Unreal Fest Reveals UE5's Future!

Author

Unreal Sensei
October 06, 2023

Hi everyone! Today was the last day of Unreal Fest

Unreal Fest is Epic Game’s convention on everything Unreal. Luckily for everyone not attending all of the talks and tutorials have been saved on Unreal’s youtube channel. You can watch all the talks here on YouTube

Here are some of my favorite talks so far:

Great showcase of the future of UEFN. When the Unreal Editor launched it was lacking a lot of features us Unreal Engine developers have taken for granted. In this talk we learn more about what features are coming and what will be different from base Unreal.

Lumen is one of the most expensive operations you can add to a game. In this essential talk we learn how to optimize Lumen for the best performance possible.

This talk covers new features including some that have gone under the radar.

Unreal’s roadmap has been updated. Now we can see features Epic is working on for UE5.4 and beyond!

Dynamic Displacement

Tesselation was added in UE5.3 but it is not realtime. Dynamic Displacement will allow us to change the height map of a nanite mesh or landscape in realtime. This makes it possible to use Nanite for water meshes or dynamic snow.

Next Generation Terrain Solution

Unreal’s landscape system is pretty old and has largely remained the same since UE3. This new terrain system will replace hieghtfield landscapes which means we might be able to create 3D terrain like the voxel plugin.

Modeling Tools - 2D

The 2D editor for models will see improvements to UV mapping. Most importantly the ability to bake maps like in Substance Painter will be added. This possibly paves the way for material texture painting directly in the engine as an alternative to Substance and Photoshop.

These are some of the features I found most interesting you can see more here.

Also soon I will be releasing a remake of the AutoLandscape Mastermaterial that includes Nanite Displacement. Stay tune for a video on the channel!