Epic Games had a bunch of Unreal Engine 5 news to show off at this year’s Game Developers Conference. During the presentation called State of Unreal the developer showed off, among other things, new functions for the game engine, a completely new construction tool for Fortnite and various videos that show where game graphics can take us in the future.
You can see the presentation in its entirety in the video window at the top of the article. Alternatively, we have collected the most important news from State of Unreal, which you can look through below.
Hellblade 2 – MetaHuman Animator
Ninja Theory confirmed almost three years ago that it used Unreal Engine 5 to build the sequel to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. This week we got to see a little more of what the team is up to, especially related to the Unreal tool MetaHuman Animator.
With MetaHuman Animator, Epic promises to be able to recreate very realistic facial expressions. Not only that, but the process should be so advanced that developers can use a phone camera to record video and transfer it straight into the game engine.
Ninja Theory showed an example of what MetaHuman can achieve in the video above.
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
Epic is working on expanding Fortnite from a single game to an entire ecosystem. A large part of that job will be made possible with what the developer calls the Unreal Editor for Fortnite, a new tool that allows developers to build and launch completely new game experiences inside Fortnite.
Here you can make use of all items and elements from Fortnite, but use game resources that are very different from the colorful shooter world we know.
Unreal Editor for Fortnite is available for testing now, in a public beta via the Epic Games Store.
Unreal Engine 5.2
Unreal Engine 5.2 is the next big update for the popular game engine. The update hasn’t been given a release date, but Epic did reveal a bit of what developers can expect when it arrives.
Among the new features is a feature called Substrate, which gives users even more control over how objects look. The 5.2 update also introduces what Epic calls the Procedural Content Generation Framework, which is supposed to be able to generate vast and highly detailed environments far faster than has been possible before.
Furthermore, all of Epic’s marketplaces for game resources – Unreal Engine Marketplace, Sketchfab, Quixel Bridge and ArtStation Marketplace – will be merged into one store called Fab.com. This will happen sometime later this year, but exactly when has not been confirmed.
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