With little research you can find it, the techniques mentioned are the pinnacle of rasterization and theres an ample amount of resources to learn about it, when he says they are different and game changing ( pun not intended ), trust me they really are
Its absolutely incredible what technologies you can get free and out of the box with unreal engine 5. Developers 10 years ago would probably have been frothing at the mouth seeing what you can do now!
@@Rossilaz58 its important to acknowledge that photorealism sells extremly well in games. I know what you mean though, but developing games is a business and triple A studios will make decisions based on predictions what will sell best. That doesn't mean stylized games won't sell well or realistic graphics guarantee lots of money, but it's safer for large companies in general.
Lumen and the shadow map thing are great but Nanite is the main reason I'm putting myself through learning C++ so I can go back to using unreal in the long term because that shit is straight up magic
There's a video I saw where some programmer made his own virtual geometry system in Unity (I think) and it looks the same. I think it may become the standard in coming years
@@sym9266 ive seem something like that too, while interesting, a small team of external devs that opeprate seperate from unity as a company doesn't seem like a recipe for innovation and a place as market leader. The footage i've seen (although i must admit that was still when it was in closed beta I belief) didn't seem anywhere near as stable as nanite. I can't fault them for that of course, i'm sure they dont even have 10% of the recourses epic is throwing at this and in that context it's impressive!! I have similair feelings to Unity's shader graph VS unreal's material editor, it's clearly not as well developed and trying to copy over what works from unreal, which of course is good because I like working on shaders in a node system rather than through code but in more and more ways unity seems to be 1 (or more) step behind unreal. about a year ago I moved over to working in unity and I am not unhappy about it at all, my main source of annoyance with unreal was the blueprint programming felt clunky and slow so the choice was between c# in unity or learning c++. at the time, i went with c# and I can't say I fully regret it but more and more it seems that, if I take the time to learn c++ now, it will save me a lot of headaches in the future, not having to make LODs for every model in your game will save a ridiculous amount of time while also increasing the quality. I'm sure unity will catch up to this, but at that point, where does unreal stand? (all along with some of the less that great news about unity as a company over the last couple of months)
@@thegamedevcave I see your point. I'm just super excited about the technology, less about the specific software. Incredible time to be alive as far as that goes😁
@@sym9266 oh taht I do agree with! epic just seems to be throwing an insane about of money into R&D right now and I like working with unreal but by no means that that mean i'm unhappy with unity, as you said, the tech itself is more important than the software itself
I have a cs degree and I have used a bit of ue5. I think you would need to at least be able to do basic pointer operations to use ue5's c++ api (not really an api, it is direct function calling but practically similar to other engines language bindings). If you don't know C++, I wouldn't recommend you to write too much code in your ue5 project. It could make your game leak memory or just unmaintainable, stick to blueprints if possible.
Its very cool seeing how much this game has changed, i remember finding it in the ps store when i was 13 and thinking it looked alright. I am now 19 and I still really like it
Same bro, remember getting my ps4 in summer 2017 when I was 10 and was waiting for pubg to release but I found fortnite which was the only free br game and now I'm 16 and still enjoying it
Is Nanite basically the geometry equivalent of tri-linear mip map interpolation? So essentially the LODs still exist but instead of having 4-6 set levels (or "gears") they have infinite levels (like a Continuously Variable Transmission in a car), and those levels are handled dynamically in real-time?
The way I understand it is, it combines rendering only what the player can see. Take a house in Fortnite. Traditionally, when the player can see any part of the house, you render the entire house, because it is one object. Nanite breaks down the house into thousands (if not more) pieces. Then renders each peace as it comes into view. So even if you have a big object, nanite doesn’t render everything, only what is visible.
@@Schizo0ol33tKazuka It’s actually a different process than that. 3D objects are usually rendered with differing levels of detail (LOD) based on the distance from the camera/player. This meant that separate models would have to be loaded in as the player came closer; increasing in detail. With Nanite, the object is rendered as one model that increases in polygon count as you come closer to it. This process seamlessly blends between the “LODs” so that no matter where the camera is the object will appear at its max resolution.
watch the nanite siggraph presentation for the best answer. nanite breaks geometry into clusters of triangles in a giant heirarchical lod tree (paged in from disk). then by cutting the tree for any arbitrary view position, nanite can efficiently render a lod with pixel-sized triangles that's perceptually indistinguishable from the full geometry. so in essence it renders a (relatively) constant number of pixel-sized triangles every frame, meaning the rendering complexity is now a function of screen resolution not geometry. an interesting detail is this is now done using a software rasterizer rather than hardware (which was designed for large triangles).
I get that it’s impressive technology and all, but I wouldn’t really say it looks good. It’s so dark and high contrast it reminds me of a “realistic” minecraft shader pack from 2013
It's not exactly the new feature's fault. Developers can easily increase the exposure and the amount of times the light bounces for dark areas to be a bit brighter.
Does it actually run at 60 FPS on the average end user's consoles/PCs? Last I heard, everyone I knew who played had it turned off because it was still too slow. I'm Genuinely curious
This new tech seems to only be good for high end hardware wish ppl would point that out more cuz why it looks cool it wont run well on lower end systems
I have it turned off, since I only have an APU nanite left me with 35 - 40 fps, which isnt terrible per say, but for a game like fortnite i would rather have 60 fps. I will say though, even with nanite turned off the game generally looks much prettier.
I run a RTX 3060ti and it seems to run well. I now play in performance mode with 120hz, mainly for the input delay and the significant advantage low graphics gives.
Hey stylized station. I love your content and bought your course years ago when it first launched. I'm just wondering are there any plans on updating it for the Unreal Engine 5.0 series in the near future? :)
Im really not a fan of the new look. The art style is cartoony but the graphics are too realistic for it, and now it looks weird. It doesnt go together for me.
Would love to see how you translate all of this into your own projects. So we can see how all of this is actually made. I know for example Nanite is pretty much very easy to access. But it never heard of this Shady Shadow Map Ray Tracing Stuff. Also Lumen is pretty much still a huge Performance Killer :D? How did Fortnite manage to make this that i can even enjoy this new tech on a very very old pc.
The funny thing is that this update to Unreal Engine 5.1 actually improved the framerate of the Switch and old-gen version ( I tested it on my brother's PS4, I imagine it got a little better on Xbox One too) which is impressive, I didn't expect this level of optimization on the old plataforms. The only downside is the city with the cyberpunk style, in this the framerate drops horribly on Switch and PS4, but the rest of the game is pretty ok, anyway, I can't wait to someday get my hands on a PS5 and be able to play the game with those gorgeous graphics, but until then, I'm glad the Switch version still has some support as it's my only main console right now .
Also I don’t know if the bushes in Oblivion billboard to your direction but that was like the first game where I obviously walked up to like look at The foliage and noticed the leaves were just turning towards my direction no matter what direction I faced
More like collapsing groups of triangles into smaller clusters with less geometry, based on camera distance. Unreal's Nanite visualization let's you fly around and see it in real time.
I would have liked to know a more visual, side-by-side comparison. And also a comparison of game size. If the games used tricks and technologies, like LOD models, mipmaps, shadow maps, and so on, wouldn't we expect all those "crutches" to not be necessary anymore and therefore reducing game size dramatically? I know that modern games use most of their storage for the textures, but also given how big those are, and to reduce memory usage you create mipmaps, you could strip all the mipmap layers away, right?
Wait, how is increasing the polygon count not worsening the performance exponentially? You already could make high detail geometry models before, but that consumed unholy amounts of resources. That's pretty much why lod and normal maps are used. What does nanite do that changes this? Do the new shadow maps and lumens not decrease performance compared to tradicional rendering techniques? The reflections you showed didn't need the object being reflected do be on screen (SSR) i thought that required ray tracing. How does that, the ambient occlusion and the new shadows differ from raytracing? Do they require specific hardware or just dx12, opengl and vulkan support?
Are there any downsides? Like, the game becoming very large (file size wize) or something? Does te average computer can run this? Or do you still need a very high end specs for this to be 60 fps?
New tecnologies always will have performance loss. Of course, now your computer will now be able to run bilions of models without a big performance hit, but it still have performance hit, because what Nanite do is 'Render these 3 bilions polygons, in only 60 milions', but at the same time = If the gpu can't render 60 milions properly, it'll lag anyway; If you have lower RAM memory or VRAM memory, you will have struggling, because these objects still have hundreds of megabites and textures with a HIGH amount of resolution, and go on. In the end, it'll depends if the developer want to push the engine to it's limits, and use hundreds of super detailed models with hundreds of textures at 6k resolution and go on. If they still uses model with avarage polygons and etc, you surelly will gain performance in comparasion with old method, but at the end, we know that's not what the developers wll do.
The new geometry for trees and buildings is fantastic, but the examples you’re showing of stuff in broad daylight look SO dark. It looks bad. Not even in a realistic vs. cartoony way, it’s not realistic at all to be that dark in the middle of a bright day. I legitimately had to check and see if my Night Shift setting was on because it looked like a strange filter was applied. Then when the character is indoors its pitch black with some faint rim light? Bro that aint a good look for this game.
A LOT, im in a game career learning all the techniques in order to make everything from zero, environment artists need to know ANYTHING about testing and optimize, from camera views, to weakspots, installing the right material for all the props/characters and shaders/lights on the map, if you want to be one artist like that start trying methodical roles like hard surfaces/rigging/doing uvs, etc..
@@LukiGames0 time is relative. if you already have experience it will take a lot less. so, throwing time into equation basically means "i might quit this if it is too hard"... thing is, game dev IS HARD no matter what. So, you either go all in on it or just try something different, maybe its not for you if you refrain from putting the effort.
Honestly lumen has no place in any fast paced game IMO. You can CONSTANTLY see the noise being reduced, and the lighting 'catching up' to whatever new dynamic condition just caused it to change. From the demo when they announced it it was very slow (right at the beginning of the cave, when they change time of day) and it seems like it is a bit faster already - but IMO it is still undercooked; in this video the engine struggled to calculate the lighting in a timely manner, so I'd imagine it is even worse in person.
This may be a stupid question but... In theory, does nanite can resolve visual game optimization for different consoles? I believe the files would be heavier but if nanite continues to get better, is it possible? idk I'm not a dev xd
Yea it does save a lot on storage since you only need one detailed asset of everything without having to make 5 or so slightly lower detail versions of each model
Yes and no, you surelly don't need anymore hundreds of different models to only one object, and it lower the usage of extra texture to simulate geometry, which save a lot of space, but now since you can add objects with bilions of polygons without performance loss, if the developer add super detailed object, the game size willl be a lot bigger, even if it's only requires one object now. So it will still depends on game, if they really try to use the entire engine with full detailed nanite objects, game size can be from 100gbs to 600gbs easy without proper compression methods.
ram is not everything, infact it barely matters you can have 2TB of ram and unreal would still lag as hell, just make sure you have a great cpu and gpu (you also need like 16GB so that unreal doesn't crash)
On 3080 the cost is still a bit too high for me so no nanite/lumen nor shadows for me. While it looks great the visuals are a tactical disadvantage however.
Im one of many people who play fortnite on console, and guys, imagine how hard it is to play fortnite, when your console has to run these graphics. (you can't change them) The worst thing about this is unreasonable input dealy and very low fps. Even worse in Tournaments.
@@HakoTaco1 I know i'm an Unreal aligned Dev since the UDK, by wasted i mean Fortnite is the current windows for all that insane engine tech, and it does not make it look that much better , for me due to its over-stylisation Fortnite look like a 2010 mobile game kept on life support. The tech is saving the game from looking thrash instead of making said tech shine for casual gamers, i wish Ue5 star-project was anything else, but you never choose what will make bank.
Kinda misleading, not all assets are super high poly now, it still makes no sense for the actual game size And the environment design is a really important point for a game to look good, it's not just "unreal good graphics" That's why you see and will keep seeing ue games that all look the same, you still need a real artistic direction. Btw i liked it more before, had a more cartoony feel to it, now it seems like it's trying to be something it's not just to show off the new ue features, which i guess is fine for an epic games game (and a game that's basically a 'do whatever you want, people'll still play it like fortnite), but to me it's lost a bit of it's original visual character It looks more... generic asset store toon/anime now
@@qChronos1 why not? Look at halo remastered, you can toggle the graphics from new to original I wouldn't say that's what they should do, they clearly want the game to go in a different direction, but it'd be definitely possible
@@qChronos1 yes but all that stuff is still supported in ue5 and it's super easy to upgrade from 4 to 5 for pretty much every asset Plus they're epic games, if THEY don't know how to handle unreal engine i don't know who could ahah And i'm pretty damn sure halo remastered and original were on different engines as well, much more than 'old' and new fortnite
@@dizzyndead Worse but not *that* terrible (maybe I got used to it lol). Just saying that the Switch isn't making the other versions look worse than they could be.
The game Looks better now in therms of inviroment but the grass and the trees dont look very good now it looked better in chapter 3 season 2 i think because the grass and trees had very good and not so Cartoony....
I need someone to help me answering my question. I’m a first year student at saic hoping to take game design classes next semester. I’m mainly interested in making stylized game environments and thought about taking your survival kit but the problem is that my college only teaches in unity and I don’t want to distract myself with so many resources since I’m just a beginner in game design world. So what should I do, is there any resource I can learn stylized environmental design with unity ?
Also, working in Unity. Sigh, I bought too many assets to abandon Unity for Unreal, but I really want to. Unity doesnt have Meta Human or Nannite. You can make a completely custom character and upload it into Meta Human and it will turn it into a game ready asset with realistic skin and facial expression. What's Unity doing? They're busy breaking teh API of all the tools I use so I can never make progress on my game.
always thought fortnite looked kinda like some generic cartoonized game and a little bit washed up in terms of colors and details... but damn, it feels like its graphics finally reached a level to actually pull the style off
