You can now start using the first public version of Unreal Engine, free of charge.
Epic Games revealed Early Access to Unreal Engine 5 is now available. Please note that it is not production-ready, but you can finally get your hands on the new tech that brought some much excitement last year.
First, there's Nanite, a virtualized micropolygon geometry system that lets users generate games with massive amounts of geometric detail without the need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs.
The next big thing is, of course, Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination solution. The system allows users to create dynamic, believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to different changes.
The team has also presented a new World Partition system "that automatically divides the world into a grid and streams the necessary cells when required." This whole power seems incredibly expensive, but the new solution lets you save your performance budget.
The engine also introduces the concept of Data Layers to generate different variations of the same World. You can set up daytime and nighttime versions, plus turn on specific datasets.
There's more, of course. The team also revealed new animation tools, Megascans additions, and more, and the best thing is that you can try everything right now. Learn more here.
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