individual polygon and there are   millions of them the biggest issue with nanite is  that when it released it only worked on non-moving   static objects it was only really good for objects  like rocks and cliffs this changed with the Unreal   Engine 5.1 updates it introduced nanite foliage  which gave us the ability to create force with an   unlimited amount of detail here is a world with  over a hundred thousand trees without any lods   but Landscapes which is the biggest part of any  environment was still missing nanites Landscapes   allow us to create large open worlds easily using  the tool we can sculpt add height maps and paint   different materials quickly this means Landscapes  were stuck using low resolution geometry and it   heard our game's performance because unreal  has a hard time rendering non-nanite objects   in all the tech demos epic games release to  avoid these issues they didn't use Landscapes   instead they faked Landscapes this desert ground  isn't actually a landscape instead it is a bunch   of nanite objects stacked on top of each other  to make it look like a landscape finally in 5.3   nanite officially supports Landscapes to activate  nanite select your landscape and then within the   details panel enable nanite and then build data  now that it's enabled we can watch the geometry   dynamically deform it is that easy to enable  nanites on our landscapes in the first version of   ue5 we made this Village on the channel but at the  time the only objects using nanites were rocks and   the buildings now on UE 5.3 the entire world is  nanite there isn't a single object that isn't   using nanites this means we can get an infinite  amount of detail from our environments and the   performance is a lot better nanite Landscapes can  now also use tessellation to add more detail in   ue4 we had tessellation which allowed us to  create displacements from a high texture when   Unreal Engine 5 released it was removed but now it  is back and it is using nanites this means we can   change objects from the material editor we have  a brand new input called displacement where the   high High texture goes tessellation can convert  any simple mesh into an object with thousands of   polygons just with a texture here's an environment  with a landscape that isn't using displacement   the world feels kind of flat and here's the same  landscape with displacement the ground has depth   to it and it looks a lot better everything you  see on screen except the plants is the landscape   all the Rocks twigs and roots are not objects  they are a high texture and whenever I make a   change to my landscape the nanite displacement  remains in effect for the first time in gaming   we're not limited by how many polygons are on  screen we can have infinite geometry everywhere   the next major feature is better volumetric fog  and smoke unreals had volumetric fog for a while   which gives us the ability to have realistic light  scattering in fog and smoke to enable volumetric   fog is easy you just have to click volumetric  fog within the height fog to turn it on now we   get Dynamic fog that interacts with lighting so I  can move the sunlight around and you'll see those   God Rays change direction it is the secret  to make any of your environments stand out   here are before and afters of an animation with  and without volumetric fog the world feels more   realistic and it looks visually more interesting  with fog the only issue and unreal was that it   was problematic to create finely detailed fog it  can only be used to create large splashes and it   was hard to use volumetrics for complex shapes  like explosions instead explosions and smoke had   to be faked with Billboards Billboards are just  a flat surface with an animated texture you can   see that this is just one single plane the smoke  isn't actually 3D obviously this doesn't look the   best because when I move the lighting in my  environment the smoke stays exactly the same   we don't see any changes because after all this  is just a flat 2D texture in 5.3 sparse volume   textures fix this we can now import complicate  volumetric simulations from programs like Janga   FX here is a sparse volume explosion imported  from Janga FX into unreal and if I pause the   simulation you can see it is not being faked by  Billboards this smoke simulation is completely 3D   if I move the light around it will dynamically  change the way the smoke looks the smoke is able   to cast Shadows onto itself we can even  use sparse volume textures to represent   clouds and what's amazing about these clouds  compared to Unreal's default cloud system is   that I can move them around and rotate them so I  get full control over where my clouds are in the   sky and if we zoom out we can even see that these  clouds are massive objects that I can move around   and place them exactly where I want them to be  volumes can even replace some particle effects   for example this fire here is very similar to the  explosion where if I go into wireframe View mode   it is just a couple of 2D planes that simulate a  fire animation and then if I look down directly   at it this effect immediately breaks and now  here's that particle effect but it's replaced   with a sparse volume texture and this fire is now  completely in 3D it's not a 2d plane that's facing   the camera so if we look at it from the top down  the effect doesn't break this fire is real and it   exists in our world another major feature is that  we can now create animatable characters directly   in Unreal Engine in unreal we have been able to  create Rigs and anime characters this animation   you're looking at right now was animated entirely  and unreal it wasn't created in another program   like blender or Maya the biggest part missing  in the character creation workflow was skeletal   mesh editing which is the process of creating  bones in a character UE 5.3 adds a skeletal mesh   editor this means we could create bones and Whey  paint directly in the editor it is now possible   and unreal through modeling white painting bones  rigging and animating using sequencer to create an   entire character just using Unreal we also get a  new cloth Editor to create realistic simulations   for clothes users can Define exactly how a  cloth simulation can interact with a character   and then artificial intelligence will bake that  interaction into an animation Reflections also   got a major update if you don't know Unreal Engine  5 introduced a brand new lighting system called   Lumen Lumen gives us Dynamic bounce Lighting in  real time it is important to know that bounce   lighting is also called Global illumination Global  illumination is a process of light rays bouncing   around illuminating your entire world before Lumen  game developers faked Global illumination through   a process called light baking like baking is  rendering bounce lighting before the game is   played this render is then stored in a texture  called a light map which is then overlaid on   top of the world to make it look like the light is  bouncing around in real time when in reality it's   just a pre-rendered texture but now the problem  is that Global illumination isn't real time as   soon as I make a change to our light map it is  no longer in sync we have to rebake the entire   environment all over again which is time consuming  this is why Lumen is a big deal because it is true   real-time Global illumination we don't have to  bake our lights but the downsize that Lumen is   very expensive to run not every computer can run  it because it is computationally intensive this   is why on real games like Valorant still use big  lighting it is a competitive game so every frame   matters if we open up a Valor map in unreal  you will see it using big lighting if I move   an object the light doesn't update until I re-bake  the environments even though Lumen exists a lot of   games still have to use baked lighting because  it's just more performance you could get 120   frames with baked lighting it's hard to get that  many frames with Lumen Hardware hasn't caught up   yet this environment is using big lighting and  one of the biggest issues with bake lighting is   that it doesn't have any Reflections you'll see  that this entire environment is broken because   the reflections aren't working and we can fix  this by manually adding in Reflections by using   a reflection capture within visual effects sphere  reflection capture this will capture a 360 degree   texture of my environments and then project it  on onto any reflective surfaces the workflow   to get Reflections everywhere is that now I have  to create another reflection capture and move it   to where there's a bunch of Reflections and then  I have to create a another one and then continue   the process throughout the entire environment and  if we have a large environment this process can be   very tedious here's an environment that's using  Lumen and Reflections work immediately we do not   need reflection captures but the issue is that we  have to use Lumen Global illumination which hurts   our performance in 5.3 we now have the ability to  use the Lumen reflections with big lighting so we   do not have to use Lumen Global illumination  to get Lumen Reflections to get this feature   go to the Post process volume and set Global  illumination to none so we're using the baked   lighting and not Lumen and then set Reflections  to Lumen now we're using baked lighting for globe   illumination and only using Lumen for Reflections  we get the high performance of static lighting we   have the accuracy of lumen reflect actions plus we  no longer have to set up reflection captures also   Lumen reflection now supports multiple bounces  so let's say we have a mirror right here and   then across the hallway we have another mirror  notice how we can't see the other mirrors in Its   Reflection that's because we don't have enough  reflection about this so if we go back into the   post process volume under Reflections we have a  brand new setting called Max reflection bounces   if I set this to 2 now we can see the reflections  the modeling mode user interface got a facelift   and now it is a lot easier to use all the tools  are neatly organized in the categories and let's   say there's a tool I use a lot like displays then  I can right click and add to favorites and now I   can quickly access that tool within the favorites  tab Mass materials like foliage are now 20 faster   and there are more Shadow options for nanite  to help optimize Shadows unreal Shadow system   called virtual Shadow maps are right now the main  bottleneck 2 foliage so this gives us more control   over what types of Shadows should trees cast and  finally a big update for Mac users nanite is Now   supported on all Apple M2 devices finally Apple  users have access to both Lumen and nanite when   ue5 first release it didn't have either feature  this also means that Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen   and nanite will be able to run on the Apple Vision  Pro Pro the programs you're developing now on   unreal could be used for the Apple Vision Pro  in the future the possibilities are endless for   unreal these were all the major changes to UE 5.2  but these are just the ones I think are important   of course there's a bunch of other changes you  can check out by going to the unreal release notes   unreal is more important than ever because half  of all next generation games are being made in   ue5 there is 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 the essentials to learn ue5 you can   learn how to create this world you see right now  you can check it out Link in the description below

Channel: Unreal Sensei

Views: 2,100,412

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, landscape, landscapes

Id: POwTaVZ_CA0

Length: 12min 25sec (745 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 07 2023