Unreal Engine 5 was just released this morning.
And it is a game changer.
The computer graphics industry will never be the same.
Everyone from game developers to movie makers are excited to start using Unreal
Engine five.
But you're probably wondering why Unreal Engine 5 is such a big deal.
Well, in this video,
I'm going to go over five reasons why Unreal Engine five is a game changer.
Number one is Unreal's
brand new lighting system called Lumen.
Since the start of computer
graphics developers have been trying to simulate global illumination.
Essentially, global illumination is bounce lighting, which is the extra light
that is created from light rays bouncing off of different surfaces.
For example, if we have a room with just one light source,
which is the window, it doesn't make sense for the room to be pitch black.
Instead, light rays from the window will bounce off of the floors
and walls to illuminate the entire room indirectly.
Movies have been able
to use bounce light for a while now through the process called path tracing,
but it can take a very long time for just a single frame to render.
Sometimes these renders can even last for hours.
Obviously, this makes it hard to use for video games that require
30 to 120 frames rendered every second.
To get around this in the past game developers have faked
global illumination through a process called light baking.
Essentially, all the path tracing was rendered 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 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 is not real time.
So as soon as I make a change, our light map is no longer in sync.
So we have to rebake
the entire environment all over again, which is time consuming.
This is why Lumen is such a big deal since it's true real time
global illumination.
So right here
we have the same scene but Lumen is turned on, so there is no baked lighting.
And notice
how as soon as I start to move the chair around the light updates in real time,
we can even play with how much light is coming through the window dynamically.
So let's add in a cube
and we can scale this up
and slowly start to block off all the light in the room and then notice.
As soon as I move this, we start to seep in more and more in the light.
And this room is entirely dynamicly
changing its visibility because of all of that balanced lighting,
which was near impossible and unreal engine for the city.
Sample shows off Lumen pretty well.
I can rotate my sun and watch all those buildings illuminate
each other through their balanced lighting.
Even windows on buildings now give off light
For example, if I grab this car and move it infront of the the window,
it starts to cast soft shadows onto the concrete.
Reason two is Nanite
Every object you see in CGI, whether that be in video games
or movies, are comprised of tiny flat planes of geometry called polygons.
And generally, the more polygons you have in a world, the longer
it takes for a computer to render, which can slow down video games.
This is why games use a system called a level of detail or LOD
for short Basically, the further away an object is from
the camera, the less polygons it will use to render that object.
This makes games run faster since there's less polygons that have to be rendered,
but it's a time consuming process to create all the abilities
Nanite changes this at a simple level.
Nanite allows for dynamic level of detail.
This means you can have an object with millions of polygons without any LODs
because those polygons
dynamically deform, lowering the total amount of polys on the object.
This allows for high poly assets made for movies to be used in video games now.
I think it's best to show an example of why this is a big deal.
So right in front of you is a donut.
I made in unreal engine
and this donut is made up of about 30,000 different polygons.
Here is that same exact donut, but copied and pasted
over 100,000 times.
And what is insane is that we're not faking any of these donuts
with textures or billboards All these donuts are individual objects
that we can move around, rotate and scale.
Maybe one donut is bigger than all the others.
A more practical example is a city sample, which is made up entirely
of nanite objects.
We can see how nanite works by coming up to let down an entire visualization
and triangles.
So every color you see is an individual polygon,
and we could see more polygons pop in the closer
we get to on the buildings or to any of those objects.
For example, this water tower.
If I go away, we can see that the water tower
loses polys, but when I come up close, it gains more and more polys.
Number three is the Megascans asset library.
What is the point of great features like nanite lumen?
If we don't have any objects to populate our world with.
This is where mega scans can help us.
MegaScans is a library of over 16,000 assets ready to be used
automatically in Unreal Engine five These assets include 3D objects,
plants, material surfaces, modular objects.
And recently they even added customizable trees
and all these objects are photorealistic because they're scanned from real life.
The team of mega scans have flew all over the world,
from Japan to Iceland, scanning and capturing different objects
and surfaces using a program called Reality Capture.
These scans are then converted into 3D objects and imported into Unreal.
They have been used in movies and TV shows like The Lion King and Mandalorian.
What's amazing is that all
these assets are free and built into Unreal Engine five.
By default, you get mega scans all you have to do
is click on the ADD button right here and select Quixel Bridge
Now we get access to those 16,000 assets.
So, for example, what if you want a rock from the desert?
Well, I must select 3D assets to filter for objects
and type in desert and then rock.
So we see all the different assets that we can choose from.
Let's say, for example, maybe I want this asset right here.
All you have to do is drag it into your world, wait for it to download
and now we have that object
ready to move around and place in our world.
They even give us a lot of customizable features,
such as changing the Color of the Rock,
or we can even make the rock a lot shinier.
So let's get a better angle.
So the sun is hitting.
That's right here. By adjusting
It's Max Roughness.
So maybe this rock is really wet, so it's a really shiny.
In fact, this environment I created is almost made up entirely
of mega scan assets from the houses to the foliage
all the way to the cliffs at the very far back.
They are all from the library.
Also, the desert
from the valley of the ancient demo is entirely made up of megascan
Sets.
You can pretty much click anywhere on the screen, and odds are
you have selected a real life object that was scanned from the deserts of Utah.
Reason number four is metahumans Humans are one of the hardest assets
to create for games and movies,
especially if you're trying to create realistic humans.
It is one of the most expensive parts of any production
This is why metahumans is amazing.
It allows us to quickly create realistic humans in minutes,
and the application runs on your computer browser
so you don't need to download Unreal engine to use it.
It also comes with a bunch of different preset humans.
This is one of the preset humans.
You could see that we have just a bunch of options at the left, right here
We could go in and sculpt, maybe give him a bigger nose
and also raise the cheekbones, and then we could go into the head.
Give him different hair and maybe even add in a mustache
and of course, change the proportions.
Maybe make him a little bit skinnier.
Of course, we could continue using metahuman creator
but what if we want to bring the human into UE5
Well, it's as easy as opening up bridge and going into the metahumans
tab and under my metahumans, you see, all the humans you have created,
all you to do is simply download that character and imported into your game.
Once you do have it imported
you just have to find where he is under metahuman and simply drag it out.
It is that easy now to create a realistic human for games and animation.
But we're not just limited to a static human.
We can animate pretty much everything about this metahuman, including his face.
So, for example, what if you want to move his mouth down?
Just grab it like that.
Move it you can also move his eyes so you could see him looking in game
And keep in mind,
all of these are animatable, so you could create an entire animation.
We can even change his bodies.
Posts so we could raise arms and maybe try to animate him waving.
If you are good with animation,
The Matrix Unreal Engine five demo is a great example of the power Metahumans.
All the humans, from the player character to the pedestrians walk in the street
are metahumans.
Even Keanu Reeves is a customized metahuman.
Instead of using the Metahuman Application Artist scanned Keanu's face
and then use the metahuman technology for the materials rig in an animation.
So if you are a technical artist, you can still make use
of metahuman in a more traditional pipeline.
You're not just limited to what is possible.
The Metahuman editor number five is surprisingly unreal Engine four.
You probably noticed that
what you see on the screen right now is not unreal to five.
This is a demo of Unreal Engine four
that was released in 2012, which is a decade ago.
The reason why I'm showing this is to demonstrate that UE4
projects can easily be converted into UE5 projects.
Now this is the same demo, but running Unreal Engine five making use
of all the new features such as Lumen and nanites.
So it looks a lot better than it did in 2012.
The reason why this is important is because all the content created for UE4
is still relevant and works for you UE5 where there be tutorials or asset backs.
There's already an existing and thriving unreal ecosystem.
For example, there are over 10,000 different aspects you can buy right now
on the unreal marketplace, and almost all of them can be converted to UE5
Not to mention, a lot of these assets are free and new.
Free content is being added every month.
Also, almost all tutorials
created for Unreal Engine four still applied Unreal under five,
which is great for me because that means all my past videos are still relevant
For example, if you want to learn how to create a donut, an unreal engine,
then all you have to do
is watch this unreal engine for video and it still works for Unreal Engine five.
And if you want to learn unreal engine 5 then luckily you are in the right place,
I have a free five hour long beginner tutorial which you can watch right now.
Link in description below.
We go over everything from the basics of unreal
to creating a beautiful environment like the one you see right here.
Feel free to check it out if you are interested in learning unreal.
Thousands of people have already completed that course
and have started their unreal journey through it.
Also, since UE5 has now officially released,
I have a bunch of content videos and assets planned for this channel.
So if you're interested in it that make sure you subscribe
and pressed the Bell icon for notifications.
With all that being said, I hope to see you in future videos.