Gears developer on Unreal Engine 5: Lumen is a 'game-changer'

Epic Games detailed and unleashed its next-gen Unreal Engine 5 during its State of Unreal 2022 event earlier this week, with game developers also teasing their new UE5-powered projects.

Gears developer The Coalition teased a rather beautiful Unreal Engine 5 demo running on Microsoft's next-gen Xbox Series X console. During the State of Unreal 2022 event the video was teased, but then Coalition Technical Director Kate Rayner provided more details during an interview with Xbox Wire.

Rayner said that Nanite -- Unreal Engine 5's new virtualized geometry system -- allows for over 100x the detail than previously possible. Rayner continued saying that the team can do so many new things with light, saying that fully dynamic real-time global illumination lighting "has been a long sought-after feature, but up until now, it's not been possible on console. Lumen is a total game-changer".

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The Coalition Technical Director Kate Rayner said: "A couple things we're really proud of are the facial animations and just the overall quality of the character model".

"We were able to utilize a preliminary version of our next-gen face rig and hire an actor wearing a head-cam to capture performance, and partner with Cubic Motion to bring it all to life. That, coupled with Control Rig, helped us create someone who looks and moves in the most realistic ways we've ever done, and it's incredibly exciting to think where we can go next. We also utilized Chaos cloth physics to get to a really high level of visual fidelity, and we're extremely pleased with the results".

"You can see the impact of Nanite already in our The Coalition cinematic tech test, which enables full-quality movie assets to be rendered in real-time. This means that our artists can create assets with tens of millions of polygons, scalable to scenes with billions and billions. The details are just incredible, more than 100 times what was possible before. Just looking at the eyeball detail the number of vertices and polygons are the equivalent of what an entire character would have been in the previous generation of games".

"You also see how we're doing new things with light. Fully dynamic real-time global illumination lighting has been a long sought-after feature, but up until now, it's not been possible on console. Lumen is a total game-changer".