Unreal Engine 5 Tech Demo, [UE5 Developer Availability 2022-04-05]

Looks pretty bad for now.
The Developer usually is very talented and creative. Made this for example:

Really a remarkable game, liked it.

 

Nice animation, though the lighting is pretty crap, I wondered if they inspired this film

(bad film btw) not worth watching

 

They're also known for making random small projects like the UE5 games. I'll take that as is, a tiny little open source experiment because they wanted to play around with UE5. There's no indication whatsoever that it's intended to be some commercialized release, or anything beyond a tiny experiment. Really it's nice of them to just release to everyone for free.

 

Here is a nice comparasion between UE5 and UE4 and what i said lightnining is not making a big difference. Both secences looks realy nice because they have unique geometry design. No rock looks like a other the geometry textures of the tree and stones looks nice. Geometry gives componentes a unique touch:

 

To be fair, his early tech builds and alpha releases that led to Overgrowth were also pretty janky as he experimented with his own engine, Unity and UE. Back then he was mostly experimenting with how to animate bunny combat so graphics were really bare bones.

I see him doing the same in the above video with UE5. Except now he's experimenting with lighting and how he might use it in a game. So, again it's pretty bare bones as he focuses on what he's experimenting on.

Always interesting to see what this developer is working on.

Regards,
SB

 

The Alpha Point presentation confirmed that the Coalition have had an early version of UE5 since November. Presumably it's a similar story for other close partners.

 

Love what they can do with Metahuman. Can't wait to see all future UE5 projects especially Hellblade II.

 

I dont see anything that couldnt be done in 4.
Looks underwhelming compared to the tech demos we saw on U5

 

The last ue5 demo was balling it quite high indeed but whats on display here is quite stunning on what they can do with the lighting.

 

Polygons are key feature of nanite:

 

Slides from Nanite deep dive at SIGGRAPH are posted here: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/index.html
Lumen stuff coming tomorrow, and I believe they mentioned the videos are going to be posted a few weeks later.

 

They posted this Lumen overview yesterday. I'm not sure it's the same presentation.

 

Size on disk improved by 20% sice EA and they think they can reduce sizes even more and will a major focus for them.

 

Incredible bit of software engineering and well laid out presentation. Congrats to you and the team. There is so much good stuff in there and I wonder if any of it will inspire future graphics apis. Or will Nanite finally usher in the era of pure compute pipelines (aside from texture filtering of course).

We probably don’t want apis to enforce cluster or instance formats but a hardware micropoly rasterizer would be useful. This could help with Nanite’s overdraw problem though performance seems fine already. Presumably the stated performance numbers are from PS5.

The problem with deformable meshes is only relevant when you need multiple LODs right? Is there any reason Nanite couldn’t be used for 3rd person character models or first person weapon models where you always want maximum LOD?

 

Hellblade 2 was in development before ue5 early access so its featureset should mainly focus on things possible before. It might run on ue5 but it is mainly an ue4 port so far.

 

Ninja Theory mentioned at E3 that they are still working on a vertical slice of HB2.

 

SIGGRAPH Lumen slides (and lots of other good stuff!) now online at the same site: http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/index.html

 

Yeah unless otherwise stated it's usually PS5.

Conceptually the clustering part (and even the simplification part) can work for skinned stuff that does not change topology. Some sort of cluster culling is going to be desirable for stuff like virtual shadow maps regardless of Nanite. The difficulties arise more around if arbitrary "late" deformation is allowed you still need to understand bounding volumes at a coarse scale, ideally without skinning all the vertices in memory first. Obviously that can work when geometry isn't too high poly (indeed that is how people are forced to do it for raytracing), but would not be feasible for the amount of detail that the Nanite meshes in the demos typically have. For those I imagine you really want to skin some sort of control mesh instead.

For specific cases like skinning there are some ways to understand bounds on deformed meshes/clusters based on the bones and weights, but I'm definitely not an expert in the area. I'd generally just summarize as "there are possibilities, but it's not exactly straightforward in the general-use engine case".

 

One thing I wish is that with UE5, Epic would work on how to improve run-time shader compilation. Lots of UE4 games have stuttering while the shaders are being compiled and cached during the first experience of almost anything.. so you get bad stuttering, and it leaves a really bad first impression. There are developers out there who have UE4 based games which don't have this issue as much or at all.. such as Gears 5 and Days Gone in my experience. But those games also feature heavily reworked and custom engine integration into UE4 itself.. so while some of the biggest devs can make due just fine.. a lot of the other devs who can't do that sort of thing have to settle for UE4 as it is. Games like It Takes Two, and Ghost Runner for example have bad stuttering when performing certain actions for the first time. And of course the most recent one I can think of is The Ascent.. which has terrible stuttering when shooting barrels with explosions and other effects that stall the game.

Here's a video I took of the first experience of playing It Takes Two.. an UE4 game. First run is without the shaders cached... then after I immediately restart the same cutscene... and it's smooth.



That is something you absolutely shouldn't have to deal with as your first experience with the game. I'm not saying it's Epic's fault.. but it's a common theme with UE developed games.

I really wish developers and Epic would focus on that aspect. Whether that includes allowing us to pre-generate our shaders before initial play, or improving the engine to the point where this no longer happens... as it's really a bummer. The first impression is everything. Optimization for framerates is important... but what's more important is optimization to ensure that the game isn't hitching and stalling by simply doing actions or camera cuts or whatever. I'm speaking for myself here, but I have absolutely NO PROBLEM waiting a 5-10 minutes to build a shader cache at initial launch to ensure that my first experience is optimal... than load in and deal with terrible stutter while I play and experience the game.

With games performing JIT processing and loading and with loading screens being kept to a minimum... it's more detrimental than ever to the game itself. I really hope as you see more people complaining and dealing with the stuttering (which isn't there on consoles) that something has to be done.. and waiting a few mins before your first launch of the game to cache the shaders isn't all that bad in comparison.

This is something that CAN be addressed.. and the option should be there for those of us willing to wait to have the best experience possible.

 

This is a UE5 game. Not worthy of a thread perhaps but it is striking to look at.