How many times, while playing, have you found yourself faced with a virtual world that seemed too… virtual? Flat lights, expressionless faces, static skies. With U, Epic Games promises to break down these limitations, bringing video games closer to reality than ever before.
The key to this new version just announced? Is called Megalights, and that's just one of the many innovations introduced in this update. Get ready to explore environments lit by thousands of dynamic lights, interact with human-faced characters, and get lost under ever-changing skies. Welcome to the future of simulation (by the way, one has to agree with Bostrom). Welcome to Unreal Engine 5.5.
Unreal Engine 5.5, New Horizons for Lighting
With Megalights, Unreal Engine 5.5 breaks one of the most frustrating barriers to creating virtual worlds: the limit on the number of lights. Previously, each individual light source required a significant amount of processing power, forcing developers to use them sparingly. Now, that constraint is a thing of the past.
Megalights lets you fit thousands of lights into a scene without sacrificing performance. The result is incredibly more realistic and atmospheric environments, where the lighting interacts with the environment just as it would in the real world. From the soft shadows of a forest to the vibrant neon signs of a city, now every image, every sequence can finally shine with its own light.
MetaHumans: Human-Sized Characters
In addition to the lighting revolution, Unreal Engine 5.5 takes virtual characters to a new level of realism thanks to metahumans. These ultra-detailed human models can now be animated through theartificial intelligence, generating facial movements synchronized with speech in a completely automatic way.
No more robotic expressions or out-of-sync lips: with MetaHumans, interacting with a virtual character will be like talking to a real person. And that's not all: Epic has also introduced an optimized version of MetaHumans, which maintains the incredible level of detail while drastically reducing the impact on performance and storage space required.
Breathtaking skies with volumetric clouds
Finally, Unreal Engine 5.5 takes game skies to a new level of spectacularity with volumetric clouds. Instead of the usual static backgrounds, developers can now create dynamic, realistic skies, where each cloud is a 3D object that interacts convincingly with light.
Whether it’s the slow passing of lazy clouds on a summer’s day or the rapid accumulation of thunderstorms, Unreal Engine 5.5’s volumetric clouds make looking up more rewarding than ever. And with the new day-night cycle, watching the sun rise or set is a breathtaking experience.
From Megalights to MetaHumans, through volumetric clouds and much more, U represents a huge step forward for photorealism in video games. With such powerful tools at our disposal, I can't wait to see the worlds that developers will be able to create: and in a few years, seriously, who will be able to distinguish the appearance of a virtual environment from that of a real environment?
