hello ladies and gentlemen it's Mike here at game from scratch and unreal Fest in Seattle just wound down some major announcements there and I'm going to focus on one very specifically that is the release of Unreal Engine 5. 5 so yes Unreal Engine 5. 5 if you head on over to everyone's favorite launcher the Epic gam store you will find that the in the epic games launcher there is now unreal L 5.
5 preview available obviously this is a preview don't even think about using it in a production environment but we do have some exciting new features to talk about about that are in Unreal Engine 5. 5 now the weird thing is there's no blog or release notes or anything to go along with this particular release so I'm going to let the announcements come straight from the horse's mouth and that is going to be from the actual session itself as we will get to in just a second another thing I will point out is Tim Sweeney is still the most awkward public speaker I have ever seen in my life you can literally tell while he is up there on stage that he is in his own personal hell and I can sympathize with that I hate public speaking as well but it's just one of those things every time I watch Tim give a keynote it's like oh that poor guy he does not want to be there all right anyways let's jump in and take a look at what we can expect in Unreal Engine 5. 5 so the first announcement we have is around nanite skeletal meshes and with 55 we now have support for Nite skeletal meshes while this feature is still experimental we've overcome many complex hurdles it currently supports linear Bland skinning combined with Dynamic displacement and we're working on adding translucency support for high quality characters with this feature you'll get incredibly fast rendering of crowds of hundreds of high quality characters including metahumans of course we got the usual and expected updates as well obviously we've got improvements to uh Lumen the rendering on the back end we have a new uh denoiser that has been inserted as well and of course we've got movements towards 60 frames per second Ray tracing technology nothing really completely new in this area other than the N noiser uh but definitely a focus on uh performance improvements just on a general case this next part though this is definitely the star of the show and I'm mostly going to let them go ahead and describe it in their own words because the Nuance of this is quite interesting and this is the new thing that they are calling megga lights this kind of seems to be what nanite was for lighting uh for for geometry and mega lights is for lighting it's basically going to free you up to use literally thousands of Lights in your scenes new types of lighting environments again I'm just going to let them demonstrate and describe it because this part is definitely mind-blowing so let's just jump in and see it the demo I'm going to cut it down a little bit for time but you're going to get just the full demonstration that they made Moving On Let's Talk Mega lights on real engine is that it's best when users can express themselves without technical constraint like nanite did for triangles or Lumen for Global illumination megaly removes limitation in a whole new category direct lighting and shadows take for example these textured area lights considered the gold standard of offline rendering here they are in real time spilling vibrant color into the scene casting soft shadows and Illuminating the environment in a way artists simply couldn't have done before [Applause] and a whole new tool in the Creator's toolkit is huge but that's not the only way megga lights makes things better let's see what's next hey there little guy who are [Music] you so it looks like Ekko has found herself in quite an interesting Marketplace here just about to open for the day let's turn on some of these shop fronts and see what's for [Music] sale there's something missing though the scene it's flat it's undefined let's turn on Shadows but not just for a few important lights for every single light in the entire View [Music] [Applause] from these main shop fronts to the screens the displays the flickering oil lamps string lights candles signs we're free to use whatever lights we need to tell our story and bring this beautiful environment to life now the density of light sources you see here it's extremely high and this is what you get when artists are working playfully without limitation okay let's go back to the scene Victor let's go further let's activate all these animated drones and robots over 1,000 individual Shadow casting light sources in this view alone wow like little fireflies all of these lights they're movable Dynamic scattering through the volumetric fog and megaly handles this impressive scene without missing a beat as we continue on it's worth mentioning that removing these limitations around light count and shadows it doesn't just apply to point and spotlights but to area lights as well megga lights enables artists to use area lights as freely as they would any other light source now whether you're using textured area lights light functions crisp Shadows or lovely soft Shadows you can have huge numbers of Lights of any type in whatever configuration works best for your scene now as we send eeko off on her next adventure we should mention performance what you've seen here is running live on a PlayStation 5 Mega whes is included in u55 it's an experimental feature in 55 and you can also check it out on the Expo floor if you want a closer look at all the pretty pixels now they also discussed some improvements to their animation tools which have becoming a very long way they've actually even added some new like real-time deformers you can use directly inside of Unreal Engine so that you no longer have to round trip out to your DCC tool you can actually do all of your animation off rank directly inside of Unreal Engine itself also their new uh skeletal system has been promoted up uh and is now considered uh more ready to use uh again what you just saw here by the way with the mega light stuff that is all um just experimental at this point in time no guarantee that it's actually going to go into production uction the animation tools definitely matured in this release and rounding it out we have a couple of other announcers got this new vehicle component system that was built in we have a new uh debugger for chaos physics for visualizing how your physics interactions are working we got some improvements to meta sound support and then we also have some really interesting new tools announced around the idea of mobile UI visualization stuff so if you're doing development for various different mobile platforms you can get a nice preview or look of exactly how your mobile rendering will work and ladies and gentlemen that is a very condensed version of what Unreal Engine 55 is all about again no release notes about this right now and I do need to caution once again this is preview do not use this in a production environment and when we get to the beta phase and the final release of course I will cover it here on the channel as well so if you are not already subscribed please do so or consider doing so so anyways and let me know what you think Unreal Engine 5.
