Yesterday, Epic Games unveiled the all-new Unreal Engine 5. The Unreal Engine is the latest of the 3D Game Engines. For those of who do not know the Unreal Engine is used in most of the popular games like Fortnite, Pubg Mobile and so on. Most of the games we play in Android, iOS, desktops and gaming consoles are based on this engine.
With Unreal Engine 5, Epic Games brings two significant features, which are called Nanite and Lumen. The Nanite bears an updated Geometry Pipeline, helping increase the fidelity of geometry in the games. This also makes it easy for the developers to upload ZBrush sculpts, photogrammetry scans such as Quixel Megascans or CAD data straight into the Engine without working on optimization which will be taken care of by the Engine itself. It can also produce a large amount of triangle data per frame, where each triangle accounts to the size of a pixel. The more the triangles are, the more real the game appears, without depending on external mapping. It can also get rid of popping, and LOD distance as geometry can upscale the resolution keeping the fidelity intact, even at a closer distance.
Next feature is the Lumen, which is a new real-time dynamic lighting software with multi bounce global illumination. This saves developers the time needed to tailor in lighting into the game world. They can forego techniques like ray tracing to simulate bounce-lighting for GI that requires higher computing power, and the Unreal Engine 5 does it for them.
The Epic Games has released a demo of the Unreal Engine 5 on the upcoming Sony Play Station 5. As you can see, the game features more realistic graphics, high fidelity geometry and provide closer to life visuals, thanks to Quixel Megascans being ported from the previous Unreal Engine build. It also showcases moving bounce lighting with the new Lumen global illumination system. Techniques like Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering are also being ported to the latest version.
Epic Games has promised an early preview by early 2021 and a full release sometime in late-2021. The new Engine is compatible with platforms including iOS, Android, PC< Mac, PS5 and Xbox Series S. Still, the company also stated not to expect Play Station like visual fidelity on iPhones. The games might take several years to reach the platforms mentioned above with the new engine. But the company has promised that they are working on Fortnite which can be seen running on Unreal Engine 5 in the next five years.
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