Juan Cañada är Epic Games chef för grafikteknik och höll nyligen ett föredrag i Madrid under ett spelevent. Gamereactor deltog i evenemanget och hade nöjet att filma intervjun längre ned som går igenom allt som rör Unreal Engine med den erfarne utvecklaren.
Även om Playstation 5 och Xbox Series X fortfarande känns nya, så är vi snart i deras halvtid. Därför ville vi fråga om den nuvarande användningen av Unreal Engine 5 hos olika studios och projekt, detta eftersom många av dem fortfarande väljer kraftigt anpassade Unreal Engine 4-lösningar. Cañada svarade:
"Yeah, well the transition takes years. Game companies cannot switch to another engine all of a sudden. It's going great, the adoption of Unreal Engine 5 is pretty incredible. We work on a number of demos since 2020 when we announced Unreal Engine 5, a demo called Rebirth, then another demo called The Matrix Awakens, and I cannot share numbers but those demos brought a lot of people to Unreal Engine 5.
It's just that creating a big game takes time, so the games that you see now have been developed with previous versions of Unreal. The games you will see in the future will be developed with Unreal Engine 5."
Han förklarade även för oss vad nya Unreal Engine 5-teknologier som Lumen och Nanite har att erbjuda oss:
"For the final user, for the person who's playing the game, it's all about quality (...) But for game developers, differences in workflow are huge.
Lumen is a dynamic lighting system which gives you global illumination in real time, so you don't need to bake anymore. Before Lumen, you had to pre-bake all the lighting and something called static baking, static lighting. You have to bake that information of lighting to textures, and you had to deal with a very annoying and slow process: Every time you change geometry, you need to re-bake things.
Regarding Nanite, apart from giving you an astonishing amount of quality, because you can zoom in on the geometry and you see a lot of detail that you only saw in film before, you can forget about things like LODs, level of details. In the past, when you modelled something like a house, a building, you had to create different versions of the model that were loaded with more or less polygons, depending on how far the camera was. That was very annoying, very hard to maintain, and that's over too with Nanite because Nanite makes that process automatic: You just load the model with cinematographic quality, all the resolution you can afford, and then Nanite works under the hood, creating the perfect performance version of it, depending on where the camera is."
Kolla in videon nedan för en intressant diskussion om Unreal Engine med flera spännande anekdoter (inklusive en om Fortnite).
Unreal Engine 5-demot The Matrix Awakens visade vad Epics senaste grafikmotor är kapabel till.
