At its State of Unreal presentation at GDC 2023, Epic Games showed a tech demo Electric Dreams with an example of using new features, which will appear in Unreal Engine 5.2.
The demo included driving off-road in an electric pickup truck Rivian R1Tand the location was a photorealistic jungle, where the entire environment properly reacted to the movement of the car due to the physics engine Chaos.
The car model itself was provided by Rivian and had about 71 million polygons, but was drawn in real time thanks to the technology Nanites.
The tech demo also showed the work of a new material substrate system, which allows you to quickly and easily change what the object is made of.. For example, you can change the color of the car body or add dirt and marks to the surface from driving through puddles. Usually, artists have to turn to programmers to make such changes, but now it will be possible to do it yourself in real time.
In addition, Unreal Engine 5.2 will offer an experimental set of tools for creating procedural content.. Using the tech demo as an example, the developers showed how it is possible to literally change the location of elements on a manually created part of the level with automatic filling of the vacated space with just one mouse movement and then, on this basis, create a much larger playing space around by procedural generation.
The preview version of Unreal Engine 5.2 is out today.
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