Current Trends in the Industry (or: Let’s Talk About Unreal Engine 5, but Not Say a Lot of Anything)

There’s a new standard heading our direction in the computer graphics industry, and I feel like I’m in the right place at the right time for this.

Unreal Engine was released in 1998, specifically made for the Epic Games title Unreal. The engine was primarily designed for first-person shooters and has since been used in other industries, including film and television. The latest version, Unreal Engine 5, is packed full of new features and improvements for those existing features. Unreal now supports larger file sizes and the use of higher quality textures. More realism comes partially from higher quality textures. With a higher quality texture, you could see a well textured brick wall, and when getting closer to the wall those details actually become sharper and more minute.  

In addition to large files, Unreal Engine 5 also brings realistic scene lighting, virtualized geometry systems, shared rigs across characters, increased flexibility for managing audio, and a better way to create open worlds. And this all sounds great, even if you don’t know what any of it means.

So what does this mean?

Nanite, the virtualized geometry system, for example, saves you time when designing detail. It eliminates the task of loading in LODs allowing you to import film-quality art. LOD stands for Level of Detail and using LODs reduces polygon counts so that items don’t have as many faces when they’re further away. This means that your graphics won’t lag, no matter what your scene looks like in the distance.  

This is a good thing, since Unreal Engine is great for making large open worlds. Now, with the new World Partition system you can create and manage large, complex levels that load and unload as you cross the landscape. This reduces overlap by saving data as external files (however this uses a high performance version of the control system).

Lumen, the new lighting system, quickly adjusts to any changes made in the scenes time of day and additional sources of light. The lighting system was great in Unreal Engine 4, but from what I’ve seen of Unreal Engine 5, this is going to be so much better.

Now, perhaps my favorite new toy in Unreal Engine 5 is the expanded animation toolset. With Control Ride, you can now create and share rigs over multiple characters, saving time onrigging multiple skeletons. Additionally now there’s the Full-body IK solver, giving a creator greater control and creating more natural movements.

Unreal Engine 5 had a trailer launch in May of 2020. It is currently in early access and has a full launch expected for early 2022.