Unreal Engine 5: What's New and Exciting

April 5, 2022. Epic Games releases Unreal Engine 5 (UE5).

It marked a pivotal moment in game engines and the gaming industry. The game engine contains a remarkable set of new and exciting features that allow developers to push the limits of the game design process.

Features and workflow improvements through Unreal Engine 5 warrant its 10-20% market share. Its customer base is mainly game development studios with 20 – 49 employees.

It has always been and will most likely stay one of the Top 5 Game Engines.

UE5 is a tremendous upgrade to its predecessor, UE4, with features such as Lumen Global Lighting System, Virtual Shadow Maps, World Partition Tool, and MetaHuman. This offers modularity, high-quality facial realism, and large-scale world-building without any extra load on your hardware configurations.

The most current version is the Unreal Engine 5.3. It has amazing experimental features like cinematic-quality volumetric rendering, skeletal editor, orthographic rendering, etc.

Unreal Engine 5 is also set to receive several new features and updates in 2024, including support for Nanite and Lumen, a next-generation terrain solution, procedural content generation updates, a new Unreal Cloud solution, and more.

EDIIIE, a 3D Animation Company has expertise in creating games and game assets in UE. In this article, we dive into the benefits of using Unreal Engine 5 and how they improve, simplify, and optimize game creation for you.

Let’s begin.

Nanite Virtualized Geometry

This is a technology designed to create detailed 3D models and environments. Through Nanite Virtualized Geometry you can:

Develop assets with immense geometric detail without compromising on performance.
Import high-resolution assets, with millions of polygons, directly, without the need for mesh simplification.
Create lifelike, cinematic-quality visuals in real-time.
Streamline the workflow with techniques like LOD (Level of Detail) generation and management.
Reduce the load on the GPU and the CPU by only rendering game environment parts filtered through view-frustum culling and occlusion culling.
Ensure cross platform game development support for diverse device setups while maintaining high fidelity.

Lumen

Lumen is UE5’s illumination technology that delivers enhanced game lighting. It:

Reacts to changes in lighting and scene conditions in real-time.
Removes the need for precomputed lightmaps and supports dynamic scene changes like day to night transitions.
Allows for high-fidelity lighting for more immersive game environments without compromising on performance.
Makes the game lighting system more accessible for devs.
Works well on all platforms from mobiles to high-end PCs and consoles.
Improves light interactions like reflections, environmental shading, depth perception, and other light interactions on different materials for more realistic visuals.

Temporal Super Resolution (TSR)

TSR is a UE5 feature that enhances image quality and performance. It:

Improves the sharpness and clarity of images.
Enables games to run at higher frame rates by optimizing the rendering process.
Reduces the computational load on the hardware, which is particularly beneficial for VR and high-resolution displays or any Unreal game development company.

World Partition System

A world partition system allows developers to manage large-scale virtual worlds. It allows them to:

Automate the loading and unloading of game areas, based on the player’s location.
Organize the game environment better by dividing it into grids.
Work simultaneously on different sections of the virtual world.
Ensure smooth gameplay and player movements through dynamic content streaming.
Reduce memory usage as only a certain part of the game world needs to be rendered at a given time.

MetaSounds

MetaSounds is a high performance audio management system that gives game devs complete control. It allows them to:

Control audio DSP with its graph-based approach to sound processing.
Alter audio elements in the game engine, in real-time.
Generate procedural audio without the need for predefined samples.
Integrate it with the physics and animation systems to sync sounds with on-screen actions.
Scale it with future UE features.

There are also several more features that UE5 has provided such as convolution reverb, Vcam enhancements, data layers, and enhanced editor UI, etc.

Tabular Comparison Between Unreal Engine 5 v/s 4

Feature	Unreal Engine 5	Unreal Engine 4
Geometry Handling	Nanite allows for cinematic-quality visual assets without manual optimization	Limited by polygon budgets; requires optimization
Lighting	Lumen offers fully dynamic global illumination in real time	Uses baked lighting solutions like Lightmass
Level Streaming	World Partition system automates loading/unloading of game world parts	Manual level streaming management
Anti-Aliasing and Resolution	Temporal Super Resolution enhances image quality and performance	Traditional methods like Temporal AA
Sound Design	MetaSounds provides a fully procedural and high-performance audio system	Conventional audio system
User Interface	Streamlined and more user-friendly interface for ease of use	More complex and detailed
Animation and Rigging	Enhanced tools like Control Rig for procedural animations and live adjustments	Standard rigging and animation tools
Content Variation Management	Data Layers simplify the creation of multiple scene variations from one source	Limited or requires custom solutions
Performance Optimization	Advanced optimization techniques integrated, aiming for higher performance at scale	Requires significant manual optimization

Conclusion

With this look into the new animation tools in Unreal Engine 5, you are ready to ease into the game development process.

Unreal Engine 5 is redefining the landscape of game development. This is the next step for you in creating detailed, dynamic, and immersive gaming experiences for your players.
Book a consultation with EDIIIE for help across the game development process Unreal Engine game development process.

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