Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo, Release Target Late 2021

If we're fortunate, these tools will stay wholly independent and usable for people not invested in Unreal Engine. But I foresee a situation similar when when EA bought Criterion and third parties using Criterion's RenderWare engine were forced to look elsewhere as EA just let it stagnate. Games using RenderWare included GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas.

 

Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of that aspect, but I completely agree. Let's hope it remains viable standalone in addition to becoming a freebie for UE licenses.

 

Also if we're unlucky they will be only available in Unreal Engine, and considering the current times we live in, I'm willing to bet Murphy's Law is present more than ever in everything.

 

Let's not turn a technical thread into a subjective comparison thread.

 

Looks like they added a new indirection layer to runtime virtual textures on UE4.26, so now it should be feasible for large worlds while keeping millimeter precision.

 

Question from a graphics enthusiast without technical background here.
Considering we have reached a point where we can have 1 triangle per pixel, is the vegetation problem still a problem?
I mean, to my understanding, lots of vegetation means lots of foliage, which means lots of alpha, which used to be a problem, am I wrong? If everything is poly, there is no more alpha foliage, am I wrong?
Is the alpha problem due to limitations with the hardware rasterization? Does software rasterization solve this problem?
If all foliage was done with triangles, would it solve the problem ? Of course I guess the bottleneck would be deported somewhere else like unrealistically large assets sizes and crazy amount of hidden surfaces removal...
To summarize, does crazy polys and software rasterization solve the vegetation problem ?

 

It's unknown whether UE5's new "virtualized" geo will be useable for trees, or any "animated" meshes at all. But even if they have to use traditional polys it's not as bad as it was in the previous generations, as long as you're not doing hardware raytracing for shadows AND interactive foliage. Beyond that seemingly hard limit trees and grass and what have you should be much better this generation around, 60fps and high res included, and you should still be able to get individual blades of grass blowing independently out to a good distance, and individual leaves swaying in the wind (as long as you're close in).

Though I wouldn't expect any of that until dedicated next gen titles, that aren't half guessed at super early support stuff like Godfall and The Medium arrive, maybe by the end of this year. Creating foliage assets that look good for PS4/XBO is a real art otherwise, it's easy to make it look like low poly bodge, and the artistry also means there's not a super easy way to just make higher end versions of that same assets that look good as well.

 

In the Unrealfest presentation they stated that Nanite is for rigid geometry only and also that foilage is better handled by 'traditional' techniques.

edit:

This presentation for those that missed it. (15:24 for the specific slide)

 

A proper opaque rendering of foliage needs a very high quality antialiasing and rendering method which can render subpixel detail very fast.
Polycounts should get to thousands of polygons per pixel.

 

Okay well that's f*cking amazing. Even if we only see those quality models in cutscenes it'd be a massive step up over what we have today. Or imagine just randomizing the settings on this to generate NPC's resulting in just as much variation as you'd see in the real world.

 

It will translate into gameplay at no additional cost. These procedural tools (more in the near future) created in order to eliminate that transition.

 

Wonder what's going on with MHC that it's a cloud only tool. Too much data to be a downloadable module?

 

UE5 it seems to be very impressive. Sad I don't like Tim Epic.

 

Maybe you would like Tim Apple better.

 

I would guess it works with huge amounts of scanned assets and combining them, bit like the character creator in Star Citizen.
If there is few thousand of source meshes the size could become quite big.

 

Star Citizen's using 3Lateral's Genesplicer tech, which is presumably a MHC precursor. This VXGuide article from a while back suggests they'd be using deep learning to created rigs for characters, so I suspect the reason for the cloud based MHC is a mix of that and the size of the base assets.

https://www.fxguide.com/quicktakes/gene-splicer-from-3lateral-ilm-rogue-one-on-ue4/