Unreal Engine 5.3 - Next Level Tech Is Coming!

Yes! We just talked about Unreal Engine  5. 2 a popular, game development platform   approximately a month ago, and now the new 5. 3  version is already here. So what’s new here? Can   this really be improved so easily? I mean, the  previous version put up a clinic in simulating   pretty much everything we could think about.   In their demo, we could drive a virtual car   and even the tire pressure and compression  was simulated. And so much more. And now,   5. 3 gives us everything that a Wise Fellow  Scholar could ask for - better explosions,   ray traced effects, better cloth  simulations, and more! Yummy! First, now hold on to your papers Fellow Scholars,  because they now support sparse volume textures.    Oh my! Yes! This enables us to create or bring in  already existing volumetric simulations of smoke,   explosions, and more. And it also supports  OpenVDB. This is a software library that helps us   compress down the immense amount of data that is  required for these simulations. Not so long ago,   we looked at NVIDIA’s amazing NeuralVDB paper,  a variant of this that can cut down the memory   footprint of such a simulation by get this,  up to 100x. 100x less memory needed. Wow. And now, we can not only create or import  these simulations, but we can also render   them. Oh yes, that is light transport.   Ray tracing if you will. Something that   we talk about all the time here, on Two Minute  Papers. Here, we start out with a noisy image,   and over time, it clears up, or if we don’t  have the time, we can use a noise filtering   algorithm to fill in the missing details. This  is typically for off-line applications here and   not for real-time games, but typically for  feature-length movies. But, don’t forget,   real time ray tracing is also possible, and it  might come to Unreal Engine quicker than we think. They also have a new skeletal editor, where I  really liked that now you can also paint these   skinning weights right on the body. Okay,  but what does that mean? Skinning weights   determine the influence of joints and bones  on the body, and how the body should move and   deform around them. This can now be done much  more efficiently directly in Unreal Engine. Cloth simulations, now are based on the XPBD  paper, extended position-based dynamics. A   legendary NVIDIA paper from 2016, it finally  made it to the industry and into the hands of   millions and millions of users. I am so happy  to see this kind of tech transfer happen,   and it really shows the world that these papers  that you hear about here are real. They get out   there in the real world and make it better. Note  that they also have an incredible AI-based cloth   simulator too that can simulate muscle movements  too. These results are truly something else. Wow. They also introduced orthographic  rendering to Unreal Engine,   this helps us eliminate the distortion that  arises from the shape of real camera lenses   leading to a really distinctive look.   This is going to be great for not only   architectural visualization projects,  but for top-down strategy games too. And there is so much more!   They added camera rig rails,   that makes your in-game cameras move a  little more like a real cinematic camera,   these amazing virtual LED production stages  can now run with higher resolution and   higher frame rates, wide-angle lenses,  multi-camera shoots at the same time. Also, something that I don’t hear too many people  talking about is support for foveated rendering.    This is for those virtual reality headsets that  can track where you look, and create more detailed   geometry around that spot, and do less work on the  parts you are currently not looking at. Something   that we talked about almost 400 episodes ago, and  now, once again, it is making its way into the   hands of the whole world. Once again, to my joy,  the papers coming alive. What a time to be alive! Lighting with volumetric fog is also better,   these beautiful multi-layer materials  are rendered better. So cool! This is   going to be a huge improvement for anyone  creating video games, animation movies,

virtual worlds, and many other creative  things. So now, let the experiments begin! This was Two Minute Papers with Dr. Károly  Zsolnai-Fehér. Subscribe if you wish to see more.