Epic Games Launches Unreal Engine 5 Early Access, Shows Massive 3D Scenes (venturebeat.com) 25
After years of work, Epic Games is launching early access for game developers for Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the company's tools for making games with highly realistic 3D animations. VentureBeat reports: Unreal Engine 5, which will officially ship in 2022, is the company's crowning technical achievement. The early access build will let game developers start testing features and prototyping their upcoming games. Epic isn't saying how long this took or how many employees are working on it, but it's a safe bet that a large chunk of those devs are involved in Unreal Engine 5. It's been seven years since the last engine shipped. Unreal Engine 5 will deliver the freedom, fidelity, and flexibility to create next-generation games that will blow players' minds, said Nick Penwarden, the vice president of engineering, in an interview with GamesBeat. He said it will be effortless for game developers to use groundbreaking new features such as Nanite and Lumen, which provide a generational leap in visual fidelity. The new World Partition system enables the creation of expansive worlds with scalable content.
Developers can also download the new sample project, Valley of the Ancient, to start exploring the new features of UE5. Captured on an Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, Valley of the Ancient is a rich and practical example of how the new features included with Unreal Engine 5 early access can be used, and is the result of internal stress-testing. The demo features a woman named Echo in a deserted mountain area. The team from Quixel, which Epic acquired in 2019, went out to Moab in Utah to scan tons of rock formations, using drones and cameras. And the artists who created the demo populated the scene with Megascans assets, as opposed to using anything procedural or traditional animation tools. "We are targeting 30FPS on next-generation console hardware" at 4K output with the demo, said Penwarden. "We expect people to be targeting 60 frames per second. It's really a choice of the the gaming content itself, what you want to target, and UE5 is absolutely capable of powering 60 frames per second experiences. We chose to, in this case, absolutely maximize visual quality. And so we targeted 30fps. But we're absolutely going to support 60 frames per second experiences."
You can view a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X here on YouTube.
Developers can also download the new sample project, Valley of the Ancient, to start exploring the new features of UE5. Captured on an Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, Valley of the Ancient is a rich and practical example of how the new features included with Unreal Engine 5 early access can be used, and is the result of internal stress-testing. The demo features a woman named Echo in a deserted mountain area. The team from Quixel, which Epic acquired in 2019, went out to Moab in Utah to scan tons of rock formations, using drones and cameras. And the artists who created the demo populated the scene with Megascans assets, as opposed to using anything procedural or traditional animation tools. "We are targeting 30FPS on next-generation console hardware" at 4K output with the demo, said Penwarden. "We expect people to be targeting 60 frames per second. It's really a choice of the the gaming content itself, what you want to target, and UE5 is absolutely capable of powering 60 frames per second experiences. We chose to, in this case, absolutely maximize visual quality. And so we targeted 30fps. But we're absolutely going to support 60 frames per second experiences."
You can view a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X here on YouTube.
Realism. (Score:1)
Unreal Engine 5 will deliver the freedom, fidelity, and flexibility to create next-generation games that will blow players' minds, said Nick Penwarden, the vice president of engineering, in an interview with GamesBeat.
If a game is blowing your mind, you're holding the controller wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
The team from Quixel, which Epic acquired in 2019, went out to Moab in Utah to scan tons of rock formations,
Did the scanner they used look like a metal pillar, about 3m tall, made of metal sheets riveted into a triangular prison? Just asking...
Re: (Score:2)
> triangular prison
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: and min specs are 1080 ti's (Score:3)
Yeah but then it costs them time and money to make it work on low performance GPUs. People developing for slow cards can use the existing engine or Unity.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:and min specs are 1080 ti's (Score:5, Informative)
Min specs for the *tech demo* is a 1080 Ti and 32GB of RAM. That's not the minimum spec for the engine, which is an iteration on UE4 and carries forward the relatively broad scaling options that engine had.
Rocks. (Score:2)
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You should look at the whole video, at some point they do add about a half-dozen bushes!
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They're using Megascans, which they own and offer to people who use their engine, which are essentially like stock footage for 3D scanned geometry with levels of detail and materials all bundled in.
So it's quick and easy to have some level designers throw a bunch of that together and have it look good for the features they're showing off.
With plants it's more difficult, like you said, because you can't really do photogrammetry of a tree full of leaves, and you also need a dynamics setup.
So the desert is goo
Re: (Score:2)
Dynamic organic stuff can be easier in some ways, but rocks have historically had the issue that in reality they're all pretty unique and different shapes, but in a game they suffer from textures repeating and being flat
Podracing (Score:2)
I know podracing has been done before but I want a podracing game with no constraints on where I can drive/fly the vehicle.
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If every participant can go in any direction, how is it still a race? Are you asking for a game of "Tag, you're it!"?
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That would be cool too but racing games always seem to keep you in a track even though there would never be such a physical limitation in the real world. Say that part of the "course" has you crossing something like Goblin Valley in Utah. The only requirement is that you enter from one location and exit from another one. How you get there should be totally up to the pilot.
Not next gen enough (Score:2)
went out to Moab in Utah to scan tons of rock formations, using drones and cameras. And the artists who created the demo populated the scene with Megascans assets, as opposed to using anything procedural or traditional animation tools.
I would have thought next gen tools would do photorealistic generation of rock formations, indeed a whole planet's varied landscapes, using fractal techniques.
Not brag about how you can handle terabytes of .bmps.
Too Bad (Score:2)
3d Scans (Score:1)