9
votes
Unreal Engine 5 usage
Hi Everyone!
First post on Tildes. I'm excited to have been invited to give it a shot!
I was wondering if anyone here is using Unreal Engine 5 for any project their working on? It could be game design, virtual production, architecture, automotive or you name it!
I'm currently testing out numerous areas of Unreal Engine 5 for virtual production.
Thanks!!
I use it from time to time for assessing scale. Its crazy easy to spin up a VR project, so I'll often just drop models in the space and pook at them from a variety of perspectives.
That's awesome!
Unreal definitely does a great job at being able to jump in quick and do what you need for that.
As a developer who plays with rendering as a hobby, I've been floored by the technological coups that UE5 has delivered over the past few years.
I like to build intimate puzzle games with a lot of moving parts, and that generally rules out baked or static lighting. Before UE5, my typical lighting setup was ambient light, one or two directional lights, and occlusion. Even in 2023, that's similar to what I see most indie games with a lot of dynamic objects doing. It looks passable.
Lumen blows that away in situations where you can use it. You toss a bunch of stuff into a scene, move objects and lights around at runtime, and indirect lighting mostly just works. Someone with more knowledge might be able to confirm that Epic was motivated to develop Lumen in part because they were struggling to deal with lighting given Fortnite's dynamic mesh placement. I spent a week or so just setting up scenes and gawking at how aesthetic they looked. Good lighting has got to be at least half the secret sauce in achieving the look.
Scripting, shaders, and so forth, are more of a mixed bag for me, but I feel that way about all of the big engines. There just never seems to be quite enough control... But I grew up with C, so that's definitely just my personal bias.
I'm curious if other devs and creatives here have had different experiences extending UE5 to larger projects.
UE5 definitely offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to areas such as lighting. Lumen does a great job at handling dynamic lighting with great global illumination and reflections. They continue to improve it as well! Version 5.2 just came out that gave some great overall improvements and some extra really nice features (two sided foliage support!).
It is a great system, it just requires a lot of extra work to get it working within a larger environment and there will be some workarounds needed based on how your world is being setup. I think over time, it'll get even easier to get working within large environments and I'm excited to see where developers go from there!