Unreal's newest update Unreal Engine 5.3 just released and it is a big deal the main reason is
nanite Landscapes when unreal engine 5 came out it introduced a revolutionary new way to render
geometry called nanite to briefly sum up nanites every object you see in computer Graphics is made
up of tiny flat planes of geometry called polygons the more polygons you have in your environment the
longer it will take to render this is why video games have made a system called level of detail
or LOD for short the further away an object is from the camera the less polygons it will use to
render that object this makes games run faster but we are limited in the amount of geometric detail
we could have Nanite fixes this because it uses Dynamic level detail which means you could have
an object with millions of polygons without any lods because the geometry deforms lowering the
amount of polygons on an object a good example of nanite in use is this city if I come up to
LIT nanite triangles we can see nanite in action every color is an individual polygon and there are
millions of them the biggest issue with nanite is that when it released it only worked on non-moving
static objects it was only really good for objects like rocks and cliffs this changed with the Unreal
Engine 5.1 updates it introduced nanite foliage which gave us the ability to create force with an
unlimited amount of detail here is a world with over a hundred thousand trees without any lods
but Landscapes which is the biggest part of any environment was still missing nanites Landscapes
allow us to create large open worlds easily using the tool we can sculpt add height maps and paint
different materials quickly this means Landscapes were stuck using low resolution geometry and it
heard our game's performance because unreal has a hard time rendering non-nanite objects
in all the tech demos epic games release to avoid these issues they didn't use Landscapes
instead they faked Landscapes this desert ground isn't actually a landscape instead it is a bunch
of nanite objects stacked on top of each other to make it look like a landscape finally in 5.3
nanite officially supports Landscapes to activate nanite select your landscape and then within the
details panel enable nanite and then build data now that it's enabled we can watch the geometry
dynamically deform it is that easy to enable nanites on our landscapes in the first version of
ue5 we made this Village on the channel but at the time the only objects using nanites were rocks and
the buildings now on UE 5.3 the entire world is nanite there isn't a single object that isn't
using nanites this means we can get an infinite amount of detail from our environments and the
performance is a lot better nanite Landscapes can now also use tessellation to add more detail in
ue4 we had tessellation which allowed us to create displacements from a high texture when
Unreal Engine 5 released it was removed but now it is back and it is using nanites this means we can
change objects from the material editor we have a brand new input called displacement where the
high High texture goes tessellation can convert any simple mesh into an object with thousands of
polygons just with a texture here's an environment with a landscape that isn't using displacement
the world feels kind of flat and here's the same landscape with displacement the ground has depth
to it and it looks a lot better everything you see on screen except the plants is the landscape
all the Rocks twigs and roots are not objects they are a high texture and whenever I make a
change to my landscape the nanite displacement remains in effect for the first time in gaming
we're not limited by how many polygons are on screen we can have infinite geometry everywhere
the next major feature is better volumetric fog and smoke unreals had volumetric fog for a while
which gives us the ability to have realistic light scattering in fog and smoke to enable volumetric
fog is easy you just have to click volumetric fog within the height fog to turn it on now we
get Dynamic fog that interacts with lighting so I can move the sunlight around and you'll see those
God Rays change direction it is the secret to make any of your environments stand out
here are before and afters of an animation with and without volumetric fog the world feels more
realistic and it looks visually more interesting with fog the only issue and unreal was that it
was problematic to create finely detailed fog it can only be used to create large splashes and it
was hard to use volumetrics for complex shapes like explosions instead explosions and smoke had
to be faked with Billboards Billboards are just a flat surface with an animated texture you can
see that this is just one single plane the smoke isn't actually 3D obviously this doesn't look the
best because when I move the lighting in my environment the smoke stays exactly the same
we don't see any changes because after all this is just a flat 2D texture in 5.3 sparse volume
textures fix this we can now import complicate volumetric simulations from programs like Janga
FX here is a sparse volume explosion imported from Janga FX into unreal and if I pause the
simulation you can see it is not being faked by Billboards this smoke simulation is completely 3D
if I move the light around it will dynamically change the way the smoke looks the smoke is able
to cast Shadows onto itself we can even use sparse volume textures to represent
clouds and what's amazing about these clouds compared to Unreal's default cloud system is
that I can move them around and rotate them so I get full control over where my clouds are in the
sky and if we zoom out we can even see that these clouds are massive objects that I can move around
and place them exactly where I want them to be volumes can even replace some particle effects
for example this fire here is very similar to the explosion where if I go into wireframe View mode
it is just a couple of 2D planes that simulate a fire animation and then if I look down directly
at it this effect immediately breaks and now here's that particle effect but it's replaced
with a sparse volume texture and this fire is now completely in 3D it's not a 2d plane that's facing
the camera so if we look at it from the top down the effect doesn't break this fire is real and it
exists in our world another major feature is that we can now create animatable characters directly
in Unreal Engine in unreal we have been able to create Rigs and anime characters this animation
you're looking at right now was animated entirely and unreal it wasn't created in another program
like blender or Maya the biggest part missing in the character creation workflow was skeletal
mesh editing which is the process of creating bones in a character UE 5.3 adds a skeletal mesh
editor this means we could create bones and Whey paint directly in the editor it is now possible
and unreal through modeling white painting bones rigging and animating using sequencer to create an
entire character just using Unreal we also get a new cloth Editor to create realistic simulations
for clothes users can Define exactly how a cloth simulation can interact with a character
and then artificial intelligence will bake that interaction into an animation Reflections also
got a major update if you don't know Unreal Engine 5 introduced a brand new lighting system called
Lumen Lumen gives us Dynamic bounce Lighting in real time it is important to know that bounce
lighting is also called Global illumination Global illumination is a process of light rays bouncing
around illuminating your entire world before Lumen game developers faked Global illumination through
a process called light baking like baking is rendering bounce lighting before the game is
played this render is then stored in a texture called a light map which is then overlaid on
top of the world to make it look like the light is bouncing around in real time when in reality it's
just a pre-rendered texture but now the problem is that Global illumination isn't real time as
soon as I make a change to our light map it is no longer in sync we have to rebake the entire
environment all over again which is time consuming this is why Lumen is a big deal because it is true
real-time Global illumination we don't have to bake our lights but the downsize that Lumen is
very expensive to run not every computer can run it because it is computationally intensive this
is why on real games like Valorant still use big lighting it is a competitive game so every frame
matters if we open up a Valor map in unreal you will see it using big lighting if I move
an object the light doesn't update until I re-bake the environments even though Lumen exists a lot of
games still have to use baked lighting because it's just more performance you could get 120
frames with baked lighting it's hard to get that many frames with Lumen Hardware hasn't caught up
yet this environment is using big lighting and one of the biggest issues with bake lighting is
that it doesn't have any Reflections you'll see that this entire environment is broken because
the reflections aren't working and we can fix this by manually adding in Reflections by using
a reflection capture within visual effects sphere reflection capture this will capture a 360 degree
texture of my environments and then project it on onto any reflective surfaces the workflow
to get Reflections everywhere is that now I have to create another reflection capture and move it
to where there's a bunch of Reflections and then I have to create a another one and then continue
the process throughout the entire environment and if we have a large environment this process can be
very tedious here's an environment that's using Lumen and Reflections work immediately we do not
need reflection captures but the issue is that we have to use Lumen Global illumination which hurts
our performance in 5.3 we now have the ability to use the Lumen reflections with big lighting so we
do not have to use Lumen Global illumination to get Lumen Reflections to get this feature
go to the Post process volume and set Global illumination to none so we're using the baked
lighting and not Lumen and then set Reflections to Lumen now we're using baked lighting for globe
illumination and only using Lumen for Reflections we get the high performance of static lighting we
have the accuracy of lumen reflect actions plus we no longer have to set up reflection captures also
Lumen reflection now supports multiple bounces so let's say we have a mirror right here and
then across the hallway we have another mirror notice how we can't see the other mirrors in Its
Reflection that's because we don't have enough reflection about this so if we go back into the
post process volume under Reflections we have a brand new setting called Max reflection bounces
if I set this to 2 now we can see the reflections the modeling mode user interface got a facelift
and now it is a lot easier to use all the tools are neatly organized in the categories and let's
say there's a tool I use a lot like displays then I can right click and add to favorites and now I
can quickly access that tool within the favorites tab Mass materials like foliage are now 20 faster
and there are more Shadow options for nanite to help optimize Shadows unreal Shadow system
called virtual Shadow maps are right now the main bottleneck 2 foliage so this gives us more control
over what types of Shadows should trees cast and finally a big update for Mac users nanite is Now
supported on all Apple M2 devices finally Apple users have access to both Lumen and nanite when
ue5 first release it didn't have either feature this also means that Unreal Engine 5 with Lumen
and nanite will be able to run on the Apple Vision Pro Pro the programs you're developing now on
unreal could be used for the Apple Vision Pro in the future the possibilities are endless for
unreal these were all the major changes to UE 5.2 but these are just the ones I think are important
of course there's a bunch of other changes you can check out by going to the unreal release notes
unreal is more important than ever because half of all next generation games are being made in
ue5 there is no better time to learn Unreal Engine than now luckily for you I have an
entire free course right here on YouTube which goes over the essentials to learn ue5 you can
learn how to create this world you see right now you can check it out Link in the description below