Epic Games revealed Unreal Engine 5 along with a demo on PlayStation 5. Unreal Engine 5 brings next-generation photorealism to games that on par with movie CG and even real life. Unreal Engine 5 empowers artists to achieve unprecedented levels of detail and interactivity and brings these capabilities within practical reach of teams of all sizes through highly productive tools and content libraries. Epic Games releases a real-time demo ‘Lumen in the Land of Nanite’ running on PlayStation 5.
Unreal Engine 5 will feature two new core technologies: Nanite and Lumen. The new core technologies are explained below. The released demo also uses existing engine systems including Chaos physics and destruction, Niagara VFX, convolution reverb, and ambisonics rendering.
Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real-time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality.
Lumen is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. The system renders diffuse interreflection with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in huge, detailed environments, at scales ranging from kilometres to millimetres. Artists and designers can create more dynamic scenes using Lumen, for example, changing the sun angle for time of day, turning on a flashlight, or blowing a hole in the ceiling, and indirect lighting will adapt accordingly. Lumen erases the need to wait for lightmap bakes to finish and to author light map UVs—a huge time saving when an artist can move a light inside the Unreal Editor and lighting looks the same as when the game is run on console.
Learn more about Unreal Engine 5 at unrealengine.com.
About Unreal Engine
Unreal Engine is a game engine developed by Epic Games. Unreal Engine is the world's most open and advanced real-time 3D creation platform for photoreal visuals and immersive experiences.
