Artists Discuss UE4, RTX And Other Breakthroughs Of Recent Years

With the recent release of PlayStation 5 and the new Xbox consoles, we'd decided to discuss major breakthroughs, recent trends, and the next generation of visuals with 80 Level artists. What recent breakthroughs and reveals in the industry would you say were the most important? What pushed the whole market to the next level, especially in terms of visual quality? Ray tracing? UE5? New tools?

One of the biggest things of this year was the reveal of Unreal Engine 5 which introduced a number of breakthroughs. The first is Nanite: it will let artists create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Epic Games promises that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine (anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data). The Nanite geometry is said to be streamed and scaled in real-time and there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets. There's no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs, no loss in quality.

And that's just Unreal Engine 5. Another huge recent trend is ray tracing and how it changed visuals in games. Developers can now implement realistic reflections, accurate shadows, and add a mirror without using heap tricks. The tech is still in its early days, and RTX cards are quite pricey meaning that it will take at least a  couple of years to spread the technology worldwide. 

What was the biggest breakthrough in your opinion? What will let us advanced to the next level? Let's study some opinions from 80 Level artists and discuss other important breakthroughs in the comments and on social media channels. 

Tales da Rocha (Interview): We are so lucky to work in a field that has huge innovations every year, things that will impact our work, our outputs, and the way we approach the problems.

But I got to confess that Unreal Engine 5 shook me to the bones. I've lost count of how many times I watch that video, it's just mind-blowing. I can't wait to put my hands on that and see all the capabilities and how far the developers will be able to push this engine.

Nabil Kechich (Interview): I think UE5’s real-time global illumination and the Nanite technology is very cool as it will allow for incredible fidelity. Artists can also stop worrying as much about optimizing meshes which will allow for some really cool games. Imagine RTS games that when zoomed in look like FPS? That is an exciting thing we are looking forward to as a studio given our work on Edge of Chaos. Real-time raytracing in general and the performance of the NVIDIA 3000 series cards are an exciting shift as it gives us an even better performance budget to achieve visuals and lighting to an unprecedented degree. 

It’s something I've been thinking about for some time and this year I’ve been able to open up my own company and I've been working with a friend on a game, but we still have lots to do. I can show a small sneak peek but we’ll be able to show everyone more of what we’ve been working on next year. 

Vistorovschi Victor (Interview): Real-time ray tracing is a cool feature, being able to have accurate dynamic shadows and reflections but it’s still a relatively new thing and has a way to go but it’s gonna get better with new hardware and further optimization but for me, it’s the ability to stream assets directly into the GPU, a feature that was showcased in UE5 and will be present in next-gen consoles. Being able to stream high poly assets and high res textures, no LODs, fully dynamic, it’s almost magical.

Shihab Uddin Alvi (Interview): Surely the industry is moving towards RTX and adapting to make the best possible use of this cutting-edge tech. On the other hand, UE5 has shown some promising features that will speed up the cinematic/film workflow. In my opinion, those new features of UE5 will push the industry a lot further. At the end, tools that help the artists to make their workflow easier and let them focus more on the artistic parts will add prominent value to the industry

Marko Zets Prpic (Interview): Artificial intelligence started kicking in seriously in recent years. Things are changing rapidly and the only way to stay in business is to adapt. I love UE4 but I feel that it is overkill for concept artists. Blender is much lighter and easier to use. Of course, it is a different story for others in the pipeline. However, I do see the advantage of its video tools. It could really impact the movie industry.

Anna Koroleva (Interview): I’m not sure that visuals in games will be able to massively reach a new level before modern high-end hardware becomes more affordable for the mass market.  After all, you can make 8k textures and models with millions of polygons, but it doesn’t seem like anything will change while people have a problem buying good video cards and SSD hard drives just for games. Unreal engine is becoming a popular tool for movie production, for arch viz, but game graphics will still be optimized to cover the largest possible range of devices.

Damien Lappa (Interview) Following the next-gen topics, personally, my biggest interest comes from the demonstration of Unreal Engine 5. For sure most of the optimization won't be gone anytime soon, but it clearly shows how many possibilities we can gain with new technology.

With the growing scale and complexity of games, the procedural workflow will be in demand even more than ever. Seeing the fidelity of the object and potentially expanding the streaming solutions, assets like massive cliffs, rivers, or even planets may become a new norm in games.

The trend of implementing the tools from cinematic production started a while ago. With ray-tracing solutions becoming more accessible for game dev together with the speed of loading assets can give us many more possibilities in implementing the new technologies evolving real-time rendering even further. Seeing how Unreal Engine 4 is already used in the Mandalorian TV show I am eager to enter the new era.

Matthew Messner (Interview): I am very excited about all the new powerful hardware and tools on the horizon. I've always been a technophile. But you also can't ignore how popular the Switch is. As far as gaming hardware tech goes it's old as hell and has tons of limitations. But the games find a way to look great, they ooze fun, and it's growing inaccessibility because of cost. So there are a lot of lessons to be learned there as an artist. There might soon be a time where studios will need to optimize games for reasons other than that the hardware isn't capable of handling the geometry. People theoretically might not want to get a game that takes up 5 terabytes of their SSD. Or maybe there won't be a high enough adoption level of high-end monitors and televisions to warrant delivering resolutions that high. Those are things I've been considering but they don't seem like bad problems to have.

That being said, I am really looking forward to experimenting with Ray Tracing and UE5, I especially want to test out the capabilities of Nanite and put it through its paces. I'd like to see if it actually improves productivity and increases the freedom of development from an artist's perspective. My current hardware is a little behind the times though. I wouldn't complain if AMD, Intel, Nvidia, or one of their key partners wanted to send me some of absolute top of the line gear so I could help make art that sells a hell of a lot more of the highest-end hardware for them. Ray tracing is going to really help us artists continue to push the boundaries with our storytelling. Lighting is so important in visual art and having more control over it is more powerful than we might think.

It appears that the two biggest breakthroughs are Unreal Engine 5 and ray tracing. UE5 is not here yet, but we're excited to play with Nanite and use new lighting tools, while RTX is already ON and it brought a huge boost to the level of quality in games. What do you think? What other important technologies should we discuss?

Author: Arti Sergeev

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