Viral Video Mistaken for UE5

Hello everyone, here is another week of Unreal news!

If you haven’t already follow me on Instagram. I will start to post a ton of content on there soon.

Unreal Engine 5 was caught in a misinformation controversy over the week. An amazing video by SHANEF3D went viral on X with many reposters claiming it was someone working in UE5. It is not Unreal for two reasons: the Unreal Editor movement gizmo looks completely different and interactive smoke is not this dynamic yet (of course smoke will get better in future!) but the average social media goer wouldn’t know that.

It quickly spiralled out of control with controversial political figures using the video as an example of why misinformation is rampant. Somehow Unreal Engine 5 will become the main tool to spread misinformation.

SHANEF3D came out clarifying that it is misinformation to say it was made in Unreal. My guess is that it was made using Cinema4D, Houdini or both composited on real life footage.

3D artist Henry Yamin wrote an article for 80lvl detailing how he used Houdini and Unreal’s new PCG tools (Procedural Content Generation). So far it has been the best use of PCG so far and how it can extend other procedural tools like Houdini. I imagine that in a year we will have a procedural generation community in Unreal as robust as Blender’s Geometry nodes. Geometry nodes has been the best addition to Blender since the release of 2.8 and has increased the use cases for Blender. Hopefully PCG will leave as big as an impact.

Should Cyberpunk 2 even switch to Unreal?

After the buggy release of Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red announced last year that it will be developing their future Witcher and Cyberpunk titles on UE5. While at the time it was seen as a good move, after the release of the Cyberpunk DLC Phantom Liberty which brought massive graphical improvements the community is now reconsidering the switch.

Phantom Liberty has made Cyberpunk the best looking game so far. Leveraging Nvidia’s DLSS3.5 we now get smooth path traced lighting which is better than Lumen. Also the engine is significantly more stable than at release.

Digital Foundry has addressed this on their show. My take is that CD Projekt Red is working directly with Epic to improve the Engine. We will see technology developed for Cyberpunk folded into Unreal over the coming years. Also the next CDPR game is at least 5 years away. Plenty of time for UE5 to surpass the current Cyberpunk engine.

See everyone next week!

Zach Hunter