Unreal Engine 5 Announced With Breath-Taking PS5 Demo
Epic Games have released a first look at Unreal Engine 5. They have said that their goal in this next generation,
“is to achieve photorealism on par with movie CG and real life, and put it within practical reach of development teams of all sizes through highly productive tools and content libraries.”
The demo that they have released is called “Lumen in the Land of Nanite”. The aim of this demo is to showcase two of their new core technologies, Lumen and Nanite.
Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry will allow artists to create as much Geometric detail as the eye can see on the screen.
Nanite virtualized geometry means that “film quality” source art can be imported directly into the Unreal engine. This source art can now comprise of hundreds, millions, or even billions of Polygons.
This Geometry will be streamed and scaled in real-time so there will be no more budgets such as polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets. On top of this there will be no loss in quality.
Lumen is an illumination solution that will immediately react to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in massive, extremely detailed environments at scales ranging for as small as millimeters to as large as Kilometers.
Artists will be able to create more detailed lighting scenarios such as changing the angle of the sun for the time of day, turning a flashlight on, etc.
An artist can move a light inside the unreal editor and lighting looks the same as when it is run on console.
The team that created this technology made use of the Quixel Megascans library, which provides film quality objects up to hundreds of millions of Polygons.
The demo showcases existing engine systems such as Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonic rendering.
Epic is already making use of unreal engine 4.25 which supports next-generation console platforms from Sony and Microsoft.
Unreal Engine 5 will be made available for preview early next year with its full release scheduled for late 2021.