The Unreal Engine 5 is going to make future games powered by it look incredible, as even the engine’s early access version can be used to create some amazing-looking maps.
MAWI United shared a few days ago a new video showcasing their Birch Forest Map recreated in the new engine from Epic. The map features Lumen with ray tracing, which makes everything look even more impressive.
Performance also seems to be somewhat decent. The Unreal Engine 5 birch Forest Map runs at 30 FPS on an RTX 2080, which is definitely impressive, considering the engine is still in an early access state.
Epic Games finally provided a new look at the Unreal Engine 5 unique features last week, also providing new information on the Nanite and Lumen features.
Nanite
Nanite is a virtualized micropolygon geometry system that enables you to create games with massive amounts of geometric detail, eliminating time-consuming and tedious work such as baking details to normal maps or manually authoring LODs.
Imagine directly importing in Unreal Engine 5 film-quality source art comprised of millions of polygons—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans—and placing them millions of times, all while maintaining a real-time frame rate, and without any noticeable loss of fidelity. Impossible? Not any more!
Lumen
Next up is Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination solution. With Lumen, you can create dynamic, believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or opening an exterior door.
With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; you can simply create and edit lights inside the Unreal Editor and see the same final lighting as when the game is run on console.
More information on the Unreal Engine 5 can be found on the engine’s Official Website.
