In 2020, Epic Games publicly for the first time. Nearly three years later, gamers are still waiting for the technology to go mainstream. Outside and , there aren’t any UE5 games you can play right now, and the first salvo probably won’t come until later in the year at the earliest. None of that stopped Epic from showing off the latest capabilities of the engine with a handful of new demos during their recent at GDC 2023.
Arguably the most impressive ever seen Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 developer Ninja Theory shows off what’s new from Epic . The tool promises to make realistic facial capture accessible to independent developers by allowing them to use an iPhone, rather than a dedicated computer, to capture facial performances. As you can see in the two demos Epic shared, the tool makes it possible to quickly and accurately transform an actor’s close-up video into something a studio can use in-game. Epic said that the animator would be released this summer.
Separately, Epic showed off some of the improvements coming to Unreal Engine 5.2 with a demo that featured, among all things, a digital recreation of an electric truck. The EV turned out to be the perfect showcase for UE 5’s new Substrate shading system. The technology allows artists to create different shading models and layer them however they see fit. In the demo, Epic gave the R1T an opal body to show how Substrate can allow different layers of material to interact with each other without creating light artifacts. The demo was also a showcase for Epic’s new suite of procedural content generation tools. They allow artists to create expansive, highly detailed levels from a small set of handcrafted assets.
If all goes according to plan, it won’t be long before the first Unreal Engine 5 game list arrives. As long as it doesn’t get delayed again, is scheduled to launch this year. lords of the fallen and , Two other UE5 projects don’t have a release date yet, but have been in development for a few years.
