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

Nice fluid effect. love the niagara system.

 

• Focussed on rigid geometry first.

That explains why there was very little vegetation in the demo. It feels odd that Epic keep making, or prioritising, technical direction decisions that make varied open world games more difficult to implement.

 

The developer will use "normal" geometry for character and vegetation. Nanite will only be used for terrain , building, house and so on.

 

If you have a forest, I'd wonder if you could / want to have the main body of trees as Nanite objects and the bit that are usually cards still as regular geometry.

 

The thin and overlapping geometry is a great question to raise, and you are not the first to bring it up. My guess is that use-case is NOT the most nanite-friendly, but if we are lucky, it can still work if only in modesty.

I believe nothing about the setting chosen for the demo was accidental. Chizzeld rocks are great at showing off what nanaite and lumen is good at, but simultaneously at hiding what it may not be ideal for. As noted, there was little in highly specular reflection, skinned geo, procedural destruction and as you pointed out, thin geo. Another othing missing that I think may also be relevant: Smooth surfaces.

Nanite may not only be good at processing very intricate and irregular organic surfaces, but it may be the case that it's also BAD at things that are not very irregular and organic.

Maybe the lossyness of their compression and LODing system can hide behind the inherent noisiness and complexity of assets such as those in the demo, yet be more obvious and distracting when in cleaner, smoother geometry (Think, man-made curved space ship kind of stuff)

Or, even if the artifacts are not noticeable even in that use case, their method of "just compress and stream millions of verts all the time" is not the most efficient use of resources for surfaces that could otherwise be represented through subdivision surfaces. But I'm biased on that one. I just can't let go of my dream of seeing widespread use of sub-d curved surfaces in games. It just seems so ellegant...

 

Good insight -- I do think hard surface shapes are likely to turn out okay, there were quite a few precise edges on the temple and bricks in the demo, so I don't think we have anything akin to voxelization style loss of edge definition to worry about (plus what % of shipped ue4 games take place in urban environments? its gotta be like 50%+ right? As cool as this tech is, i doubt management would sign off on it if it didn't scale well on common manmade surfaces).

Smooth curved surfaces are an interesting concern -- I assume it'll be fine visually, it's hard to picture anything (breaking up the mesh into clusters, I guess, like assasins creed unity and there being some kind of errors at the seams? Or like, something vaguely analogoues to block compression leaving discontinuities in smooth surfaces or their normals, but being subtle enough to be completely hidden by noise?) that would completely not work on those kinds of surfaces yet look fine on the statue and buildings we saw.

I do wonder if the performance scales to different surface types in a way unlike what we're used to in traditional 3d though. Maybe larger objects

I don't think it's really a lack of focus, deforming meshes are just a very different problem to solve, and the potential advantages of this technique are too big to pass up. Like deferred rendering not handling transparency, lots of the biggest leaps in what we can do in games visually come at the loss of certain common subjects looking worse or running worse.

Probably skinned geo will work fine mixed in with nanite, since the main character obviously looked and ran fine, but im always suspicious of what's being hidden in demos like this.

 

http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2020/05/some-thoughts-on-unreal-5s-nanite-in.html

An interesting point of view about Nanite, it can apply to Lumen too.

 

https://www.gamesradar.com/were-abl...ssible-tomorrow-inside-epics-unreal-engine-5/

They just published the EDGE august 2020 Interview about Unreal Engine 5

 

Article reads as it was written for people who have not much intrest in tech (seems to be written for the avarage joe). Aside from that, it doesnt even seem accurate, as it basically describes the PS5 as being superior to MS's console. 'Sony had listened', 'PS5 made nanite possible', and noting that the xsx left 'many scratching their heads'.The amount of 'PS5 SSD hype' reads like pre-console launch, like if it was written over half a year ago.
Unreal Engine 5 is going to see implementation across quite many games i think, even fortnite down the line. The addition of ray tracing will make for even more impressive tech demos, too.

The article seems ammunition for console warring to me.

Edit: just read the (few) comments made on the article itself....

 

ps5 has some advantages over xsx (as xsx has over ps5) and nothing strange that some of this advantages can be used in incomming ue5 as we've already seen it in some multiplatform games. Also ue5 devs says ssd is indeed crucial here so I'm looking for first games on ue5 as many also here said that it's only marketing talk

 

It was, as the post you quoted said it was released in EDGE (a magazine) in August 2020

 

Explains alot, didnt even see that. The article shared was from today (and its comments).

 

https://www.splashdamage.com/careers/job/o2jDcfwU

It looks like Splash Damage next game is UE 5.

 

You took that well out of context. Edge was talking about the Xbox July event. Don't think anyone would argue it presented a compelling look at next gen graphics.

 

Maybe, they didnt specify exactly? Hellblade 2 was a impressive tech demo, too.

 

Just read from elsewhere that Brian Karis expects the Lumen in the Land of Nanite demo to be released at some point. He also said that they have a new and improved upsampling method that has made the demo look even better.

EDIT: His comments were made a few days ago.

 

Hellblade 2 wasn't at the July event, was running on PC, in engine but not clearly realtime. It's really only UE5 demo that makes it look achievable, maybe (as of the time the article was written).

 

If HB2 was real time, it was a cinematic sub-30fps real time.

It probably was pre-rendered.

 

Honestly I dont think it was, not saying that the actual game uses assets are of the same quality as the assets in the trailer, even if its just to do with overall game size.

The reason I think it was real time is because of all the 'weird' things about the trailer, it was running at 24 fps and had some weird non standard resolution, there were also some rendering artifacts in the trailer that likely wouldn't be there if it truly was pre-rendered.

 

If it was real time in any way shape or form, even at 24fps at a weird resolution running on the actual XSX, the developer and Microsoft would be shouting it from the roof tops every day of the week. The fact that they never mentioned if it was real time, already tells you its not.