During the State of Unreal keynote held at GDC 2024, Unreal Engine revealed some interesting new developments that are coming in the next update of its graphics engine.
Developers will now be able to create authentic, highly dense environments and character details in real time in a way that just doesn’t seem to have been possible in the past. The company demoed these new capabilities during an early preview of Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra, and it’s really quite impressive.
The new updates to Unreal Engine 5.4 allow game devs to build authentic environments with the help of what’s called Nanite adaptive tessellation. The environments are built from the ground up, adding details such as ground texture, snow, or smoke. The lighting is especially impressive, with elements like smoke casting shadows on the ground, but also on itself — and all of this is being added or removed in real time.
This technology is useful for all kinds of details in the environment, and not just the ground. The demo showed off another new technique in Unreal Engine, known as heterogeneous volumes while zooming in on smoke pouring out of a barrel on fire in the scene. Heterogeneous volumetrics cast shadows across the rest of the scene, as well as within itself. This can also be mixed with more traditional methods, such as by adding particles, and all of this can be done natively in the engine or by importing vast data sets. In speaking about the realistic smoke and lighting in the scene, Liberi says the result is “film-quality visual effects, all running in real-time that are totally responsive to dynamic lighting.
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