Unreal Engine 5 Early Access is out!

Unreal Engine 5 Early Access build was just released for public. You can now try the next generation of great game /  virtual production and visualization engine and check new features.

Now you can create environments with massive amounts of geometric detail with Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry system. Directly import film-quality source art comprised of millions of polygons—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans—and place them millions of times, all while maintaining a real-time frame rate, and without any noticeable loss of fidelity.

Nanite intelligently streams and processes only the detail you can perceive, largely removing  poly count and draw call constraints, and eliminating time-consuming work like baking details to normal maps and manually authoring LODs—freeing you up to concentrate on creativity. 

The next big thing is Lumen - it is a fully dynamic global illumination solution that lets you create dynamic, believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or opening an exterior door. 

With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures; you can simply create and edit lights inside the Unreal Editor and see the same final lighting as when the game is run on console.

New Unreal Engine 5 simplifies workflow for big open spaces, introducing a new World Partition that system changes how levels are managed and streamed, automatically dividing the world into a grid and streaming the necessary cells. 

Team members can now also simultaneously work on the same region of the same World without treading on each other’s toes, thanks to a new One File Per Actor system, while with Data Layers, you can create different variations of the same World—such as daytime and nighttime versions—as layers that exist in the same space.

In UE5, the Unreal Editor gets a makeover, with an updated visual style, streamlined workflows, and optimized use of screen real estate, making it easier, faster, and more pleasing to use.

To free up more space for viewport interactions, there is a new ability to easily summon and stow the Content Browser and to dock any editor tab to the collapsible sidebar. You can now quickly access frequently used properties in the Details panel with a new favoriting system, while the new Create button on the main toolbar lets you easily place Actors into your world. There’s also a streamlined, easier workflow for creating new projects.

Check out Unreal Engine 5.