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A first look at Unreal Engine 5

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Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#271

Post by longtom »

skohan wrote: post #160
_bxg1 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly isn't completely raytraced, because current hardware can't support that. If they use the new hardware, they're using it in some kind of mixed mode. Whether that means only for certain materials, or whether they're able to use it to do "fat rays" that approximate only the general direction for indirect light, or whatever else. But direct, hard shadows are quite cheap (comparatively) on today's regular, ra…

It certainly isn't fully path traced, but the result does look to me like they are using ray-traced GI. You can tell by some of the details, like colored bounce lighting which I am not sure can be achieved with this level of detail using other methods. The current standard for getting real-time performance for ray tracing is to limit the number of rays and bounces, and stabilize the results temporally. I.e. to get a…

Another trick is in stead of tracing multiple bounces per ray at once, to compute one indirect bounce every n-th frame using intermediate results from the previous (not the current) frame and then spatio-temporally smooth the results, possibly with on-screen bilateral filtering of the past few frames. I think one can see they do this when they move the light source. It takes a while for the indirect bounces to fade out. Perhaps they use screen space ray tracing for this (meaning no indirect bounces for occluded geometry).

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#273

Post by chupasaurus »

yodon wrote: post #223
VikingCoder wrote: post #152

I've been wondering for a while Unreal doesn't just make the Unreal Browser. You download and install it. Then you give it a URL, and it streams down a map, and downloads DLLs containing behavior custom to that map. While you're in a map, you can walk through a portal to another map. Or you can just keep moving in a direction, which streams more and more map. If you're in a multi-player environment, you connect to a…

They did. It's called Fortnite. It's been fairly distuptive.

UE4 supports dynamic multiple maps. Fortnite maps are static ones, even though they could be done using that feature.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#274

Post by naikrovek »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #209
robmerki wrote: post #24

I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has truly created a way to show full quality assets at runtime without manual LOD / optimization, then this is going to be a huge process improvement for game development. Same goes for this lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became that much easier. They also bought Quixel,…

Don't you still need to do some of that just for file size and data transfer, if nothing else? In the demo they said it had hundreds of billions of triangles. Google tells me you can get down to 18 bytes or so per triangle, but even if we assume a lower bound of just three bytes per triangle (amortized storage of 1 vertex per triangle of an x,y,z point), we're talking about on the order of terabytes to just store tha…

Instancing is the key, for that part of this demo at least. One statue replicated 300 times only costs slightly more than one of those statues alone.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#275

Post by keenmaster »

jondiggsit wrote: post #189
aeturnum wrote: post #25

It's great to see that graphics continue to improve, but I think the pipelining of reproducing physical space characteristics is most interesting to me. One of the things they mention in the video is using tools to measure how real spaces echo and then reproducing those echo characteristics in virtual spaces. Techniques like that have enormous potential for allowing us to use virtual space and actual space collaborat…

As a high-end builder, I would love to integrate a wall like this into a project. The ability (as shown with the Mandelorian video) the screens have to produce light would be incredible in interior living spaces.

Modular micro LED panels will make this easier, when they’re not absurdly expensive.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#276

Post by omikun »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #209
robmerki wrote: post #24

I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has truly created a way to show full quality assets at runtime without manual LOD / optimization, then this is going to be a huge process improvement for game development. Same goes for this lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became that much easier. They also bought Quixel,…

Don't you still need to do some of that just for file size and data transfer, if nothing else? In the demo they said it had hundreds of billions of triangles. Google tells me you can get down to 18 bytes or so per triangle, but even if we assume a lower bound of just three bytes per triangle (amortized storage of 1 vertex per triangle of an x,y,z point), we're talking about on the order of terabytes to just store tha…

That's assuming 6 bytes per vertex, 3 vertices per triangle? Most assets use triangle strips, which averages closer to 1 vertex per triangle. They also said the souce mesh is in billions of triangles, but their Nanite pairs that down to 10's of millions. At ~1 vert/tri * 6bytes * 100mil tri, that's 600MB of meshes. Keep in mind this is just a demo, so they can pack what would normally be an entire level into one room. A whole game might end up be equivalent to a couple of demos after they manually optimize even more.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#278

Post by naikrovek »

barbecue_sauce wrote: post #162
robmerki wrote: post #24

I am always skeptical of tech demos like this, but if Epic has truly created a way to show full quality assets at runtime without manual LOD / optimization, then this is going to be a huge process improvement for game development. Same goes for this lighting. Baking lights is such a burden, if they can simply do all of this at runtime then making beautiful games just became that much easier. They also bought Quixel,…

As far as I know, Quixel still requires a subscription, and the assets can still be used in Unity. But the dynamic LOD optimization is definitely a killer feature.

Quixel is free for use with Unreal. The pricing structure for all other content tools is the same as it was before Epic bought Quixel.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#279

Post by randyrand »

muststopmyths wrote: post #240

This looks nice, but I'm not sure what the practical gameplay consequences for the new tech are. I sure as shit am not going to ship a terabyte of original-quality assets in my game. It would help me produce cinematics more easily though, I suppose. Real-time global illumination looks dope. No more overnight lighting builds :)

why not? PS5 can download/delete as you go.

Re: A first look at Unreal Engine 5

#280

Post by rowanG077 »

backtracking wrote: post #230
flipgimble wrote: post #145

Let me throw in an anecdote that may amuse some: I was working for a now defunct large game company when Epic and Tim Sweeny came in to demo Unreal Engine 3 very early before the PS3 and XBox360 were launched. This was about 2004. Their demo blew away executives in particular. They showed multicolored lights casting multicolored shadows on a single high detail character. One of the lights was behind a stained glass w…

It's say current UE4 games don't match the details of the UE4 demos they showed on release.

FF 7 remake comes extremely close though. That's the best looking UE4 game I know. It's expected that real games do not have demo levels of visual fidelity.
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