Unreal Engine 5 sets the bar for gaming realism

Company Epic Games for the first time demonstrated the capabilities of the game engine Unreal Engine 5 . One of the main goals of its creation was to achieve exceptional photorealism, comparable only with AAA blockbusters and life itself.

Unreal Engine 5 supports PC, Mac, current and next generation consoles, iOS and Android. A full release of the engine is expected next year.

The new engine has two key areas:

• The first is a fully dynamic global lighting that instantly responds to scene changes. Now there is no need to limit yourself to a game with a static world - you can iterate over it extremely quickly. The new lighting system is called Lumen .
• The second is virtualized geometry. With UE5, artists do not have to think about counting polygons or how much space they will occupy in the system’s memory. You can use cinematic quality assets in the engine directly, load models from ZBrush and photogrammetry data, without wasting time optimizing levels of detail or lowering quality in order to fit into the desired frame rate. This technology is called Nanite .

Now consider all the innovations on the example of a game demo for the PlayStation 5 .



Much of what you see was built with Quixel Megascan assets . But instead of the game versions, cinematic ones are used here, which are usually found only in blockbusters. About one billion triangles of the original geometry are presented in one frame. And thanks to the virtual texturing technology, they all use 8K quality textures.

How do all these triangles really look?



No, this is not noise: these are the same triangles, each of its own color, many of them are so small that together they create a picture of noise. Nanite achieves detail down to one pixel. This means that triangles are usually the size of a pixel. So many geometric details require the shadows to be drawn pixel by pixel. It is tooNanite can do it .

All the lighting in the demo presented is completely dynamic - and this is thanks to Lumen , which also implements global lighting with multiple reflections. No light cards, no baking.



In addition, the audio system has been solidly redesigned. Convolution Reverb allows you to measure the echo characteristics of real spaces and reproduce them in virtual reality. Sound field rendering allows you to record and play spatial audio - all for deeper immersion.



This bat flock was created using Niagara's special effects system . Particles in NiagaraNow they can interact with each other and understand the environment like never before.

The demo uses a system of game physics and destruction Chaos . Here it is used, for example, to accurately model falling stones and fabric of the heroine's scarf.

The engine also has a host of new features for modeling liquids.



Now that the environment has become so complex, there is a need to seriously improve the animation system. In UE5 it was sold prognostication foot position and deformation of the movement, which dynamically changes the inverse kinematics and posture so that they look more natural.

To make the character more realistic interact with the environment, it became possible to launch a seamless contextual animation - such as, for example, the heroine’s hand on the surface of the doorway.



Dynamic GI in the new engine is amazing, not only because of the acceleration of iterations, but also due to its effect on the gameplay. Any light source can move, creating excellent lighting. Dynamic lighting also includes specular gloss, which can be seen on all metal surfaces. In the scene, you can even notice bugs reproduced with Niagara , running away from the incident light rays. Lumen reacts not only to moving light sources, but also to changes in geometry.

Remember we mentioned high poly assets?



This statue was imported directly from ZBrush and has over 33 million triangles. No baking normal maps, no levels of detail. More than one of these statues can be made: there are about five hundred in this room - a total of more than 16 billion triangles from statues alone! In the whole demo of triangles, several hundred billion.

With Nanite , you have infinite geometry at your disposal, while Lumen has fully dynamic global lighting. And these possibilities are not limited to one small room - they can be applied to the entire space up to the horizon.

Announcement video itself: