Unreal Engine 5 Demo
Epic Games showcased the new Unreal Engine on a PlayStation 5 and it looked stunning. The 15-minute video displayed the improved engine and all its capabilities while the narrators introduced us to the new ideas the team put into this new engine.
Lumen and Nanite. These are the names given to the new dynamic lighting system and the improved visual design that the new engine can offer. Lumen brings any world to life. Whether drowned in darkness or soaked in light, the lighting showcased in the demo was phenomenal. Not only that but the ability to have the shadows be concise and smooth allowed for the entire demo to seem like it was a high-budget Hollywood blockbuster.
Nanite, on the other hand, takes advantage of technology that is used in many Hollywood animations. Using extremely tiny triangles, about a pixel in size, they can create visuals that look remarkably close to real. This added “geometry” to the engine gives games the opportunity to have high-quality graphics with depth across a range. In the demo, they mention that this technology can be used for close-by objects, like statues, as well as far away objects on the horizon. The new engine is going to be an artists’ dream. This may even allow games to load in high-quality graphics without having to sacrifice the looks of background objects.
Both Lumen and Nanite, take center stage in the demo as the new ideas that will revolutionize the gaming industry. However, it is not until both are implemented together does it become apparent how good the games of the next generation are going to look. The demo not only showed us beautiful and intricate structures, but also those same intricacies working on an amazingly quick scale as the character flies between crumbling ruins.
When I first saw Lumen and Nanite work in harmony on the demo I was awestruck. Visually it looked amazing. The details of falling rocks, the ways in which light would illuminate certain parts of an object and even the ways in which the depth of objects created shadows on itself was something I have never seen in a video game and I can only hope that the next generation of video games looks as stunning as this demo did. Unreal Engine 5 is slated to be launched in 2021.