Breathtaking play of light and shadow in the Unreal Engine 5 demo

Epic Games continues to improve its Unreal Engine 5 technology. Today at the GDC in San Francisco, it showed off the new features that Unreal Engine 5 brings. Unreal Engine 5.2. The play of light and shadow in the jungle, accompanied by the Rivian electronic SUV, stands out in the demo. This is possible thanks to the well-known Lumen technology, which has been improved again.

By car the company showed how you can instantly change the surface of a digital car model, adding variations in its coloring, or dirt and mud from driving through puddles. Or vice versa, so that dirt is washed off the car as it passes through cleaner water. Previously, these changes had to be programmed. Now artists can make them themselves in real time. In order to have interesting information about the complete machine, it is on it. 71 million polygons.

Epic has also improved the tools to make it easier to create huge open worlds with procedural content, including dense vegetation, which we saw again in today’s demo. This is the second part of the video, where we see how the designer moves a large rock formation to the center of a dry riverbed, which automatically reacts to other procedurally generated elements nearby, in this case, logs. . When the rock moves backward, it returns almost to its original state.

In order for all this to be possible, you must first create a smaller part of the level manually (the so-called base) and then increase it faster with generated content through procedural tools. According to Epic, the 4-by-4-kilometer space is created from a 200-by-200-meter square that the developer “built” by hand.

Everything we see is running in real time on an Intel Core i9 13900K processor and an Nvidia RTX 4090 graphics card.

One last thing: the animation of realistic models can be enhanced with artificial intelligence thanks to Metahuman in Unreal Engine 5.2.