Nana MarfoA student with a passion for game development and all things Japan. Archives
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Rambling about Unreal Engine 515/6/2020
Yes, I live! Sadly, lockdown hasn't treated me well, and uni has been hellish on top of that, but Geoff Keighly, host of The Game Awards and game indusry insider, made something called the Summer Games Fest. This was probably meant to happen next year as he was stepping away from E3, but due to the cancelation of E3, it's happening this year. As a quick side note, I don't think Gamescom: ONL is happening due the cancellation of Gamescom this year, but that's besides the point. On Wednesday we got the big news that Unreal Engine 5 is happening, and I want to talk about it!
Just as a side not, I mostly focus on asset creation, and I don't have super deep knowledge of the pipeline. I'm just excited about something and I wanna talk about it!
We start off with Brian Karis and Jerome Platteaux talking the 2 new systems in Unreal Engine: Lumin, which improves the effects of Dynamic Globel Ilumination, and Nanite, something that if it works properly, could VASTLY make the job of 3D video game artists a lot easier. The footage they show is running on PS5 in real time, and MAN does it look amazing!
The first thing I want to talk about is the opening in the cave. It showed that the amount of tris in the was akinned to pixels on screen, and that the textures were 8k textures via virtual texturing. I'll talk about this more in a bit when I get to the zBrush portion of the program. They also state that the lighting in this demo, powered by Lumin, is all dynamic, without using light maps, which is pretty insane.
They also talk audio engine improvement, which I'm not gonna talk about because I don't really know too much about the sound pipeline. They also talk about their particle system Naigra, and how each particle can now 'talk to one another' and can read the environment better than ever. They also talk about the improvement of the of their animations systems, including predictive foot placement, as well the abilty to trigger new contextual events seemlessly. A lot of improvements into animation within the game engine is good, as this help compensate of an animator's mistakes.
They talk a bit more about Lighting, which again, I don't know too much about, but I want to talk about something that could change the workflow of the inderstury.
That stachu you can see in front of you there was imported directly from zBrush, according to Epic Games, which is huge because usually models made in zBrush are skulpted digitally, which means there meshes are very uneven and topology is not very good. This is why usually models have versions with lower poly counts, as they usually are easier to optomise in a game engine. But with this, it seems that time period has ended as they use the assets that are usually used in cutscenes. The reason that cutscenes can use higher quality assets is because typically, cutscenes are pre-rendered, and don't have to worry about the memory being used in real time. This does depend on the game though, so don't quote me on that entirely.
Overall, I'm VERY excited for next gen of console, as well as what companies decide to make with them! I really hope you guys are as well, as on the day of writng this, sony does it's big event for the PS5!
Man 2020 would be amazing if all the sucky stuff in the world wasn't happening. Sadly we can't change that. Anyways I hope you guys are all always doing well, a lot of gaming news is dropping right now, so if anything super interesting comes up, I'll ramble about it!
But for now, thanks for reading, stay safe and I'll see you guys next time!
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