Unreal Engine 5.2 Looks Like REAL LIFE _ Next-Gen Graphics Tech Demo 2023

Right .

So last year , we added several new features to the engine to support foliage rendering .

And the Fortnite team used those features to ship Battle Royal Chapter four .

At the same time , Jacob over there and the team at Quel were experimenting with what's possible for photo real foliage environments and testing out the latest functionality we've been building for Unreal Engine .

So Jacob is here with us today in the Unreal editor .

Let's explore the environment and what better way to do that than off roading and what better way to off road than an Avian R one T .

Now , Vivian uses Unreal to power their instrument cluster including 3d visualization of their vehicles .

So we work with them to bring the R one T to life in this experience .

Let's head on out Jacob .

Sure thing on my way .

All right .

So we're building tools for interactive and dynamic worlds .

So here we have chaos physics simulating rocks that tumble as we drive over them leads bend out of the way .

And we also added some real time fluid simulation .

We worked with the team at Rivian to set up unreels chaos vehicle model to simulate the suspension of the truck and how the electric motors drive each individual wheel chaos also simulates how the tires compress and deform and meta sounds enable the team to precisely re synthesize the sounds of the electric motors and mix them with the Abi sonics of the jungle provided us with a highly detailed model of the truck .

About 71 million polygons that were able to render in real time .

Thanks to Nanite .

Now , the Rian not only looks incredibly realistic because of loin and Nanite but also its materials .

And today we're introducing substrate , our new material framework and to better demonstrate it , let's swap the paint out for OPAL .

Now , of course , you can't order Avian with opal body panels , but Opal was the internal code name for this project and also a really great demonstration of substrates capabilities , the base layer models , the iridescence refraction and reflections that occur inside of an opal and on top of that is a layer representing the polished surface and how light is absorbed as it travels through that clear layer of varying depths .

And now we can add back on the dust and dirt layers and notice how the reflection changes when interacting with the dust layer and that there are no artifacts along the transition from dirt to dust to opal .

So substrate is more expressive , enabling artists to create materials like this with different shading models and compose and layer those materials as they see fit .

All right , let's head on out Jacob on my way , right , in terms of performance substrate materials that are similar to the current UN rail engine shading model cost about the same .

But now artists have the freedom to offer more complex materials for extremely detailed use cases like in cinematics and in film .

So we're going to drive under this fallen tree here and everything that you've seen up to this point was painstakingly hand built by the environment team at quel everything since that fallen tree has been built using our brand new experimental suite of procedural content generation tools , entirely an engine that are flexible , deterministic and artist driven .

Our guiding principle in building these systems was to empower artists to make tools for artists .

So Jacob is gonna go ahead and add a procedural assembly to the world and the cool thing is that it communicates .

Thank you .

Yeah , pretty cool .

And the cool thing is that it communicates with other nearby procedural elements in the scene like the creek bed .

So let's say a designer comes by wants to direct the player to drive to the left .

Jacob can simply move the assembly to the right and everything updates to accommodate that change .

Game design is iterative .

So let's say the designer comes back , wants to give the player the choice of going left or right again .

Jacob can simply move the assembly back over .

Now , the artist who created this assembly also added some additional handles that Jacob can use to art direct where rock slides occur , allows them to customize the piece a little bit more , make it a little easier for the Rabban to drive by .

So we started by handcrafting that original part of the level to set the visuals and art direction for the entire piece and then built out procedural tools that allowed the team to create a much larger play space much more quickly .

Now , let's see how we can use these procedural tools to make larger sweeping changes to the environment .

So Jacob , let's start by removing some of the trees in this area .

Absolutely .

That's easy enough actually .

All right , a little too much .

Let's let's add some trees back in and let's also add in some cliff formations , give it a little bit more variability .

So the procedural systems are all deterministic as Jacob is experimenting with different sets of input parameters .

Once he finds a set that he likes , he can always go back to it and get out exactly the same results .

And the procedural systems aren't just placing trees and rocks but also fog cards , bugs , birds , everything that's needed to bring this environment to life and everything that you've seen here works at scale .

This environment is four kilometers by four kilometers .

If we hide all the procedural elements , we can see that original hand built area about 200 m by 200 m .

We believe that there will always be the need for hand building environments .

So we design these procedural systems to be tools for artists that work in concert with hand built content , both substrate and the new procedural tools will be available in experimental form in 5.2 .

And everything you've seen here is running in the Unreal editor in real time on a developer machine with an intel 3 900 K CP and NVIDIA Rx 490 GP .

So Jacob , thanks for being here and helping us out today .

Thank you very much Nick for having me .

It's been a pleasure .