Nearly three years after Unreal Engine 5 was first revealed, we’re on the cusp of the first major UE5 game releases, including Immortals of Aveum, The Lords of the Fallen and Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl. With the release of Unreal Engine 5.2, the time seems right to take another look at what new features have been added in the latest revision and how these additions will colour the games of the future – including titles from developers that previously built their own engines like CD Projekt Red and Crystal Dynamics.
Procedural generation is the headline addition of UE5.2, as showcased through the Electric Dreams demo back in March. If you recall, the spaces featured in the original Unreal Engine 5 reveal with Lumen in the Land of Nanite and Valley of the Ancient were built in a very particular way. Artists manually placed and arranged each and every bit of the environment from prefabricated assets, often spending time copying-and-pasting these assets with rotation and scale changes to make the sparsely populated rocky environments found in these demos. While this technique can be an effective way to build smaller-scale projects like these reveals, this kind of “kit bashing” as it’s called is perhaps impractical for a real video game production. It takes plenty of manual labour and is limiting on the engine side too, as the wasteful overlapping of many meshes tanks performance for hardware-accelerated Lumen ray tracing.
In the later Matrix Awakens demo, Epic showcased a procedural tool to populate urban environments, but with 5.2 they’ve released another system for natural outdoor environments, like the one seen in the Electric Dreams demo. Here, Nanite is used not only for opaque objects like rocks, but also for objects like leaves and bushes that use alpha-masked transparencies. Based upon my first contact with the demo and in the editor itself, this technique seems effective in generating convincing high-quality environments from a limited number of assets and little artist intervention. This should make it easier to populate large worlds with a convincing amount of detail, with Nanite supplying the requisite detail.
