Epic Games presented Unreal Engine 5 for the first time in public in 2020. Gamers are still waiting for the technology to become widely used almost three years later. There aren’t any UE5 games available to play right now besides Fortnite and The Matrix Awakens, and the first round won’t come out until the very end of the year at the earliest. The State of Unreal speech Epic gave at GDC 2023 recently had a number of new demos highlighting the engine’s most recent features, despite all of that.
The most striking one was Ninja Theory, the creator of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, showcasing Epic’s brand-new MetaHuman Animator. By enabling independent developers to record realistic facial performances using an iPhone rather than specialised equipment, the tool claims to increase the accessibility of realistic facial capture for this market. The tool enables a studio to swiftly and precisely turn a closeup video of an actor into something a studio can use in-game, as you can see from the two demonstrations Epic supplied. The animator will debut this summer, according to Epic.
In a separate demonstration, Epic showcased some of the improvements in Unreal Engine 5.2 using, of all things, a digital reproduction of Rivian’s R1T electric truck. The EV ended up being the ideal showpiece for the new Substrate shading technique in UE 5. With the aid of technology, artists can produce several shading models and overlay them anyway they see suitable. To demonstrate how Substrate can allow multiple material layers to interact with one another without producing lighting errors, Epic gave the R1T an opal body in the demo. Additionally, the demo served as a demonstration for the new Procedural Content Generation capabilities from Epic. With just a few carefully designed elements, they enable level designers to produce vast, intricate worlds.
If all goes as planned, the first batch of Unreal Engine 5 games should be available soon. Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl should arrive this year, barring another delay. Two further UE5 projects, Black Myth: Wukong and Lords of the Fallen, don’t currently have a release date but have been in development for a while.
