In this article, we'll take a look at two key new technologies coming in Unreal Engine 5: Nanite and Lumen.
Nanite stands for virtual micropolygon geometry, which is a technology that automatically scales the original 3D model with hundreds of millions or billions of polygons from the SSD using the Streaming technique and scales it automatically. You can reduce the number of triangles in your geometry and drastically reduce the effort of developers. So, with this tech, you can apply and work with film-level art sources composed of large numbers of polygons, from Zbrush sculpting to photogrammetry scans and CAD data, directly into Unreal Engine without lowering quality. Particularly, there is no need to do any work such as polygon count optimization, draw call, LOD, normal map, etc. that developers or artists have to do several times using the engine, and it reduces working time and obtains the best quality at the same time.
How to handle lighting is an important issue for the performance of real-time rendering. Lumen is a completely dynamic global illumination, in simple terms, a solution that instantly reacts to changes in light in a 3D environment and applies them to the surroundings. The direction of the light changes according to a specific time, or even indirect light changes in real time according to the movement of light such as in a narrow or wide area.
In UE5, changes to the light can be reflected in real time, saving a lot of time for artists and designers, and creating more dynamic scenes in UE5.
