Unreal Engine 5 Reaction | Unchained Report

no i think like no doubt it's incredible right like the tech the tech um is is a feat it's really it's a lot of work that went into it and it looks great like there's there's no there's no doubt here that it that it's really really good looking and um and it definitely sparked a lot of conversation on the internet the marketing you know everybody's talking about it everybody was going crazy and definitely all the artists that i know all the modelers and environmental artists and all of them were just immediately oh my god this is amazing what you know what will happen with my workflow how will i work oh my god i can't i can't wait right so everybody's like super excited about it uh and it was it's great you know and it's a it's a really good tech demo to show off show off that tech um ps5 i think it really shows of the power um or what we could theoretically expect you know

that we could pump out onto the onto a ps5 and it really gets me excited about that the amount of detail and amount of it's really the detail that i think is missing a lot of games um that it kind of shows off so i think that's amazing um at the same time though you know this is not planned to be out until like the end of 20 2021 right and there's still probably a lot of open questions and performance and like how do you really make this this content um what went into actually making that demo how much work did it take what the tools look like what were the workflows um so there's a lot of unanswered questions around around that part of it some more time uh so yeah i mean the first question is of course

i mean i kind of know the answer but i want to make it clear out there for people who haven't seen the demo or if you're watching this i'm going to get the video going so of course uh how how practical is that real how much of it is real um how how much of it is faked i mean i know we're near launch and usually in that case uh whenever a tech demo is near launch it's pretty close right it's not like a fairy tale but i want to hear kind of your opinion of because there were new tech in there the the i believe the lumen uh the first time global elimination is really introduced in a practical unreal right yeah yeah i wouldn't yeah yeah like i wouldn't go that far but um but yeah definitely like i think bloomin is is interesting um and and how you know and and definitely the approach that they're taking with it is super interesting and there's a lot of other real-time gi techniques but and this it

looks like lumen is kind of combining a bunch and really delivering something and kind of also leaning on uh the fact that um nanite is a thing to also help to help do some of the some of the heavy lifting at a high detail level um but yeah so yeah definitely real-time gi is a is a huge uh productivity saver for for people that are making these levels and uh and i think that's that's really a big deal um i on the other hand though i think there's so much implications in like having the budget and the artistic team to even be able to create the create assets of that quality um some people are like oh no i don't need to create assets of that quality i could just use quicksilver or whatever right um but then you know you don't want all the games to look the same right you want to be able to add your stamp and your artistic touch right so um it's really a high bar for for a lot of gamete game dev teams

out there to even be able to try to reach right um and and i have no idea what the asset sizes are on disk like there's so many unanswered questions there but it's but it's there's no doubt that that tech devil is amazing i mean let's try to break it down i mean there's two main system as we kind of discuss uh there's the geo one and they were talking about how i mean i think i read into it a bit where it's kind of like how virtual texturing was kind of introduced in unreal recently and the idea is kind of similar to how they apply it to geometry do you mind kind of talking more about what the theory is behind that and how they're applying it per pixel a certain amount of triangles and so it's just what you see is not exactly yeah like i don't yeah i don't know all of the details about like of course they haven't really released all the details either right right how the gi system is working uh

they kind of detail the rails let me see if i can even find that look again um but there was there was something you know about at a at a long at a long distance you're using a much more coarse representation of the scene like voxel voxel-based geometry uh or junction that's converted into that course of course voxel graded and you use that to kind of do your uh your traces against for the for the gi uh and then when it's closer to camera it's using more detailed detailed information right so that's how you can kind of get um like a largely distance on a large scene with real-life gi without like killing your performance right because the further away you are you use a more closer approximation right um so so that that part is is really interesting and every artist every artist wants to do it with baking and big steps they just want to plop in their lights and and it just works right the one thing to take away you know it's one light source right um

so so like usually with these kind techniques the more light sources you have the slower it's going to go right so but but just doing one main one main light and having that be give you real mgi is a big improvement over having nothing right um [Music] yeah so you know when it comes to real time yeah i think that's that's really cool there's a lot of techniques up there for like you know there's lightning that does real-time gi but that has a big step uh there's ddgi um that that also has some some type of uh baking involved in where you have to kind of like make some sort of uh some sort of uh occlusion or visibility um calculation for for the probes that you're that you're doing the gi on um so like to have a system that's truly like no baking and you just drop some lights in uh that's actually really cool

yeah i mean i guess i don't know if it's even no no baking right so because like i said all of the details yeah the prep work behind it the one thing that scares me is how people look at this demo and just especially they haven't done game development right they see it as kind of like a like a skip a skipping step uh for basically 20 to 30 years of game dev knowledge it's like oh no lld's done i guess i shouldn't learn that or either optimize or any of that technique it seems like i can just create something in zbrush drop it in light it call it done which is foolish yeah yeah i think i think that promise is a little bit of overselling right i think it's still uh it's still to be known how much of how much of this job she can you have in a game where you're like hey my target is 4k 60 frames a second how much of this how much of your game could beat this

geometry that's unknown right and and so yeah i think people ready to abandon all of the things you've learned about how to optimize assets and lods and all that uh hold hold your horses on that right right um and the other thing i was pointing out about this technique too that i don't think anybody really noticed is the environment's very static yes right so um so when you want actual dynam dynamic movement stuff like that it's it's unclear how that how this tech translates to that [Music] yeah i i think everyone's so character so character artists are still like character artists are still like damn i guess i guess i don't have a silver bullet just yet right character artists are already thinking this way and current gen dude the way they build their props this is exactly how they are this is how sloppy they are

bro the the the the spoiledness the spoiledness of a character artist at some point i'm gonna write a book on it it's just ridiculous dude i remember this one time where uh we were so constricted with our levels where we're like all right this is the amount of textures and then basically the character artist would have six times that with a character it's like i'll just use one for a finger another one for an eyeball 2048 max but that's just how they think that's how they are i mean in a way the characters are pretty close to camera but it's just one of those things i feel i think environment artists just by the nature of what we do have a little bit more care with how we optimize and make things work because the impression of the environment especially something like what we're seeing right now

you know uh making it run making it look good at the same time that stands up to a well-made character it's very important to make it feel like one item right but um well i mean this demo achieved what it wanted needed to achieve which was impress the [ __ ] out of everybody and it set a high bar i mean you got to have these type of things to kind of stretch out you know the possibilities and even if you don't hit that that that mark uh every time uh you'll still end up pretty close to it which is in the end a better product for everybody right so yeah i'll i'll say that like for um for like film and tv production like this is weird this stuff is like really really promising right um for games there's some promise there it's still very unknown like like in practice like how will you actually use this how did you do it

yeah and like how will our team you know be able to get their vision across with this tech and and not go crazy with huge ass assets and take forever to make them and all of that yeah this part they're just showing off right here i mean this is that's incredible oh my god yeah it's two yeah well it's crazy it's great this one have a demo yeah that's great i would say like so here's here's where i'll i'll talk about some some of my philosophical beliefs um you know we're coming into another generation right yeah of of console hardware and we're showing again we're showing absolutely amazing graphics right absolutely amazing graphics look at these graphics look look at the the level detail you could get there's there's a big difference between these graphics and like say the games of last gen right um

but you know character animation character movement all of that is still the same right um they talked about in the video talk about some advancements they did with like ik and the cloth their scarf and all that um and yeah that's cool but like it it's not as big of a leap as these graphics are you saying those disciplines are lazy is that what you're saying no no they don't they don't do as much i would never i would never say that but what i would say is that you talk to gameplay guys or animation folks uh they'll tell you the same the same thing it's like uh we focus on every gen we focus on graphics graphics graphics is easy but it's the easy thing to sell it's the thing that people could obviously see is better um and we don't really give a lot of love to uh to some of the other disciplines

right uh although like there was a lot of talk in this as well about audio right because audio seems to be something that people want to focus on this game and and you know you've worked on games every game you know audio team gets like hey you get two percent yeah you could get you could get whatever scraps you have left over in the memory for your little audio right and so like now they're you know now we're talking about actual like real proper 3d spatial sound and those all sorts of modeling of your how you hear in the same sound waves all this kind of nonsense right can you expand on that nonsense because when i heard that i didn't wear it like what do you mean 3d sound i mean we have that don't we have that already can i just hear where it's coming from [Laughter] come on let's get back to the graphics i guess exactly exactly right exactly right and i think even i think even most people unless you're like a serious audiophile you won't even really notice yeah um but um but yeah yeah we have 3d

positional sound right sounds over there it could be bind you to lefty whatever usually right uh but then actually to be able to do proper reverb and and it changes based on the room that you're in and different smaller room and just so we're talking about so all the effects that used to be done in post-production you know same idea like any real-time applications just here or if you yeah or if you were to do it like in a different gen it would like take up a whole core or you know the main thread might do a lot of those effects and then you're like no audio guys you got like two you got a two uh you got like a half a millisecond or quarter millisecond budget for this stuff right so you can't do that there's a lot of talk about audio processing and audio hardware specific audio hardware to do this in hardware right and so it's an audio person's dream you think and so hopefully you know more games just like focus on

that and lead me to that as well not just the graphics right i see it yeah i agree i mean i hear a lot of talk with um well with characters especially they're trying to like finally do something with hair i mean it's been the same technique for for a few gen now uh we're talking about hair simulation actual physics with the hair and really fancy stuff that the film industry have been pioneering for a while now um yeah same with the cloth same idea cloth simulation yeah homegirl's hair is not doing anything special here though right but also this this isn't really the focus of this demo either yeah the characters in this one especially i mean i i felt like it's probably an art direction choice where it felt more like style stylized right so it wasn't very um yeah i've seen better characters uh yeah this demo this demo is definitely not about the character yeah it's all about the environment for sure i mean it's the most important

department of the game [Laughter] we make everything work show your bias [Laughter] we create worlds bro matrix wasn't about i guess it was about the characters we were talking about the matrix though yeah anyways uh kids kids kids at home video game making is a team sport do not listen to brandon well i mean like the lighting system i mean you made a valid point to you know they uh they really bragged about the gi solution but it's from a single light source um they didn't really play too much with well this one they have one light source with one effects source so two at most and it seems like the rule still applies in next-gen where too many dynamic lights will kill your your processors um yeah so that hasn't especially when

you're yeah especially if you have to trace your chase you're tracing rays around right so yeah um the more you have to do that and you have to do more of that if you have more light sources right so so this actually leads into my next piece of conversation so ray tracing the last year and a half especially starting with that star wars demo at gdc was like the onslaught of the next wave and we thought we were going to focus on that for the next few years which we are but then this whole lumen system um what's your take on that is there going to be a combination of two is ray tracing going to be better because it's still struggling with um with just hardware limitations right there's not much we can do about that or what's your opinion about that yeah i'm not really yeah i think it's a big topic right but um but generally i think like part part of what lumen is doing is ray tracing right yeah uh but just kind of like in in

software and compute right um and kind of doing it in a way that's sufficient for this use case right um and there's other there's other yeah there is like straight up like um you know dxr and nvidia demos that show like uh global illumination right but but those that technique like doing straight up dxr rendering for the whole of your global illumination is just not like the cost is still very high even if you have a 2080 ti and you wonder and if you want to run it at like really high resolutions it's it's a problem at high resolutions right um so some technique like this like lumen here where it's like kind of doing like a like a three stage approach to uh to generating uh the gi uh is a way of kind of like reducing the cost and getting a a believable look right um so like i'll be i'm interested to see what more what more games are going to do like

i know like you know gears of war showed uh they were talking about uh what was that ray chase reflections uh for for xbox series x um so i'm curious what more and more games are to what extent they do uh ray tracing on the consoles so i mean um kind of going back to the original point right when people first saw this especially newbies i call them noobs where they saw this demo where they're like abandon every type of valuable knowledge that we built the last 20 years forget it uh let's just throw all [ __ ] to the wall right they're talking like film people now yeah i would say the news only in the news should talk like that some of them some uh some veterans were super excited about that prospect as well and some veterans or super some veterans are super excited about it and then kind of joked about it right and they're like what do you mean i could just take my z brush and drop it straight in amazing i can't wait right so yeah

this is where renault's brain explodes gritting his teeth he's like what the [ __ ] are you talking about we're not super excited about this too yes right yeah i think if you're into graphics and you're making video games this is awesome yeah it's exciting this is why we're in games yeah you can't yeah you can't not be excited by this like this is this is uh this is really good yeah so let me let me ask you this like with the last tech demo right um from all engines right usually near launch for ps4 i feel like a lot of the games actually surpass those tech demos um we're just kind of uh talking about unreal right we're talking about unreal right now like i feel like a lot of the later generation like last of us two all these other games that have been coming out oh yeah have been totally killing it um so do you feel by the end of ps5 maybe not that long where we're gonna

see something like this in a playable way where it doesn't seem so impossible yeah i think i think i think that definitely is a possibility right um people also bring up like the playstation so the playstation 3 our playstation 4 demo uh the voxel the boxing clone tracing one right uh that never actually came out right right never came out in right in anything that was performant and actually useful um and it was that was also another cool demo from like way back right so like it's very possible too that you never see this in any game or any game reaching this quality either right or you see parts of it right you know you see games where a couple of a couple of hero pieces are using this this technology um the man i am talking about and and i i'm more bullish on uh on lumen being something that you can use

across many games right because i know there's a lot of a lot of people working on similar techniques for real-time gi right so yeah like like i think you'll see something like this and it's possible that this could this is the uh the benchmark for games to strive to uh many years down the line on playstation 5 and xbox series x right yeah i would want to bring up this point like when people there there are general reactions to this is like oh my god this is exciting right and then um and then there's another type of reaction and let me just kind of call them um burnouts people who are kind of washed up from the industry where they look at this is like and there's a legitimate concern where they feel like the the fidelity of what's expected uh from this type of demo from the consumer from the publishers uh where the team size is not exactly growing right and not everybody is sourcing

mega scans that has readily available assets to kind of populate the world um they are very concerned with this type of demo and expectation what's your feeling this is this is how old tech demos are right tech tables are aspirational right but um but yeah like you need a crazy talented and skilled art team to make this look you need that and a lot of and that is not that is not the majority of the industry right um this level quality and this level of detail is not what all game creators want to make right so even though ps5 and xml series x have have way more gpu horsepower and way more cores and all this kind of stuff right some people still just want to make uh i'm just trying to figure like a game that's pretty simple like animal crossing right people still just want to make animal crossing animal crosses making a killing right and it's not anywhere near this level of fidelity

uh because it doesn't need to be right because it's it's a different type of game right and there's still space for those different types of games but those different types of games and this has been this is historically i think true right when you want to sell hardware and you want to sell a console box right nobody nobody wants to see the new version of animal crossing to make that decision right um they want to see what k what is the absolute maximum that this thing can do what is the aspirational target of what this box can do and that's why these technologies yeah so it's best to kind of just treat this as aspirational and don't be the um the warrior ward warning about the apocalypse of game development yeah and i think like if you looked at the xbox event that happened a while back all the you know the third party games that could be coming out xbox series x

that's the majority right yeah none of them are at this quality level right and and and so like don't ex don't expect every game coming out on that console to look like this here right this is to be the norm definitely yeah um i mean that's a very interesting point like even with the first party publishers like their xbox team and their sony team or whatever that seem to have like more stability and infinite resources to kind of deliver these well yeah yeah this is just going to be a special case type of studio to kind of deliver this right yeah like don't get me wrong right i think uh xbox we have not seen the xbox first party stuff right really that's true we saw gears but we but we haven't seen halo stuff right um we haven't seen we haven't seen the heat that somebody's gonna come with with on ps5 first party

right like we have no idea right yeah june what was it june 3rd or something that's they announced their event so that's actually that's last week if you're watching this did they actually announce did they actually announce i heard that was like they just announced it today where they're going to have an actual playstation 5 event they're going to keep the uh what's the lead engineer uh mark mark cena as far away from the premises as possible too his name is sir his name is sterny by the way cerny cerny mark cerny keep away from the premises of this presentational event they're trying to get people interested not low people to quarantine sleep right so um yeah it's going to be a i think that's when they're going to show stuff yeah i start to see like heat expect to see stuff that looks really nice that's what i'm expecting um but we'll see we'll see what happens yeah all right man i mean that's pretty

much it i think uh everybody was super i'm kind of actually well we kind of turned this into like a a slightly better than uh developers reacting to unreal engine five i've been seeing that pop up like every time you see it it's like oh my god have we gone that low this is more discussion this is i'm a fancier trustee i think when this video came out i was in a meeting yeah and then my phone was just vibrating i was getting messages all over the place people were freaking out like like this just be real this definitely this broke the internet topic this was a topic of discussion in every single game dev uh studio around the world it's exciting yeah yeah yeah i don't i don't even think between ps3 the ps4 i i saw a demo that was just this exciting uh it's been a while for us i believe it just feels so out of grasp

um and even with discussing this we have no idea how they put it together they haven't really shared too much details about it uh except for maybe combining a lot of the techniques that you're saying that we have now to leverage the fakery right um what do you say how much of this is is really fake like i think like it just it's just good like there might be some clever placement of things and like you know so of course it's a controlled camera right right um but it's just you know i i can't say it's fake i gotta say it's really good it's a really good this is why everybody who who makes a demo for a game needs to have that that marketing guy in there because i feel like they really nailed the beats it's like all right here's a statue from zbrush right i was like oh this is pretty cool i guess yeah here's this here's a room full of them yes i know it's been a static environment this whole time let's just jump through it real quick i was like what the [ __ ]

they really nailed it man i feel like the beats were awesome they just upped it every every two seconds yeah marketing machine is on point for sure but it's not just the marketing it's like it's an impressive like it felt like everybody was in the room to get their take and i feel like a lot of these gameplay demos unless the designer is really on top of their game and understand that side um a lot of people miss that that you know thinking of it like music right or every like a minute or so something has to happen to really keep you engaged uh it's been a while since i've seen a demo like that um and they they really took a lot it takes a lot to get everybody on the same page to deliver something like this for sure