CHANCE: Hi, I'm Chance Ivey, Senior Technical Designer at Epic Games.
GALEN: And I'm Galen Davis, Producer and Evangelist for Quixel at Epic Games.
CHANCE: Last summer,
we revealed the first look at what's coming in Unreal Engine 5
the next generation of our real-time technology,
and our demo "Lumen in the Land of Nanite".
Since then, the Engine Team has been working hard on preparing the tools
and technology for creators around the world to get their hands on
so that they can explore the new features and provide us with feedback.
GALEN: Now, just a few months ago, we assembled a small team of developers
to see what they could build using these new features.
The result is a new practical sample project called "Valley of The Ancient".
And today we're excited to give you the very first hands-on look
at some of the new tools and workflows that we used to build it.
CHANCE: Now we've got a lot to get to so let's get started.
GALEN: When setting out to make our demo
we wanted to push the boundaries of what's possible with UE5 today
while targeting next-gen hardware specifications.
Here are sequences running in real-time on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
Okay, welcome to the brand new UI in Unreal Engine 5.
While a lot of the same features and functionality
that you come to know in UE4 are still present in the new UI,
we've added several new systems to put you at the center of the experience.
For example,
the Content Browser can now be accessed like a drawer using hotkeys,
allowing you to keep a clean workspace
while still having access to all the content that you need.
We can also collapse and restore editor tabs to and from the sidebar,
maximizing the viewport experience.
And you're going to see a lot more of the UI
when we get further into this presentation
but we can't wait for you to get your hands on it.
Now, one of the main features of Unreal Engine 5 is Nanite.
Our virtualized micropolygon geometry system that frees artists to create
as much geometric detail as the eye can see.
Virtualized geometry
supports orders of magnitude more triangles without compromising speed,
and replaces the traditional system of mesh LODs,
handling all detailed transitions seamlessly,
without any additional setup.
In other words,
Nanite lets the artist create while the engine does the work.
Switching to this Nanite visualization,
you can see individual triangles rendered out
as different colors here in the viewport.
And because the geometry is now virtualized,
you can feel free to place assets like these all throughout your scene
to fill out a massive player space.
Using this debug view,
you can see individual instances represented by different colors
from swatch to swatch.
Each instance in this environment
contains around 1 to 2 million triangles,
providing enough detail for the camera to roam
with complete creative freedom.
Now, UE5's new anti-aliasing solution,
Temporal Super Resolution, keeps up with all this new geometric detail,
to create sharper, more stable images than before
with quality approaching true native 4K at the cost of 1080p.
While highly detailed assets are great on their own
high quality lighting
that realistically reacts to your scene
is what opens the door to more dynamic worlds and immersive gameplay.
Lumen is our fully dynamic real-time global illumination solution
that immediately reacts to scene and light change,
making for more believable experiences.
And the GI hooks in directly with our time of day settings,
allowing for true physically based setups for photorealistic environments.
The Megascans library
has meticulously calibrated physically based services and objects
in the thousands of assets as of today.
And the assets that we're highlighting here
show just how powerful it is to have Nanite and
Lumen working in tandem.
Also thanks to the new Sky Atmosphere system,
it is incredibly simple to quickly simulate realistic time of day,
carefully art direct volumetric clouds
and make modifications to things like atmospherics,
sun position and fog.
And for this example, we wanted a fully dynamic scene
No light baking,
and realistic interpolation between the different times of day.
Of course, when in development,
having access to high quality content that's easy to use
helps you iterate quickly
and saves lots of time that can be better spent elsewhere on your project.
With Quixel now being a part of the Epic Games family
we've made the full Megascans library
free and open for all Unreal Engine users.
Bridge, our online browser for Megascans assets,
has historically functioned as a standalone application
for quickly exporting assets in bulk directly into the engine,
albeit separate from Unreal.
Today, we're happy to announce that Bridge is now natively integrated
directly into the engine UI.
Now, you can simply drag and drop assets directly into your scene
for a more intuitive and connected experience
And simply logging in with your Epic ID
gives you immediate access to thousands of assets to use for free
in your Unreal Engine projects.
We are constantly looking to enhance the value of the Megascans library
and today we're excited to announce
that we're adding a brand new asset type called Mega Assemblies.
Mega Assemblies are the natural next step for us
in removing even more barriers for artists in crafting their worlds.
By combining existing assets from the Megascans library
our Artists are pre-assembling elements
that can be quickly accessed and leveraged to populate your scenes.
Using the Moab set, let's add an assembly to our scene.
And just like that,
we were able to quickly change the composition of this area in our map.
With UE5, we are reimagining what collaboration looks like for teams
and projects of all sizes.
A common challenge when collaborating on large worlds
is deciding how to structure map content
so that everyone on the team can easily work without asset contention
while also avoiding painful merge conflicts.
A new system called World Partition
makes traditional world-building workflows obsolete
by changing the way that we think about map files.
Rather than requiring artists to build out map content
as a series of streaming levels.
World partition allows teams to think of a single map
as one large world that gets broken down automatically
into many smaller, streamable cells on a grid.
These cells can be selectively loaded or unloaded in the editor
to save on edit-time resources,
allowing artists to only load up the sections of the map that they need.
On top of that changes to Actors in a World Partition map
are tracked at the actor level not the map level.
This "One File Per Actor" approach empowers different team members
to work on different actors in the same map
without having to worry about their changes getting clobbered in a merge
or having to revert to get someone else's edits.
Now, this approach means you could have artists lighting, set dressing,
and reworking the landscape simultaneously
all within the same virtual space.
Managing this much content at runtime
typically requires a ton of thought about how to stream relevant
content in and out to stay inside performance budgets.
Fortunately, World Partition handles that as well.
At runtime,
only this cells in a user-defined radius from our player are loaded,
and as we move, new cells are streamed in
while cells no longer needed are replaced
by their lower resolution Hierarchical Level of Detail,
or H-LOD, version
and since all projects have different requirements,
the cell size and loading radius are fully configurable
to match each project's content streaming needs.
Another feature that comes along with World Partition is Data Layers.
Data Layers are a way to categorize map assets
and collectively enable or disable them
when you want to alter the state of the world.
Working in Data Layers,
a separate group of artists
was able to assemble a mythical re-imagination of the environment
with more interactive elements for our demo.
At runtime, we can swap between these two modes,
streaming thousands of actors in and out,
and enter into the Dark World
Let's see this in action as we go back to Chance.
CHANCE: Thanks Galen
Many runtime and interactive frameworks
in Unreal Engine are getting significant updates in UE5.
One thing we've added for animation
is an experimental new Full-Body IK solver,
which is designed to give you better results with less work.
Here you can see it in action as a rig for our player character,
Echo,
corrects itself to adjust for variations on the ground below her.
It's deterministic, reliable and around 10 times faster than before.
To build and maintain more scalable gameplay systems,
we've also added a new framework called Game Feature Plugins
that will allow you to build and ship game content in a more modular way.
With Game Feature Plugins
numerous core gameplay features can be built in parallel
with better encapsulation and finer content organization.
Game Feature Plugins allow developers to add activation instructions
to extend base game functionality,
register new input actions for players,
and interface with other frameworks such as animation.
When we shifted into the Dark World,
we also activated a new game feature to give Echo
a brand new attack ability.
All of the assets and logic needed for the ability,
including new animations,
input controls,
Blueprint code, VFX, and audio
are contained inside this plugin
and core gameplay classes have no idea
that these assets exist until we activate it.
We've also added a feature called Animation Motion Warping
which allows you to manipulate root motion animations
to adapt them to the world.
Echo's vault animation
was authored to the specific dimensions of this rubble.
Leveraging Motion Warping,
we were able to add notify states
in the vault animation asset that can react to transform data
passed in via Blueprints.
This allowed us to reuse the same animation
to vault over other assets of different dimensions
like these pieces of debris
by sending information about their size
into the Motion Warping system.
Before triggering the vaulting animation,
a Blueprint script determines her rotation,
how high up she jumps,
how far she needs to move to get to the other side,
and where her feet should land.
Motion Warping then adapts the root motion of the vault animation
to match this data.
Also, for the Rift Interact Animation,
we use Motion Warping to place Echo in the perfect position
in order to ensure her hand would always touch the rift.
So, on the topic of Animation,
Unreal Engine 5 also includes our in-editor rigging tool,
Control Rig.
Meet The Ancient,
A film quality creature imagined and built
by our friends at the Aaron Sims Creative Company.
We partnered with Aaron Sims
and his group of talented artists to concept the Dark World
and to bring it to life through an enormous, mythical adversary.
Now, every single animation for The Ancient
was authored wholly in-engine by the Aaron Sims Creative team
using Control Rig and Sequencer,
our linear cinematic animation tool.
Also just to push the boundaries a bit
they even built it out of a collection of Nanite meshes
totaling over 50 million triangles attached directly to the skeleton.
Control Rig was designed to keep artists close to their creations
without having to bounce back and forth between software packages
allowing them to quickly iterate
all inside Unreal.
While imagining the battle between Echo and The Ancient,
we wanted to give the creature a heavy laser attack
that Echo would have to avoid.
We needed it to track Echo's location in the Arena
and fire a slow, sweeping blast towards her.
Taking advantage of the Full-Body IK Slolver mentioned earlier,
we were able to influence the direction and distance
The Ancient reaches out during the firing animation
based on where Echo is in the scene.
Let's see the results.
Here is what the base firing animation looks like...
And here it is again,
with the Full-Body IK post-process layers enabled
and our info about echo passed into Control Rig.
With Full-Body IK, and Control Rig,
designers and artists
can now author fully dynamic animations that react to gameplay
without having to build complex animation state machines
composed of numerous animation assets.
In Unreal Engine 5, we've completely overhauled the audio engine,
centered around MetaSounds,
a new asset type used for every sound effect in our demo.
MetaSounds bring the power and flexibility found in material editors
to audio creation,
providing fine control for authoring procedural game audio.
With full audio synthesis capabilities and a rich audio function library,
MetaSounds give unprecedented control over sound effects
and runtime applications.
Using MetaSounds,
we built The Ancient's laser attack out of a combination of sound samples
and synthesized audio.
Let's briefly break down how it was set up.
Using the stereo mixer,
let's isolate and play just the synthesized charge sound.
This effect is made by using a handful of sound wave generators
and multiple modulation widgets.
Now, let's mix back in our sound samples to hear the final result again.
All right, let's take down The Ancient!
CHANCE: Now, everything we've been showing you in today's demo
focuses on some of the new features in UE5,
but many of your favorite UE4 features such as
Niagara Particles and Visual Effects,
Chaos Physics,
Blueprint Visual Scripting, and more
have also received numerous updates in Unreal Engine 5.
GALEN: Plus, all your UE4 projects can be upgraded to UE5
so you won't have to worry about forward compatibility
for what you're working on now.
CHANCE: Here at Epic,
we are passionate about building great tools and new technology,
and a big part of our excitement is being able to bring you,
the developer community, on the journey with us.
So today we're making an Early Access build of Unreal Engine 5
freely available on the Epic Games Launcher
and the Unreal Engine GitHub
so you can explore and test out these tools yourself
to get an early look at what's coming later in the full release of UE 5.0
GALEN: Also we're releasing the project source for "Valley of The Ancient"
so you can check out how we use these features
to build everything you've seen in today's demonstration.
We've got a series of deep dive conversations on these topics lined up
for Inside Unreal, our official weekly livestream
where you can hear from the engine dev team and ask your questions
CHANCE: Now, these are still the early days of UE5,
and you can expect more news and features to be announced
as we move closer to a production-ready release
targeting early 2022.
GALEN: Follow the Unreal Engine social channels for more information,
and feel free to download the Early Access release
of Unreal Engine 5 and the "Valley of The Ancient" project today.
CHANCE: Thanks everyone for watching,
and welcome to Early Access!