Unreal Engine 5 is here! Not only the new technologies of Lumen and Nanite, but also the performance and UI have ushered in a major upgrade

On April 5th, Epic Games ("Epic") founder and CEO Tim Sweeney officially announced Unreal Engine 5 at the Unreal Engine "State Of Unreal" live event - "We are very excited to announce , Unreal Engine 5 is now available for download".

The arrival of Unreal Engine 5 will bring unprecedented freedom, fidelity and flexibility to users and players in real-time 3D content and experience, while enabling teams large and small to truly break through the possibilities in a visual and interactive way boundaries.

Unreal Engine 5 is designed with new new technologies, such as "full dynamic global illumination solution" Lumen, "virtualized polygon geometry system" Nanite, and there are also a lot of upgrades in performance and UI for more realistic visual effects.

While some major new features like Lumen and Nanite have yet to be validated in non-game workflows (an ongoing goal for future releases), all creators will be able to continue using UE 4.27-powered workflows. But they'll also benefit from a redesigned Unreal Editor, better performance, artist-friendly animation tools, an expanded mesh creation and editing toolset, improved path tracing, and more.

Key New Features in Unreal Engine 5

Next-Generation Real-Time Rendering

Unreal Engine 5 introduces a series of groundbreaking features that enable real-time worlds rendered in high-fidelity detail.

Lumen: This is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that enables user players to create believable scenes where indirect lighting can dynamically adapt to direct lighting or changes in geometry, such as changing the angle of the sun over time, turning on a flashlight or Open the outer door.

With Lumen, you no longer need to write lightmap UVs, wait for lightmap baking, or place reflection captures; just create and edit lights in the virtual editor and see what the player sees when they run the game or experience on the target platform Final lighting.

Nanite: New virtualized micropolygon geometry system that allows you to create games and experiences with a great deal of geometric detail. Directly import film-quality source art consisting of millions of polygons, from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans, and place them millions of times while maintaining real-time frame rates without any noticeable loss of fidelity.

Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM): Designed for Lumen and Nanite needs, providing reasonable, manageable performance costs and reasonable soft shadows. Nanite and VSM intelligently stream only the details you can perceive, largely eliminating polygon count and draw call constraints, and eliminating time-consuming work like baking details to normal maps and manually writing LODs, This allows you to focus on creativity.

For the vast majority of gamers today, frame rates of 60 fps or higher on high-resolution monitors are a fundamental requirement, putting a huge strain on rendering resources. Using the built-in, platform-independent high-quality upsampling system, Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), the engine can not only render at lower resolutions, but also output pixel fidelity similar to frames rendered at higher resolutions .

New Open World Toolset

As founder and CEO Tim Sweeney said at the launch event: "Making open worlds faster, easier and more collaborative for teams of all sizes". The arrival of Unreal Engine 5 has changed the way levels are managed and fluidized for the new world partition system, which automatically divides the world into grids and fluidizes the necessary units.

Thanks to the new OneFile Per Actor (OFPA) system, team members can now also work on the same area of the same world at the same time. At the same time, with data layers, you can create different variants of the same world, such as day and night versions, or create complete and broken geometry as layers that exist in the same space.

Additionally, Unreal Engine 5 lays the groundwork for absolutely huge worlds without rebasing or other tricks, with initial support for Large World Coordinates (LWC), which are doubles under the hood.

Built-in character and animation tools

It's notoriously time-consuming, tedious, and inefficient to constantly tweak and iterate animations back and forth using the DCC package. With Unreal Engine 5, users and players can animate in context, reuse existing animations, and adjust animations at runtime to suit game conditions.

For animation creation, there is a new set of powerful, artist-friendly tools that allow a wide range of players to work directly within the Unreal Editor. Highlights include the ability to quickly and easily create rigs with enhanced, production-ready control rigs, and the ability to share rigs between multiple characters, then animate them in Sequencer (in Sequencer, you can save and apply poses, and use the Tween tool to apply blended keys with undershoot or overshoot).

In Unreal Engine 5, the new retargeting tool allows players to quickly and easily reuse and enhance existing animations. Using the IK retargeter, you can transfer animation between characters with different skeletons and scales, for example, even retargeting a human animation to a wolf. Meanwhile, IK Rig enables you to do other things like adjust the animation of your character, such as keeping a moving character looking at the target.

There are also new features for adjusting animations at runtime to compensate for different game scenarios, such as different speeds or terrain, for better believability and immersion.

Model, UV edit and bake in the editor

Unreal Engine 5 offers a significantly expanded and enhanced toolset for mesh modeling, UV editing, and baking: they combine to form a powerful workflow that enables artists to develop and refine assets within the Unreal Editor. These tools are especially useful when dealing with dense meshes, such as those generated with photogrammetry tools such as RealityCapture, or with Kitbash Quixel Megascans.

Numerous new and enhanced mesh creation and editing tools represent a fundamental leap forward. These updates also include multiple enhancements to core modeling, sculpting, remodeling, and simplification, supported by architectural improvements that create a framework for future tools.

Equally important are updates and extensions to the UV editing tool suite. The new UV editor panel supports laying out, selecting, transforming, cutting and stitching UVs in 2D space; viewing, duplicating, adding and deleting UV channels; automatic unwrapping; 3D previews (projected UVs and Auto UVs are also improved).

Additionally, the Baking and Mesh Properties toolset has been significantly expanded. New baking tools provide improvements in normal, AO, and vertex baking, while multisampling, texture filtering, UV layers, and N-to-1 baking are also key features of the updated toolset.

Enhanced editor UI and workflow

Unreal Engine 5 features a modern look, streamlined workflow, and optimized use of screen space to make it easier, faster, and easier to use.

With Quixel Bridge fully integrated, users can directly drag and drop access to the entire Megascans library without the need for a separate download step. As part of the new Create menu, which provides a single location for fetching content, creating and placing characters, populating scenes faster and easier with a simple drag-and-drop workflow and one-click access to recently used characters .

The new version also adds the ability to easily invoke and stash the content browser via hotkeys or buttons, and dock any editor tab to a collapsible sidebar to keep tools and content easily accessible while freeing up viewport interactions more space.

In addition, there is a faster and simpler workflow for creating new projects from a single unified screen.

Full program audio engine

Unreal Engine 5 also introduces a whole new way of producing audio - MetaSounds, a high-performance system that provides full control of audio DSP graphics generation for audio sources, allowing you to manage all aspects of audio rendering to drive the next generation of procedural audio experience.

MetaSounds resembles a fully programmable material and rendering pipeline, bringing to audio all the benefits of procedural content creation that the Material Editor brings to shaders: dynamic data-driven assets, mapping game parameters to sound playback capabilities, huge workflow improvements, and more.

Stunning final-pixel image

Path Tracer in Unreal Engine 5 provides stability, performance, and feature integrity enhancements, including support for hair primitives and eye shader models, as well as support for sampling, BRDF models, light transport, supported geometry, and more. Improve.

With that said, here are a few highlights of this new Unreal Engine 5, and to see all the new features and enhancements, check out the release notes.

Currently, these new features and workflows have been validated in Fortnite and game development of The Matrix Awakens: Unreal Engine 5 Experience, and the long-awaited user players can now enjoy early access!