From photorealism to the silver screen: what's next for Unreal Engine 5?

gamesindustry.biz:

Sign up for the GI Daily here to get the biggest news straight to your inbox

At GDC's State of Unreal last month, Unreal Editor for Fortnite and its creator economy took centre stage, illustrating Epic Games' vision for the metaverse.

CEO Tim Sweeney explained to us why and how the metaverse is "happening for real" (unless Apple tries to crush it) and EVP Saxs Persson told us more about expanding Fortnite's creations beyond shooters and building an ecosystem based on fairness.

But the State of Unreal also introduced a number of major features and tools that all play a part in Epic Games' goal to be a major competitor in the engine space and beyond.

One of them is new procedural tools, part of the Unreal 5.2 update and of Epic's wide photorealism goal. At the State of Unreal, the demo prompted audible gasps in the audience; the new tool lets developers generate photoreal foliage, simulate rocks and paths and more natural elements in just a few clicks, based on an initial man-made art direction.

"When we were envisioning UE5 and the suite of all the tools and technology, procedural content generation was one of the big ones," VP of engineering Nick Penwarden tells GamesIndustry.biz. "And in order to ship 5.0 originally, we knew we were gonna do that a little bit later.

"We were really interested in making new tools to help developers be more efficient and be more creative, and so we'd been working on the digital content generation tools for a while. We worked on those all throughout last year."

It's now been one year since the release of Unreal Engine 5 and our last chat with Nick Penwarden. At the State of Unreal, Epic communications director Dana Cowley shared that 77% of Unreal users are now using UE5, with the