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Epic Games has announced Unreal Engine 5, the next generation of its 3D game engine. Unreal Engine is the backbone of several of the world’s most popular games, including Fortnite, PUBG, and more, and is available on a wide variety of platforms, including iOS, Android, desktop, and consoles.
Unreal Engine 5 now takes things to the next level with the introduction of two new features the company calls Nanite and Lumen.
Nanite is an update to the geometry pipeline, which significantly increases the fidelity of geometry in a game while making it easier for developers to implement it. Developers can now import their ZBrush sculptures, photogrammetry scans like Quixel Megascans, or CAD data directly into the engine without having to optimize them. Nanite streams and scales geometry in real time, so there are no polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw call budgets to consider.
Nanite can process a large amount of triangle data per frame, where each triangle can be the size of a pixel. This high triangle count gives every object in the game an incredibly realistic appearance without having to use normal maps. It also eliminates things like flare and LOD distance, as geometry can scale with resolution and can be incredibly high-fidelity even up close.
The other new look of this engine is Lumen, a new dynamic real-time lighting system with multi-bounce global lighting. With this system, developers won’t have to introduce lighting into their game world or have to look at computationally expensive techniques like ray tracing to simulate bounce light for GI, as the game engine dynamically does this for them. a reduced cost price compared to RT.
You can see these technologies in action in the technical demo that Epic released today, which also runs on a PlayStation 5. The demo features incredibly high-fidelity geometry with realistic materials thanks to the use of Quixel megascans imported into Unreal Engine 5. rebound lighting in motion with the new Lumen global lighting system. The demo also shows techniques like Chaos Physics and Destruction, Niagara VFX, Convolution Reverb and Ambisonic Rendering found in the current version of Unreal Engine.
Unreal Engine 5 will be available in preview in early 2021 and in full later in 2021. It is compatible with iOS, Android, PC, Mac, current and next-gen consoles.
Now, obviously, you won’t see the visual fidelity of the likes you see in the previous PS5 demo on an iPhone any time soon. In fact, it will be a while before you play in this engine on any platform, since the games that use it will not come out in several years in the future. However, Epic Games has said that it will update its own Fortnite to Unreal Engine 5 next year, and while it won’t look like this demo, it will be the first test you’ll be able to get of the new engine on any platform.
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