The video is online so I’m sharing:
http://g4tv.com/trailers/hdvideos/37413/Unreal-Engine-3-New-Features-GDC-2009-Trailer.html
As a level designer, I’m most excited about LightMass. Instead of placing thousands of lights per level, we’ll be able to get away with very few. Emissive textures automatically cast light and sunlight bounces around the level realistically.
If I’m reading it right you have truly emissive textures that get baked into the map as static lighting, right? This isn’t dynamic? (Which would be impressive but also a framerate killer.)
Personally I like the MCP. That’s an awesome idea for designers to recognize and deal with “hot spots” on maps.
If I’m reading it right you have truly emissive textures that get baked into the map as static lighting, right? This isn’t dynamic?
Hmm, I’m not entirely sure to be honest. The engine team is working on this stuff and it hasn’t actually rolled out to level designers just yet.
From the video’s rendering section, it looks like you would place light sources for a pre-rendering pass that generates the emissive textures… maybe?
My understanding is this – The materials you define in the engine can be made to have an emissive component. So, let’s say you make a material for a light and specify that the glass parts are emissive. LightMass picks up on that automatically and any surface using that texture will cast light. I assume the brightness of the emissive component determines the light brightness in the world.
To clarify, it’s LIKE Beast but it’s entirely home grown.
Old thread but did we talk about this already? Unreal Engine has… what, built in humans now?
UE5 has an early access version now. Presumably games incoming in a year or two. Here’s some DF chat:
Source video here:
More from DF on UE5, now they have their own copy to play around in.
I downloaded it to futz with. Maybe I’ll take up game development.
As I seem to be the only person in this thread perhaps I’m the only person interested :)
As far as I can see it’s all the same stuff that’s been talked about before. UE5 is fully released now though.
CDPR and Tomb Raider both switching to UE5.
I’ve posted about UE5 stuff in other threads, talking about next-gen graphics, with some interest. Don’t know why this thread isn’t getting traction. Anyway nanite and lumen are neat and I can’t wait to play actual games without LOD flickering and with global illumination.
I’m interested in it, but as a non-programmer/artist I don’t really have anything to contribute and anyway I’m very much of the “let’s see it in an actual game” persuasion.
What’s really interesting is that the whole Matrix demo city is released as free sample content. And that’s a ton of content, buildings, trees, placeables. If the cars and NPC models are included too, that would be downright insane.
Their phone app to AR-scan objects is also extremely cool, as is its human generator stuff.
CD Projekt switching to UE5 was already announced a few weeks ago, but Crystal Dynamics going with UE5 (instead of their Foundation engine) was news.
Nobody else has even hinted at tech comparable to nanite.
There must be upsides but it does feel a little like the Unreal Engine is eating the world.
The presentation said just under 50% of all current-gen games releasing in the next year are on Unreal Engine. Not necessarily UE5 of course, there will be UE4 stragglers.
Unity is probably a couple of years behind. In-house engines, who knows, nothing announced yet.
You use someone else’s engine so you don’t need to build it yourself, to reduce your local workload. And nanite is all about that too, pushing a lot of the grunt annoying work from the developers and artists onto the engine. That more than anything else is why it’s so impressive.
And Lumen, GI can be done using RT hardware, but Lumen doesn’t need it-- it only uses RT for indirect lighting and they made that work on shaders, although it supposedly can use hardware RT too. So we’ve seen it elsewhere, but Lumen makes global illumination much more feasible on current-gen consoles with very slow AMD hardware RT performance. So it’s less of a “woah” moment than the visually infinite detail of nanite with no LOD flickering or pop-in, but still very impactful.
DF go through the Matrix demo… Off to watch!
TLDR: Ouch performance but someone found a tree moving with nanite :)