DRAG AND DROP Much has been said of UE5’s features, not least in the wake of the tech demo that announced Unreal Engine 5 in 2020. It was ‘Lumen in the Land of Nanite’, which introduced namesake features Lumen and Nanite, the latter of which incorporates micropolygon rendering that allows developers to bring in movie quality assets or actually use film quality assets that have been created via photogrammetry, such as through the Quixel Megascans library. “Traditionally, the act of creating incredibly high quality
photoreal content has been extremely expensive and time consuming and requiring a certain skill set that is really hard to attain,” says Teddy Bergsman, senior director of Quixel, who insists that Epic has been dedicated to creating vast libraries of high quality ready-made content for creators, as well as an ecosystem of tools to make more content quickly and easily. Hence why Epic acquired Quixel in 2019, and why the Quixel library is being integrated into UE5, “so creators can access thousands of assets that they can directly drag and drop into their scenes instantaneously, without ever having to leave the engine. And the same photogrammetry technology that made this entire library possible, RealityCapture, is also part of Epic’s creator ecosystem.” Bergsman takes me through the various assets that are
available to creators and developers, both free and paid, and it’s a bewildering selection, but the ease with which assets can be brought into UE5’s cloud-based apps, together with integration with the likes of Sketchfab and Artstation, mean that detailed scenes can be created in a matter of days by just one artist. “It just goes to show what is now possible,” he says. “This level of realism, and the speed at which these environments have been created has never been possible before.”
BIGGER AND BETTER As well as Lumen, Epic’s new dynamic global illumination system that allows for real-time lighting and geometry changes, the third major new feature of Unreal Engine 5 is World Partitions, which allows for the creation of open worlds with unprecedented verticality and scale, as evidenced in The Matrix Awakens demo. “With our open world tooling in Unreal Engine 5, developers
can start authoring levels just as if they’re one giant world,” says Penwarden. ”They don’t need to think about the details of ‘how do I break this apart for the purpose of streaming’ and all of the technical challenges that one would run into. The engine is able to figure out how to slice up the content for streaming purposes on its own. “A lot of these technologies are not only about being able
to deliver a better final end product, in terms of better games, better visuals, better storytelling, but also to make it easier and more accessible for developers to create that kind of content. It’s really about removing technical barriers and empowering developers to focus on creativity rather than the technical aspects of content creation.”
A-Z OF UE5 FEATURES
Lumen: A high quality, dynamic global illumination system that allows for real- time lighting changes and real-time geometry changes.
MetaHuman Creator: MetaHuman is a cloud- based tool with which creators can forge photorealistic digital humans that can be imported straight into Unreal for further animation.
Nanite: Micropolygon rendering feature that allows developers to bring into UE5 film quality assets or use film quality assets that have been created via photogrammetry.
Quixel Megascans: A vast library of high quality content, acquired by Epic in 2019 and now integrated into Unreal Engine 5.
RealityCapture: Quixel’s photogrammetry technology that made the Megascans library possible.
RealityScan: A mobile scanning application that allows for the capture of high quality content via phone that can be automatically processed in the cloud. Users can then quickly share or sell assets to others.
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