Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 is no longer just a pretty technical demo. The company has released an Early Access version of UE5 through the Epic Games Launcher and GitHub, giving developers an opportunity to start work with the next-gen toolkit ahead of the full release sometime in early 2022.
What to expect from the UE5 Early Access program?
The key, as hinted last year, is the ability to produce near-photorealistic visuals, convincing animations, and unique sounds with relatively little work. You can quickly produce movie-quality landscapes using the Nanite system, while Lumen provides real-time lighting that adjusts for the time of day and clouds overhead. The animation system adapts to nearby surfaces and fills in crucial gaps, and the MetaSounds system can quickly produce distinctive effects.
The technical demo shared by Geoff Keighley is a reminder of the end result — games can look and sound as good as pre-rendered cutscenes from just a few years ago, all the while running on relatively affordable console hardware like the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.
It will be a long while before you play games built on UE5, such as the next effort from Gears 5’s The Coalition. It’s safe to say they can’t come quickly enough, at least. Right now, even next-gen-only games like Returnal look much like their previous-gen counterparts. UE5 will be one of the first engines that truly shows what modern hardware can do. It might help justify a purchase if you weren’t already sold on the latest technology.
An overview of new and updated feature in the Early Access release of Unreal Engine 5
Unreal Engine 5 is the next major evolution of Unreal Engine, redesigned and enhanced for the next generation of games, real-time visualizations, and immersive interactive experiences. It will definitely empower game developers and creators across all industries to realize next-generation real-time 3D content and experiences with greater freedom, fidelity, and flexibility than ever before.
With technologies like Nanite virtualized geometry, Lumen real-time global lighting, and MetaSounds – an entirely new paradigm for immersive audio rendering – UE5 opens astounding new levels of realism and detail. You’ll be able to bring incredibly immersive and realistic gaming experiences to life.
Made by creators, for creators. With the size and complexity of next-generation assets and projects, maximizing efficiency and minimizing iteration time is essential for all roles in the project team — artists, programmers, build engineers, and more. UE5 introduces a new and refocused UI, integrates more asset design and authoring workflows into the editor to reduce the need for external apps, and offers new tools for working more smoothly with targets like consoles and mobile devices.
New rendering features
Unreal Engine 5’s newest rendering features enable you to build large, open-world games using film-quality assets that can be dynamically lit with real-time global illumination, reflections, and high resolution shadowing. These features represent generational leap infidelity, helping you bring the next generation of immersive and realistic gaming experiences to life.
Virtual Shadow Maps
Overview of Unreal Engine 5’s high resolution shadowing designed with film-quality assets and large dynamically lit open worlds in mind.
Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections
A high level overview of Lumen’s dynamic global illumination and reflections features.
Lumen Technical Details
An overview of technical capabilities and specifications of the Lumen Global Illumination and Reflections system.
Nanite Virtualized Geometry
Overview of Unreal Engine 5’s virtualized geometry system to achieve pixel scale detail and high object counts.
Read more notes about Unreal Engine 5 Early Access
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