Hello, I'm Brian Karis; Technical Director of Graphics here at Epic Games.
Hi, I'm Jerome Platteaux; Art Director of Special Projects.
A few years ago, we got together as a team and brainstormed...
...where we thought we could push forward the state of the art and real-time graphics.
There were two key areas that stood out.
The first...
Dynamic Global Illumination.
Beautiful bounce lighting...
instantaneously.
I don’t have to be constrained to do a game where the world has to be static.
And I'm able to iterate it a lot faster.
And we call this new system: Lumen.
And we are about to show you what it is capable of.
But first, there was another area that we thought we could push forward.
Truly virtualized geometry.
The artists wouldn't have to be concerned over poly counts,
draw calls, or memory.
We could directly use film quality assets and bring them straight into the engine.
And that's a big deal for artists.
I just want to be able to import my ZBrush models,
my photogrammetry scan,
my CAD data,
Without wasting any time optimizing, creating LODs, or even lowering the quality to make it hit frame rate.
In the end that’s what it's all about, art that just works.
And we call this new technology: Nanite.
Here is the future of Unreal Engine running live on a Playstation 5.
Awesome! Let's take a look at it.
GIRL: This has to be the right way!
BRIAN: Before we continue, let's stop a moment and take a look at some of the key features of this demo.
Much of what you see was built with Quixel Megascan assets.
But instead of using the game versions,
we use the cinematic versions which would typically only be used in film.
There are around a million triangles each.
And thanks to virtual texturing, they all use 8k textures as well.
Nanite can render an insane number of triangles very quickly.
There are over a billion triangles of source geometry in each frame,
that Nanite crunches down losslessly to around 20 million drawn triangles.
What does that many triangles look like?
This isn't noise.
These are the triangles, each a different color...
most are so small that they look like noise.
Nanite achieves detail down to the pixel.
Which means triangles are often the size of pixels.
This amount of geometric detail requires shadows to be pixel accurate as well.
And Nanite can do that, too.
Speaking of lighting,
all of the lighting in this demo is completely dynamic.
With the power of Lumen, that even includes multi-bounce global illumination.
No light maps, no baking here.
Without GI...
all of that beautiful lighting is gone.
With Lumen enabled, we can move the light and the bounce changes instantly.
Okay, let's keep going.
We've made some great additions to our audio system, as well.
Convolution Reverb allows us to measure reverberation characteristics of real spaces.
Like actual caves that we sampled, and reproduce them in virtual spaces.
Sound field rendering allows us to record, and play back, spatialized audio.
All of this adds up to a more immersive experience.
This swarm of bats was created with our Niagara effects system.
Particles in Niagara can now talk to one another, and understand their environment like never before.
We've also added a ton of new functionality to run fluid simulations like you see in the water below.
The demo runs on our Chaos physics system.
Here we are using it to accurately simulate the rigid bodies of the falling rocks,
and the cloth of her scarf.
Now that the environment is so complex,
we've needed to greatly improve our animations systems to adapt.
We've added predictive foot placement and motion warping,
which dynamically modifies IK and body position to look more natural.
For the character to more realistically interact with the environment...
we've added the ability to trigger seamless contextual animation events.
Like her hand on the door.
Dynamic GI is amazing, not just for speeding up iteration...
but also for its impact on gameplay.
Any light source can move while still having beautiful bounce lighting.
Dynamic illumination means specular as well which you can see on all the metal surfaces.
You can even see the Niagara powered bugs reacting to the light.
Lumen not only reacts to moving light sources, but also changes in geometry.
Remember we mentioned high poly assets?
This statue was imported directly from ZBrush, and is more than 33 million triangles.
No baking of normal maps, no authored LODs.
And we can do more than a single statue...
there are nearly 500 of that exact statue at the same detail level placed in this room.
For a total of over 16 billion triangles from statues alone.
Over this entire demo, there are hundreds of billions of triangles.
So with Nanite, you have limitless geometry...
And with Lumen, you have fully dynamic lighting and global illumination.
All running on a Playstation 5.
GIRL: There's not much time left.
BRIAN: And this doesn't need to be constrained to small rooms.
It can stretch all the way to the horizon.
GIRL: The portal - it’s open!
GIRL: Don't fail me now.
It's time to see what's next!
UNREAL ENGINE 5