I’m excited to dive into Unreal Engine 5’s new Nanite and Lumen technologies and explore whether they truly deliver real-time cinematic rendering. As a 3D artist and game developer, this could be a huge leap forward for creating incredibly detailed game environments and cutscenes.
What is Nanite?
Nanite is UE5’s virtualized micropolygon geometry technology that allows artists to import film-quality source art containing millions of polygons into the engine. Nanite then converts those polygons into tens of millions of micropolygons at runtime that can change and adapt.
Some key things to know about Nanite:
- It virtualizes geometry, freeing artists from polygon count limits and letting them create as much geometric detail as desired.
- Nanite intelligently streams and processes only the micropolys needed for the scene. This keeps frame rates high while allowing for cinematic levels of detail.
- Artists can scan real-world objects and import them directly into the engine with Nanite converting the high-poly scans into optimized game-ready meshes.
- Nanite geometry can be scaled in real time while maintaining edge quality and texture details.
Why is Nanite Revolutionary?
In the past, game artists had to manually create low- and high-poly models of game assets to optimize for real-time rendering, limiting geometry detail.
Nanite removes these restrictions by automatically converting high-poly models into optimized meshes ready for real-time gaming. This unlocks new levels of geometric detail that brings game environments much closer to their cinematic 3D counterparts.
Instead of spending time simplifying models, artists can focus on creating highly-detailed assets that look great right away in-engine. This improves workflow efficiency and frees artists to focus on creativity.
What is Lumen?
Lumen is UE5’s fully dynamic global illumination technology that immediately reacts to scene and light changes. This means indirect lighting, reflections, and shadows adapt seamlessly in real-time without pre-baking.
Key Lumen features:
- Provides dynamic diffuse global illumination for indirect lighting.
- Real-time reflections with accurate ray tracing.
- Instant indirect shadow casting from Cascaded Shadow Maps.
- Lit translucency for materials like glass, ice, skin, etc.
- Runs on desktop and consoles with full ray tracing on compatible hardware.
Why is Lumen a Game Changer?
In the past, real-time global illumination required pre-baking lighting which was time-consuming and limited flexibility. Materials were faked with cube maps and custom shaders.
With Lumen, global lighting adapts seamlessly to any scene or light changes in real-time without pre-baking. This enables more dynamic lighting workflows and saves huge amounts of lighting artist time.
Accurate real-time reflections and indirect shadows also greatly enhance scene realism. UE5 projects can use high-quality lighting that cuts down on fakery and better matches CG film renders.
UE5 Demo Scenes Showcase Potential
Epic has showcased Nanite and Lumen with several UE5 technical demos:
- Valley of the Ancient – Shows sprawling environments with millions of objects, geometry details, and film-quality volumestric fog.
- Lumen in the Land of Nanite – Demonstrates Nanite’s virtualized geometry and Lumen’s fully dynamic lighting as time of day is shifted.
- City Sample – A large open world city environment with ray traced reflections and indirect lighting throughout.
These demos illustrate how Nanite and Lumen can deliver detailed, cinematic environments in real-time without compromises. The lighting and reflections adapt smoothly as the camera moves through the scene.
Is Cinematic Real-Time Rendering Here?
Nanite and Lumen get us much closer to CG film-quality rendering in real-time gaming. However, some key differences remain:
- Ray tracing support is still limited on available gaming hardware. UE5 uses techniques like Cascaded Shadow Maps to approximate ray traced effects.
- Geometry detail is extraordinary with Nanite but some film assets are still higher poly.
- Shader complexity and material quality has room to grow for photorealism.
- UE5 runtime optimizations trade some accuracy for performance.
So while not an outright replacement for true offline film rendering yet, Nanite and Lumen represent a giant leap in bridging the gap. As gaming hardware improves, UE5 will get even closer to delivering CG movie quality in real-time.
The Future Looks Bright
As a game developer, I’m thrilled with how much Nanite and Lumen empower artists to create stunning, detailed worlds. Together they solve two of the most stubborn rendering problems that previously held back real-time graphics from matching offline render quality.
There’s still more work to do, but Epic’s vision and execution here are top notch. I can’t wait to upgrade my projects to UE5 to take advantage of these groundbreaking features. The future looks very bright for cinematic real-time rendering in games!
