Unreal 5 has been out now for quite some time, though with the new release of Unreal 5.1 we are able to finally harness the power of the new features of Unreal 5 such as Lumen and Nanite, a new way to render realtime global illumination and an intelligent way to stream in geometry.
We have started extensive testing with Unreal 5.1 and found that our volume works well on this new release. With the coming of Lumen and Nanite we can support way heavier scenes in terms of geometry and lighting complexity. Testing will go on to further optimize and explore the possibilities of these advancements.
Lumen enables us to create fully dynamic global illumination and reflections solutions that enable indirect lighting to adapt on the fly changes to direct lighting and geometry. For example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day, or opening an interior door that illuminates the rest of the room. With Lumen, you no longer have to wait and bake lightmaps, or place reflection capture to accurately capture the environment, which saves significant time on set.
Along with the development of Nanite, we can create scenes and sets with massive amounts of geometric detail. Directly import and replicate multi-million-polygon meshes or photogrammetry scans, while maintaining a real-time frame rate without any noticeable loss of fidelity.
These systems stream and process only the detail you can perceive, largely removing poly count and draw call constraints out of the (inner camera)frustum.
Combined with all sorts of other updates to the Unreal Engine, this makes for a very efficient system to be used in virtual production/ICVFX. We are looking forward to shooting with Unreal Engine 5.1!