Juan Cañada, director of graphics engineering at Epic Games, recently spoke at the El Tardeo conference in Madrid to further educate young developers. Gamereactor attended the event and had the pleasure of filming the following interview with the veteran developer on Unreal Engine:
While they still feel new, we can say that we are in the middle of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox family of home consoles, so we wanted to ask how different studios and projects are currently using Unreal Engine 5 to see if any of them How many people still use highly customized UE4 solutions, although UE5 should be one of the driving forces of the current generation of games.
“Yes, the transition will take years,” Kannada noted in the video. “Game companies can’t suddenly switch to another engine. It’s been going really well, and the adoption of Unreal Engine 5 has been incredible. Since we announced Unreal Engine 5 in 2020, we’ve made a lot of demos, one called Rebirth, and then another , called The Matrix Awakens, I can’t share the numbers, but these demos brought a lot of people to Unreal Engine 5.
“It just takes time to make a big game,” he continued, “so the games you see today were developed with previous versions of Unreal Engine. The games you see in the future will be developed with Unreal Engine 5.
“Respawn and The Matrix Awakens bring a lot of people to Unreal Engine 5”
Then, for the technicians there, the director got more specific about what UE5 technologies like Lumen and Nanite were adding to the game.
“For the end user, for the person playing the game, it’s all about quality (…but for the game developer, the difference in workflow is huge”, he emphasized.
“Lumen is a dynamic lighting system that gives you instant global lighting, so you don’t have to bake. Before Lumen, you had to pre-bake all the lighting and something called static baking, static lighting. You had to bake the lighting The information is baked into the texture, and you have to deal with a very annoying and slow process: every time you change the geometry, you need to re-bake things”.
Cañada explained: “About Nanite, in addition to giving you amazing quality, because you can zoom in on the geometry, you see a lot of detail that was previously only seen in film, and you can forget about LOD, level of detail, etc.” In the past , when you model something like a house, a building, etc., you have to create different versions of the model that are loaded with more or less polygons, depending on the distance from the camera. This is very annoying and hard to maintain, and Nanite is over, because Nanite automates this process: you just load the model with film quality, all resolutions you can afford, and then Nanite works under the hood, according to the camera position to create the perfect performance version.
Play the full video to learn more about Unreal Engine being used in different industries, or how it has a very interesting two-way relationship with Fortnite.
