Why Unreal Engine 5.4 is a Game Changer

unreal's newest update Unreal Engine 5.4 just released and it is a huge deal the reason why is a brand new motion design editor that will change the way 3D animations are made in case you do not know u5 isn't just used for creating games it can also create high quality animations for films and TV shows while the animation tools are great they are missing many features needed for motion design motion design is a type of Animation that focuses on bringing graphic design elements to life through movement the most common program for 3D motion design is Cinema 4D which produces a lot of the unique animations you see online the problem is that Cinema 4D is not real time which means that to create an image we have to wait for each frame to render this rendering process can take hours and it drastically slows down the created process unreal fixes this with a brand new set of Animation tools similar to Cinema 4D but in real time that brings the power of procedural animation directly into the engine that means we don't have to wait for an image to render what you see on screen is what you will get you can see your edits immediately some of these tools are cloners and affectors that create Advanced procedural animations you can clone thousands of objects and program how each of them interact with each other creating unique complex animations to activate motion design is simple it is just one button this will transform onreal engine into the motion design editor this doughnut is already set up as a cloner which means we can duplicate it for count I'll set it to 200 and now we have a lot of donuts with effectors we're able to animate cloners this effector set up to create an ocean of donuts and this one is set up with physics for some Advanced procedur animations and we can create something really interesting by setting this to Unbound physical animations like this was difficult before the motion design tools and you can animate everything here's an effective that generates an entire Forest which is key framed with these tools we can render common motion design animations on top of that we can change static meshes in real time using modifiers which can stack to create different effects this is very similar to blender's modifier system and all their properties are animatable also we can now combine 2D and 3D Graphics there's a new 2D editor with a layer system similar to photoshop and after effects with mass and blend modes this makes editing 2D graphics easier than ever and we can animate any of these 2D Properties or add them as a part of a 3D animation since this is built on top of u5 we have access to all of its features like Lumin nanite particles and so much more with these features and the new motion design tools you can pretty much create any animation you thinking of a lot of the animation work that would be done in Cinema 4D or after effects can now be created in unreal on top of motion design the way we animate playable characters has fundamentally changed in 5.4 traditionally the way we create animations that react to the player's input was through State machines and blend spaces player characters are made up of a bunch of unique animations for example there is an idol animation for when the character isn't moving another animation for when they are walking and a running animation when the character is moving the fastest with blend spaces you can blend between animations here I'm blending between those three animations so first the character is idle and as they start to move they transition into the walking animation and then when they move really fast they transition into the Running Animation but if you have ever played a game before you know that animations aren't just walking and running different animations are played depending on the context or state of the game which is why we use State machines State machines will switch out different sets of Animation depending on the game play for example this state machine is using the walking blend space and then when the character jumps it switches to other states with jumping animations or if the player attacks it switches from the idle Run state to and attack state with a swing animation while we have a lot of control we have to repeat this process for every animation that you want to use very quickly we can end up with insanely complicated State machines that require a lot of work and programming to animate motion matching is new animation technology that makes this process easier instead of State machines and blend spaces it uses a motion database to dynamically select the best frame or animation to play a lot of hard work is done for us and it can create seamless transitions for complex traversal without having to manually Define what each animation is used for it is able to predict the next location of the character to help decide what to pick so if the character is jumping the system would automatically pick animation where the player is bracing to fall back to the ground and it has recently been used in games like The Last of Us Part Two because of its smooth or organic movement to use motion matching is pretty simple we have a brand new motion matching database which will ask for all the animations you want to pick from so here are a bunch of animations from the shooter example that I could just drag in there like this now these are all the animations that the player character can use right here is motion matching and action and it is a lot simpler than creating State machines if you want to improve the quality then you have to add more unique animations to the database the issue with this datab is that there's only four directions the player can go if we add more varied animations it would improve the Fidelity of the character so the more animations the better your character's movement is which is why Unreal Engine is giving away hundreds of highquality motion capture animations for developers to add to their databases to get started with motion matching creating large open worlds just got it a lot easier with a brand new biome generator added in this update recently epic games released Lego fortnite created using Unreal Engine in the game players can explore a world that is randomly generated this means each world is unique to the player and no two environments are the same the game most famous for random generation is Minecraft which creates an infinite World According to rules defined by the game programmers this technology of creating environments based off of random numbers and rules set by the artist is called procedural generation and it is essential to a lot of games because of this unrolling 5.2 added procedural content generation or PCG for shorts into the engine with PCG we can create graphs with rules for random generation this graph you see right here automatically generates an oasis I can drag this PCG into the world and an oasis will spawn in this is great because realistically we can't expect an artist to hand place every single object using PCG we can create graphs that automate the tedious process for us because of the rules I set I can change the shape of it lower or raise the amount of trees or cut a road through it you can watch the unreal 5.2 video to learn more about it PCG has gotten a significant update in UI 5.4 with the biome generator this tool was originally created to generate the biomes in Lego fortnite biomes are sets of procedural generation rules Minecraft and Lego fortnite are divided up into biomes with some areas being forests others being deserts or snowy mountains they are the key to procedural worlds because without them the world would be stagnant with the same repeating patterns everywhere here is an example of the biome generator all of these bioms and the static meshes that make up them are being placed procedurally and while this example is small you could extend this to a massive open world and just in case you want more control you can move biomes around and the tool will realistically scatter the assets this tool was created entirely using PCGS you can see by opening up the graph how it was made this goes to show how versatile procedural content generation is entire new tools and worlds can be generated from it and you can get great results without a complicated graph this is a PCG I created from scratch that quickly switches between biomes with the biome generator and procedural content generation we can start to generate infinite worlds in engine 5.4 also gave us a brand new texture editor called texture graph which allows users to create text and materials entirely within Unreal Engine unreal has always had a material editer which is how we have created and controlled materials but in order to create materials we need textures which were not made in unreal textures are created by either scanning or photographing Textures in real life or by using a program called substance designer that uses procedural generation similar to PCG but in 2D by streaming together a bunch of math operations and random generation we can quickly make complex textures this is inside substance designer and this entire graph right here is creating all the textures that were used for this material completely from scratch and here's unreal's brand new texture graph editor this brick wall texture was also generated from scratch but inside of unreal no photo scanning was involved all the nodes you see right here are being used to create this texture so let's zoom in to see what is happening we first start off with a procedural pattern that we add noise to this pattern will be used as a base to separate our concrete from the bricks we then generate a brick color and create the concrete color we combine both of them to make the brick similarly we're also able to create a roughness normal and high texture using these generated textures I can quickly create a material and then add it to my environment we can take this even further Nite displacement was added in the last update that allows us to change the geometry of an object from a high texture here I am adding the height from the texture graph to the material now there is real geometric depth the entire material was generated procedurally texture graph opens up whole new possibilities to create materials or speed up our texturing workflows motion design isn't the only animation feature to get improvements in 5.4 creating animatable characters is now easier than ever with modular control rigs to animate 3D characters we first need a rig rigs are artist friendly controls that make common tasks easier on metahumans there are two rigs one that controls the entire body and another one that controls the face in unreal we can create our own rigs called control rigs but creating control rigs requires a lot of programming to automate this process we now have modular control rigs which are pre-made rigs we can add to our characters to start animating quickly without any programming this means that now with a skelo mesh editor introduced in UI 5.3 artists can add bones to create a skeleton mesh and then rig the skeleton mesh with modular control rigs something that used to be done in Maya or blender can now be done entirely in unreal within a shorter period of time also added is a new auto retargeter this can transfer any animation on a bipedal character to another bipedal one so all the animations we already have access to for metahuman and a default skeleton mesh can be used by new characters on top of all this the sequencer which is the timeline we animate on has gotten a facelift improving readability and there is a brand new Gizmo making the process of using control rigs a lot easier Unreal Engine now performs significantly better with multiple parts of the engine being optimized tests on the city sample demo showed that GPU time decreased by 25% and render thread time decreased by 50% dramatically increasing the frame rates Hardware raate tracing is now two times faster for some environments and targets 60 frames per second with every new updates unreal gets faster this just touches the surfice you can check out the release notes to see everything added to the engine which was a massive amount for 5.4 Unreal Engine is constantly evolving every week there is something new in the world of unreal and computer Graphics which is why I made the unreal Sensei newsletter to keep you always up to date with the latest unreal news there's a link to join in the description also there's no better time to learn on real then now luckily for you I have a free course here on YouTube that'll teach you how to create the environment you see on screen check it out in the description and subscribe for more ue5 content in the future

Channel: Unreal Sensei

Views: 816,998

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: 9aIbo84jhOU

Length: 12min 46sec (766 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2024