Epic Games demos Unreal Engine 5.2 features

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Epic Games demoed the features of its Unreal Engine 5.2 game engine at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney and Unreal Engine leader Nick Penwarden showed cool features like a new substrate shading system that enables artists to author materials at a level of quality and fidelity that wasn’t possible before in real time.

In doing so, it showed off renderings of an electric car from Rivian, showing how it was possible to instantly change the surface of a car’s digital model, adding variations to its paint job, or adding dirt and mud to the surface from driving through puddles.

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Normally, artists would have to go through a programmer to make such changes happen. Now the artist can do it alone in real time.

Unreal Engine 5 has tools to more easily make huge open worlds with procedurally generated content. Quixel megascans enable the creation of scenes with things like dense vegetation more easily. In the Rivian demo, an EV truck drove through water and I could see the dust and mud washed off the truck.

Fortnite’s Chapter 4 is using the new technology. Lumen can bring light flooding into a room in the game’s environment. Sweeney said there are more than 500 million Fortnite accounts and 230 million users on the Epic Games Store.

There were 71 million polygons in the Rivian truck, enabled by Unreal’s Nanite. Epic Games showed off its opal