Unreal Engine 5’s New Rendering Tech is Beginning to Make VR Look Startlingly Real - Road to VR

Unreal Engine 5 brings 2 cardinal features which basal to radically amended the realism of some 3D geometry and lighting. While the features aren’t yet afloat optimized for VR, aboriginal developer experiments are showing awesome results.

Unreal Engine 5 launched earlier this year, but unluckily its 2 caller cardinal features—Lumen for planetary illumination lighting and Nanite for micro-geometry—weren’t supported for VR retired of the gate.

However, Epic has been moving connected consequent versions of of Unreal Engine 5, and though they aren’t acceptable for a afloat merchandise yet, preview builds of Unreal Engine 5.1 and 5.2 amusement that Lumen & Nanite person gained archetypal enactment for VR.

And portion there’s inactive apt advancement to beryllium made to afloat optimize the features for the level of show required by VR headsets, developer person begun experimenting with Lumen & Nanite successful VR and the results are already rather striking.

One specified illustration comes from Twitter users Hiroyan which dropped themselves into a cave afloat of richly elaborate objects and a flashlight to airy up the space.

The Epic gods person done it again… Lumen and Nanite successful #UnrealEngine #VirtualReality utilizing #UE5-main (5.2). This is by acold the astir item and realism I person ever seen successful #VR. pic.twitter.com/KE9aYboJTE

— Hiroyan (@H1R0Y4N) October 9, 2022

While galore Lumen demos person focused connected showing brainsick glowing balls and highly reflective surfaces (as a wide illustration of what Lumen really does), it’s really this overmuch much subtle usage of the technologies that—to me, anyway—looks the astir convincing from a realism standpoint.

The happening that truly makes this country basal retired is the interplay betwixt the highly elaborate geometry and the lighting. VR truly benefits from much elaborate geometry not lone due to the fact that the stereoscopic presumption makes it readily evident erstwhile tiny geometric details are really faked (using tricks similar mean mapping), but besides due to the fact that it’s truthful overmuch easier and much communal to get really adjacent to objects erstwhile you’re playing successful VR. Not lone tin you prime worldly up and clasp it close up to your face, you tin thin your caput infinitely adjacent to immoderate surface.

Thanks to Nanite—which fundamentally functions similar a continuous LOD strategy that draws item from the archetypal ‘master’ 3D model—the tiny aboveground details connected the rocks and wood truly basal out, particularly due to the fact that they’re real successful presumption of stereoscopic depth.

And acknowledgment to that, the Lumen lighting strategy decently catches each of those tiny aboveground details and shines connected them successful a precise convincing mode that besides subtly lights up the remainder of the country without pushing reflections to unrealistic levels simply for objection purposes.

“It’s hard to convey done screenshots, but it’s genuinely astonishing erstwhile you’re capable to get ace adjacent up to objects and they person micro item you tin spot with your ain eyes,” writes Hiroyan.

Images courtesy Hiroyan

While it volition beryllium awesome erstwhile this level of item is imaginable connected a basal VR acceptable PC, that mightiness not hap for immoderate time. Hiroyan says this objection was moving connected Nvidia’s RTX 3090, 1 of the highest-end GPUs the institution makes.