What's the Big Deal About Unreal Engine 5.1?

The line between reality and simulation was already pretty thin in Version 5.0. Then came 5.1.

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Recently, Epic Games released the 5.1 update of Unreal Engine, and things are about to get even crazier. It's probably worth a quick recap - the CG world is kind of going through a little bit of a shake-up right now. Traditionally, it takes a very long time to render a CG image - a really long time. Let's go back to the beginning for a second. Toy Story is generally considered one of the first movies to be rendered in CG. The image to the left is from Toy Story, and it likely took the team anywhere from 45 minutes to 3 days to render the shot. At the top of this article is a still from Stray, a game that will render 60 similar frames every single second on a home console. See where this is going?

Creating content in a game engine represents a massive change in the speed with which a project can be brought to life. While traditionally the engine has been used for making video games (really high-quality games with amazing graphics), people from all different disciplines of media are looking to take advantage of new innovations that have come to the engine. Even though it's still a game engine, Unreal Engine allows users to make almost anything. The motion graphics world has been using it to speed up render times, the VFX industry has been replacing green screens by filming actors in front of LED screens running environment simulations, and game studios are benefiting massively from the new graphical features.

Why is this important?

Earlier this year, in April, Epic revealed the long-awaited Unreal Engine 5.0 update - a new iteration of their engine that would introduce features like Nanite, a new system to load highly detailed meshes, and Lumen, a real-time global illumination model (bounce light). The results are incredible and eerily lifelike. I've seen advanced practitioners use the engine to create results that are indistinguishable from real images and render them in relatively no time. This new version of the engine introduced a lot of new tools that are so fast or ground-breaking that it's changing the way we think about media.

So what's the deal with 5.1?

Specifically, what does this new 5.1 update add to the mix? 5.1 represents an extension of the shift introduced in 5.0, with its two biggest features, Nanite and Lumen, receiving big changes both behind the scenes and in front and being integrated into VR - something that was sorely missing in 5.0. The line between reality and simulation was already pretty thin in 5.0, but it’s only getting thinner.

It's really hard for me to describe to anyone how amazing it is that a highly geometrically dense tree is able to move, but that's one of the new things Unreal 5.1 can do. The trees in the 5.1 showcase just look like footage, and they're not being pre-rendered.

Animators got a ton of new features in this update. To name a few, they can now access features like procedural physics simulations, generative character rigging systems, and a machine learning mesh deformer that can make people's armpits look better during deforming. You read this correctly.

You can stream this

For the past year and a half, I've been posting content to YouTube and Twitch with an unreal-powered virtual avatar to try and educate people about unreal and show off crazy unreal creations of my own. While a lot of my videos are pre-recorded, I don't typically render out any animations. I typically screen-record myself as I stream them using live motion capture. My scene doesn't take advantage of all the features in 5.1 or even 5.0, but the ability to live stream as a CG avatar is something wild that has created unforgettable experiences both for me and my audience. This is a new classification of media that we haven't fully explored, and I’m having a great time figuring it out.