ColdFusion - Now Games Can Look Like Pixar Movies - Unreal Engine 5

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

Starting point is 00:00:30 This video is brought to you by Skillshare. Hi, welcome to another episode of Coldfusion, where I cover anything in science, technology, business or history. Imagine a future where playable video games look as good as Pixar movies. Imagine if they had lighting that's realistic and creates presence. What about details that are as crisp as real life? Unreal Engine 5, a software that allows people to build games, is getting pretty damn close to making this a reality. to making this a reality. It shows us a future where photorealistic games might exist a lot sooner than we think. More importantly it also makes the process of

Starting point is 00:01:12 making games much easier. When Unreal Engine 5 was announced last year I had an immediate feeling that this was going to be big. I got that strong sense that a company was seeing the direction of an industry and choosing to act before anyone else. Earlier this year Unreal Engine 5 was made available to developers and in This episode, we'll take a look at why so many people are finding Unreal Engine 5 so fascinating. You are watching Tull Fusion TV. So just quickly, to bring everyone up to speed, what is Unreal Engine 5 exactly? In simple terms, it's the latest generation of a game-building software developed by Epic Games.

Starting point is 00:01:53 It first debuted in 1998, and has since been used in games such as Fortnite, Gears of War, and Rocket League. To begin, let's just visually take in what's just... become possible with Unreal Engine 5. I want you to note how the light looks and how it makes the scene feel and also the level of detail in the scenes. So why does it look so good? Well it's because of two key components that Epic Games has come up with. Number one is Nanite. This allows for ultra-high textures in games without paying a massive performance cost and number two is Lumen, a revolution in realistic real-time lighting. We'll come back to Lumen shortly, but let's start.

Starting point is 00:03:21 with Nanite. According to Brian Carus, the creator of Nanite, the demo you're seeing on your screen only needed three gigabytes of system RAM to run. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive.

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Starting point is 00:04:27 iGaming Ontario. ...and four gigabytes of video memory. So just take a look at this demo. It feels almost like a Pixar or DreamWorks movie. The detail and the lighting just seems to stand out as different to what we're used to in games. We're going to explore exactly why it looks different a little later in the episode. So usually game graphics demos always look great, But when you get down to it, often what's promised is far from reality. I was skeptical when I saw this demo of Unreal Engine 5 last year. But now that it's released, and everyday people are using it for themselves,

Starting point is 00:05:06 you can see that this is indeed real. Here's some further explanations. It runs great. This is on my PC. Obviously I'm an editor right now. It's a full screen at here. So what I was talking about before with that sort of detailed shadows, they get very, very sharp and detailed, which is great to be able to show off that sort of intricate geometry. Anyways, let's...

Starting point is 00:05:43 Awesome. There was some misconceptions that we put this, like, crack in here to, like, hide streaming. I have the whole level loaded in memory right now. It was actually so that we could just show the camera getting, like, really close to this rock. There's an excuse to put the animation there. It wasn't really to hide any sort of streaming things. The second major improvement is Lumen, a global illumination system that approximates ray tracing, but also without the huge performance cost.

Starting point is 00:06:17 Looking closer at the lighting aspect, many current games fake the effects of how light moves in real life. This is often referred to as pre-baking. Although the end results can look good, sometimes light baking can take tens of hours for complex scenes. And if you want to rotate a single light source, you're going to have to wait a long time to run the entire scene again. In movies by, say, Pixar, the digital light is modelled in rays, so it can reflect, bounce, be absorbed, and generally behave closer to reality. This gives it a more realistic appearance. The only issue is that it can take a computer minutes, or even hours, to draw a single frame in a movie scene. In video games, however, this isn't feasible for obvious

Starting point is 00:07:00 reasons. One frame-per-minute gameplay wouldn't be all that fun. In recent, In recent years, the advent of ray tracing has brought the possibility of cinema quality lighting to games, but it still requires specific, expensive, and beefy hardware from Nvidia to run. And because of this, it's limited. It's clear that there needs to be something new for the average user. The Lumen system offers lighting that's accurate, but without the performance cost. The developers that I've talked to have been very excited. This episode is brought to you by Accenture.

Starting point is 00:07:33 When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. When you're a mid-sized business,

Starting point is 00:08:02 You need every competitive advantage you can get. Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core, working across every system. And it's ready to go from day one so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business. And I am too. And by the way, I am in no way sponsored by Epic Games or anything like that. I just think the technology is really cool.

Starting point is 00:08:33 Arguably, more important than graphics is the step change in the ease of producing video games. In the future, games will benefit a great deal when technical limitations greatly reduce. Once this happens, game developers can stop worrying about the tedious parts and focus more and important aspects, like gameplay and story. So how does Unreal Engine 5 fix this problem? The first way of doing this is by virtually removing the polygon limit. In games, everything that you see is made out of polygons, usually triangles. With traditional methods, there's a limit to what you can put into a given scene.

Starting point is 00:09:15 Because of this, game designers have to think carefully about how they build a scene and have to sacrifice quality in some areas. The more objects and detail you put into a scene, the laggier it gets. But now this is no longer the case. Nanite makes it possible to put billions or even trillions of triangles or polygons into are seen and still have things running at 30 frames per second. Everything can be as detailed everywhere. YouTuber Kalam Upton explains further. Shares of Unreal Engine 5 is Nanite. Our virtualized micro-polygon geometry system that frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see.

Starting point is 00:09:53 Virtualized geometry supports orders of magnitude more triangles without compromising speed. Right. Now, for those of you who aren't game developers, this might not mean much. But I'm going to tell you what this means. Currently in Unreal Engine 4 and other game engines is a limit on how many polygons you can have in one scene. That's not a thing anymore. They've completely changed the way that the game engine renders things. There's no longer a limit of 1 to 5 million polygons before your game starts to lag and get a bit iffy. You don't need to make things in the distance less detailed anymore, which is the main step that is time-consuming in game development. Because you don't just have to make one rock.

Starting point is 00:10:39 You have to make that rock, and then a lower-detailed rock, and then an even lower-detailed rock, and then a picture of a rock for in the background. But it's a time-consuming process. That is gone. You just make a rock, you throw it in, doesn't matter how detailed it is, you don't have to worry about keeping the detail low. instead of 1 to 5 million polygons per scene, you can go 1 to 5 million polygons per pebble on the floor.

Starting point is 00:11:04 And that, again, is not an exaggeration. That's crazy. As a rule of thumb, on average computing hardware, the limit is around 5 to 20 million polygons per scene before performance begins to drop. This ceiling has been completely removed. Just to demonstrate that fact, take a look at these. One instance of this dog is around 10 million polygons.

Starting point is 00:11:24 This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

Starting point is 00:11:54 Reddit user, Ionize games, put a thousand of these dogs or 10 billion polygons into a single scene and were still able to zoom around at 60 frames per second with no issues. This was never even possible before. Here's another example. A Reddit user created a fly-through of the Death Star with Lumen enabled. Just note the amount of detail and also how the lighting makes the scene feel more like a movie than a game. So so far, Nanite only works on static immovable. works on static immovable objects, so characters are out of the question for this high detail.

Starting point is 00:12:43 However, epic games are working on getting the limits of Nanite lifted. If we take a look at some other limitations that have been removed, in games there's no longer any pop-in. The draw distance is ridiculously far, and you can see everything all the time. With games becoming easier to make, interesting things begin to happen. A YouTube user, Reub, re-made The Simpsons hit and run, complete with a functional first mission, built an Unreal Engine 5, in a matter of days. There's also been an overhaul of character animations, removing countless hours of work from developers. So I'm going to quickly explain this. Those lines is the game

Starting point is 00:13:23 calculating how wide an object is that you have told your character to jump over. This animation is not pre-configured. So you don't need 10 different animations for jumping over an object of different sizes. So like if an object was this big, you wouldn't need the same animation as an object this big, because you don't need the full jump. Doesn't even matter anymore. You just tell it, measure that object, jump that far. Like, it's insane. Print script determines her rotation, how high up she jumps, how far she needs to move to get to the other side, and where her feet should land. That is the same animation played in different ways and not having to be edited and recalibrated by developers. This is a game changer, because again, this eradicate,

Starting point is 00:14:10 pretty much an entire person's job, which seems great and terrible at the same time, but for the gaming industry as a whole, this is great. How about motion graphics, completely done in Unreal Engine 5? You might be starting to see by now that this software not only has implications for games, but hobby animators as well. As we start to wrap up the episode, let's take a look at some implementations for cinema entertainment. Amazingly, the previous version of Unreal Engine. was used in the production of the Star Wars Mandalorian series by Disney.

Starting point is 00:14:46 If we're going to design the whole set in-game engine ahead of time, maybe we could have some in-camera effects. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result?

Starting point is 00:15:15 Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Like the actors and to be a background that we can directly photograph. So you end up with real-time final pixels in camera. Being able to see the actors point at things

Starting point is 00:15:34 and see what they're looking at was pretty transformative. It gave everybody context. With the added benefit that if you want to move a mountain, from there to there, you can do it instantly. You could switch between the Iceland location to the desert location, all within the same day of shooting. Any sequence where you say,

Starting point is 00:15:53 oh, this world's not quite right, let's just move it a little bit. Extraordinary number of benefits and advantages for shooting in that environment. It's mind-blowing what that tool is. Here are a couple of snippets of some short films made with Unreal Engine 5. Look around to see what your friends are doing, so you guys can fall one at a time. I mean, this is a sci-fi movie. We still want to keep it a little bit grounded

Starting point is 00:16:17 and make it more believable. So does anybody have any questions for me here? Where's Ork? Uh, yeah, we didn't have the time to retarget him. He came with the T-Pose, so... Let's get this over with. Looking at some of those, you may be wondering how the character models were done.

Starting point is 00:17:52 Along with Unreal Engine 5, the Epic's game team has also created Metahuman, a character tool that according to the company, can, quote, replace hundreds of man days and, literally within minutes, users can get results that they would otherwise take months to achieve. YouTuber Tim O'Helmers tries to create himself. Motion capture is also supported with some interesting results. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.

Starting point is 00:18:32 Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. When you're a mid-sized business, you need every competitive advantage you can get.

Starting point is 00:19:00 Like an AI solution that works for you, not against you. SAP Grow is built with AI embedded at its core, working across every system. And it's ready to go from day one, so you can hit the ground running. Bring it with SAP Grow, AI Cloud ERP for any size business. So in all of this, we haven't talked about the cost.

Starting point is 00:19:27 So how much is it? Well, interestingly, Unruheel Engine 5 is free to use and play around with, And that's great news if you're looking to see what's possible with your creativity. But how would you begin to use it if you're a complete beginner? Today's sponsor, Skillshare, has you covered. An Unreal Engine course by Greg Wondra takes you step by step on how to design and create a game level, work with materials, sounds, lighting effects, menu screens, and more, using Unreal Engine 4, which operates very similarly to the current version, so it's still very useful.

Starting point is 00:19:58 Skillshare also has countless courses on anything from personal productivity and business management, to music production, web development and photography. The first 1,000 Cold Fusion subscribers, to click the link in the description, will get a one-month free trial of Skillshare. So be sure to check out the link below to get started. Okay, so back to the video. Okay, so this is all well and good, but there has to be some negatives here, right? Unreal Engine is less flexible than its main competitor, Unity.

Starting point is 00:20:28 Also, the file sizes are very large. The demo that we saw in the beginning was 25 gigabytes in size, but they used cinema quality assets, so that's kind of to be expected. Another negative is that the human models still need a bunch of work. They're great for a more cartoony style, but not so much for something realistic. So to summarize, Unreal Engine 5 unlocks a lot of possibilities for developers. The Lumen technology is a game changer and is also useful in architecture designs and real-time mock-ups. Nanite enables the removal of technical limits,

Starting point is 00:21:02 so this makes games easier to create with a little bit more. lower barrier for entry. And I think that's ultimately a good thing. And even for the film and animation industry, who knows, soon we might start seeing short films that look pretty good from complete novices out there. It's all exciting stuff. So, to sum up my feelings, if you can't tell, I'm very excited about this and can't wait to see what smaller developers and AAA game developers are like do with this new technology when it's fully released in early 2022. All right, so that's it from me. Thanks for watching. My name is Degogo and you've been watching Cold Fusion. Now I'm going to leave you with some images of how gaming will look like in the very

Starting point is 00:21:40 near future. Really, it's just amazing how far we've come. Cheers guys. Have a good one. Now it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair. Way fair, every style, every home.

ColdFusion - Now Games Can Look Like Pixar Movies - Unreal Engine 5

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