Unreal Engine 5 – Epic Games drops a bomb: Lumen and Nanite

Epic Games announced the next generation of his game engine, Unreal Engine 5 (UE5), with a breathtaking demo executed on Playstation 5.
Epic stated that the demo shows what the next console generation will be able to support, once the developers will have full access to developing tools like UE5 and the access to Microsoft’s Xbox Series X such as Sony’s PS5. Here you are the video proposed:

In a moment in the video, a room full of statues well-detailed, Epic states that each mesh has 33 million triangles, for a total of 16 billion triangles overall in the room. They assert too that Unreal Engine 5 on PS5 will create 20 million triangles for every single photogram, basically, triangles will be nearly as small as a pixel: the reality splashed on screen.

Unreal Engine 5 official announcement by Epic Games Lumen and Nanite

But how is it possible that a console can support a so high number of triangles? There are two keys that make plausible what yesterday seemed impossible: the light system and the geometry render.

Dynamic Global Lightning of Unreal Engine 5: Lumen

Beautiful bounce lighting instantaneously!
We called this new system Lumen.
-Brian Karis, Epic Games Techincal Graphic Director

Thanks to the new Lumen System in Unreal Engine 5 we won’t be forced to create levels with too static environments, because light will be calculated instantaneously on every single object rendered in the level, with a completely different method than before – despite we don’t know much about how this will work, they stated it will work! I mean… they’re the geniuses (and after a lot spent in researching I don’t think they give away information like these before the engine release date).

Geometries will be really virtualized: Nanite

Exactly! Developers and modelers won’t have to bother – like before – about the polygon number, or draw calls, nor the GPU memory occupied by models.

Practically, you will be able to export assets directly to UE5 with the same quality of those used in cartoons or films without modifying their materials: modelers and artists – like independent solo-developers – won’t lose time anymore to create LODs or to optimize meshes in order to get a better frame-rate, or at least it won’t be a priority like it used to be with UE4.

This new technology takes the name of Nanite. This is the future, this is Unreal Engine 5.

To round off, if before with Unreal Engine 4 you had to pay in 5% for incomings over 3.000$, now UE4 is near to be completely free: you will have to pay in the same percentage but only after 1.000.000$ revenues!

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