The Amazing UNREAL ENGINE 5

“Unreal Engine 5 will empower creators across all industries to deliver stunning real-time content and experiences. This Early Access build is for game developers who like to live on the bleeding edge to start testing features and prototyping their next games.”

Unreal Engine 5 developers

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You’ll be able to bring incredibly immersive and realistic gaming experiences to life with groundbreaking new features like Nanite and Lumen that will provide a generational leap in visual fidelity.

Unreal Engine 5 official website

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/unreal-engine-5

Lumen

It is a system for generating real-time global illumination or what is known as GI. it can react to changes in geometry or lighting source with no pre-baking or lightmaps needed.

“The system renders diffuse anti-reflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometres to millimetres. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly.”

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Nanite

Nanite is a “micro polygon geometry” that Epic claims produce triangles at the size of a pixel. The technology allows developers to use assets in Unreal Engine 5 containing millions or even billions of polygons without hits to performance. It points to a statue within the demo that is comprised of 33 million triangles.

They claim that “No baking of normal maps, no authored LODs is required to achieve this kind of results.

They then go on to show a room containing 500 of the same statue, each at the same level of detail. That makes for around 16.5 billion triangles in the scene, not including the room geometry.

Furthermore, they said that developers can easily import these high-poly assets (up to 8K) from Megascans or other painting and texturing applications.

According to Epic Games, Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engin5 –/anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works.

Once the models are imported, Unreal Engine 5 handles all of the streaming and scaling in real-time, so devs don’t need to worry about draw or polygon counts, or polygon memory budgets.

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Niagra

The Niagara VFX System is one of two tools you can use to create and adjust visual effects (VFX) inside Unreal Engine 4 (UE4). Before Niagara, the primary way to create and edit visual effects in UE4 was to use Cascade. While Niagara has many of the same particle manipulation methods that Cascade offers, the way you interact and build visual effects with Niagara is vastly different.

Why Reinvent Visual Effects for Unreal Engine?

well, Unreal Engine is expanding its user base and is now used in many industries outside of the game development space. Examples are:

• Architectural visualization
• Industrial design, such as automotive designs
• Virtual TV and film production

Unreal English Engine users are more diverse than ever before—from design students to small indie developers, to large professional studio teams, to individuals and companies outside the game industry. so moving forward Epic games wanted to create a visual effects (VFX) system that would work for all our users, across industries.

Cascade the old visual effect system had some Pros and Cons but they wanted to create a new system that had the advantages and strengths of Cascade while including new elements that remove the downsides of Cascade. some of the goals for the new VFX system are:

• It puts full control in the hands of the artists.
• It is programmable and customizable on every axis.
• It provides better tools for debugging, visualization, and performance.

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The Evolution of Video games

Polygons have been used in video game graphics for a very long time, much longer than many would assume. Although, of course, the earliest use of polygons was extremely crude and unappealing to the eye.

After a period of polygons gradually being refined, more advanced versions of them began to appear in games, with an increase in how many were used to make a single three-dimensional model. A notable benchmark was reached in 1996, with the release of Quake. The game is widely regarded as the first true 3D FPS game and was celebrated for a massive leap in graphics technology.

At any given time, Quake could render 200 polygons.

From the point Quake was released, video game hardware power began to rapidly increase, likewise increasing the number of polygons that could be rendered in-game engines. The advancement rate was exponential, so much so that by Quake 4, released in 2006, a single-player model had 2,600 polygons. This is not taking into account the game level, but a single character in the game.

Unreal Tournament 3, on the other hand, released in 2007, used up to 12,000 polygons for the weapon model seen in the first-person view.

In modern times, polygon count is not considered a serious problem in video game creation as it used to be before. Graphics technology has advanced to such a degree, that a single character in a game can use 150,000 or even more sometimes depending on its complexity, and thanks to today’s hardware it is possible. It seems outrageous, but the truth is that methods used to create games have evolved so extensively that polygon counts are no longer very limiting as they once were.

The Focus is instead, in modern times, on factors such as realistic and detailed lighting, as well as complicated shaders, detailed surface textures, and realistic physics.

Even though Polycount is not as limiting it has certain limits because video games don’t run on supercomputers from an alien civilization. there is a limit and Games developers have their polygon budget based on calculations that the engineers do to determine what the scene can handle.

A modern graphics technique called tessellation can quickly and efficiently create a 3D model, using tens of thousands of polygons, with an extremely efficient load on hardware. This technique is used in most modern games and results in highly detailed 3D models.

Where do they want to spend polygons in this scene?

They want to create a super-rich environment
Or incredibly high polygon characters and enemies or super bosses with hundreds of thousands of polygons.

You have to know what your target platform, memory, video requirements are, and then what your engine is technically capable of pushing and do the math.

It’s different for every scene and different situation and overtime as ‘next-gen’ has continued to push the limits and polygon count is becoming less of a limiting factor as we move forward and now textures are often as high or higher on the stack of consideration.

You can make a model with 10,000 polygons that look like a 1 million polygon model with some 4k diffuse, normal, specular, height, occlusion, emission, and detail maps.

But it seems like the Nanite technology in Unreal Engine 5 is going to allow game developers to push the limits at least 50 times of what is possible with today’s technology. As they said in the demo, there is a statue that is comprised of 33 million triangles. not only that but there are 500 of them in the scene which is equal to 16 billion triangles in one place.

This contradicts all the things we were just talking about, or at least it makes it look ridiculous. because by today’s standards probably a few million too few tens of millions of triangles are the absolute maximum we can push a polycount in a video game environment. and with Nanite, we are talking about billions of polygons.

They are saying you can bring your 3D models from 3D modelling software like Maya, 3ds max, Blender or even Zbrush with its millions of polygons without even needing to create any normal maps or whatsoever. if you have even created a game ready model or character before you know this is insane and can’t be believed until you do it yourself. because I am having a hard time grasping this at the moment.

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Future of Video game development

if what we have seen in this unreal engine 5 demos is going to be the norm in the future then, there are a lot of things that will change.

For instance, how many triangles you need to put in one particular scene is not going to be an issue, artists will model, sculpt and texture their character and 3D models and through them directly inside a game engine without using normal maps. the standard practise today in the video game industry is to create all the maps necessary including normal maps to make a model or an environment with only a few thousand or tens of thousands of polygons look like it is very high poly and super details with all its scratches, dents and damage realized using a sculpting application.

Also, the lighting is going to be more realistic and believable because now lighting is baked in the scene a not like what we have seen in the demo where the lighting is happening in real-time as if we are using a render engine inside a 3D modelling software such as Vray or octane render.

Even though the lighting looks amazing from the first look but it is not as great as what can get using a render engine like Vray.

Also, one thing I expect will take place in the future is, the fact that companies such as epic games are pushing the boundaries or quality of visuals in video games is going to make the competing push their standards further as a result because what they are doing is not going to looks as good their best competitor. as a consequence, this will probably result in a dramatic increase in how much video game coats to make.

Right now, the top AAA video games can easily require $100 million to make, which is an insane amount of money, but hopefully, with the increasing demand for the quality, we will also see new technologies that will make the process easier using automation and machine learning which can help artists and studios do their jobs faster at a lower coast.