Unreal Engine 5 for early access – A New Dawn for Startups?
Epic Games have just launched the most featured and detailed version of Unreal Engine 5 for early access!
Unreal Engine 5!? English Please! What the hell is that?
Why don’t we start with some Visual coolness?
Now, at FreeFlow, Why are we talking about Unreal Engine 5?
To understand this, we have to understand a few new genres of startup categories. we have been recognizing them for the last 2 years. Some of those are:
- Interior Designers
- Architecture Firm
- Automotive Innovations
- Game Studios
- Edutech/Content Creators/Provider
- Augmented Reality Technology Products
- Fashion Designers/ Fashion related solutions
- Electro-Mechanical Machines/Tools Innovations like Turbines, Robotic arms, etc.
- Home and Industrial Automation
All of these startups require some platform like Unreal Engine 5 to create amazingly detailed interactive experiences.
- These Interactive Experiences make it easy to virtually explain the service or product they are going to deliver to their customer. This is a very required feature that Home/ Industrial Automation startups as well as, Augmented Reality Technology products must-have nowadays.
- Pre-visualization also helps them to improvise the product/service at the planning stage. As a result, it reduces rework efforts to satisfy the requirement. In particular, this helps Interior Designer, Architecture Firms to deliver quality and accuracy.
- Applying Physical Properties with the model design allows Simulation of different Real Life conditions. For this reason, it helps the design Process of Mechanical, Electro-Mechanical, and many other types of equipment for many Innovations.
- Fashion, Product based, Automotive startups can enable customers with easy 3D product visualization along with add-ons as well as customizations.
- Edtech Startups can design Amazing Interactive & Gamified Learning Experiences with all details required.
Check out how Shopify uses Unreal Engine for an immersive customer experience
Why we feel that Unreal Engine 5 is a very appropriate tool for startups
To understand this we have to look into the latest features of Unreal Engine 5 together with some of its differentiating factors.
Before we start on features, Let me tell you the best thing any startup would love to know.
It is absolutely free & codes are accessible for development!
So, some feature tweak, modification, Plugin design is also possible in case of very specific requirements.
It is easy to start and Lots of free Learning Resources
Epic Games have a lot of free courses, youtube videos, a huge community & Lots of free resources in the Market
It brings Future and Uber Coolness in Branding
Using an ultra-modern approach in branding brings startups an edge over other competitors.
New Features in Unreal Engine 5 that turns the game for startups
In general, if a startup company plans to develop a game or any kind of interactive experience. They require it with a good amount of details along with cool features. Therefore, they need a lot of tools,3d models, plugins to get these done. These tools, models, and other resources cost a hefty amount which creates splurges of expenditures. As a result, they either get discouraged at the initial stages or end up doing incomplete work or roughly done work.
Image Courtesy: Epic Games
The latest features in Unreal Engine 5 bring them way ahead in this matter than anyone who is using some other hefty costly tools and resources. Let’s talk about those features.
Nanite:
Nanite, Image Courtesy: Epic Games
It is a virtualized Micropolygon Geometry system to intelligently stream and process only the detail you can perceive of fine-tuned or scanned 3d models. Nanite allows designers to create games or interactive experiences with massive amounts of geometric details.
Nanite with High Poly Mesh
Nanite with Nanite MeshLumen:
A fully dynamic global illumination and reflections system, designed for the future. It renders diffuse interreflection along with infinite bounces and indirect specular reflections in large, detailed environments at scales ranging from millimeters to kilometers. In simpler terms, it lets the designer create dynamic, believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry.
World Partition:
World Partition. Image Courtesy: Epic Games
With current-generation tech, open-world games and simulation projects quickly hit technical limits on terrain size. Creators have to struggle with the increasingly complex authoring and streaming workflows. They needed to keep it within memory and performance budgets. Developers require to manually divide maps into sublevels, then use the level streaming system to load and similarly unload them as the player traversed the landscape while building large landscapes. World Partition’s new data management and distance-based level streaming system provides a complete solution for large world management.
Animation Toolset:
Animation Window. Image Courtesy: Epic Games
Unreal Engine 5 brings new kinds of animation toolsets like Control rig, Fullbody IK (Inverse kinetics), Motion wrapping. Using these tools creators can fine-tune game character’s animation with natural life-like movements.
Control Rig
Image Courtesy: Epic Games
Motion Wrapping.
Image Courtesy: Epic Games
Fullbody IK
Image Courtesy: Epic Games
Chaos Physics:
Chaos Destruction
Image courtesy: Epic Games
It is a lightweight physics simulation solution, built from the ground up to meet the needs of next-generation creators. The Chaos Physics system replaces the legacy physics system and additionally comes with significant performance improvements. The system includes the following major features:
- Rigid Body Dynamics
- Rigid Body Animation Nodes and Cloth Physics
- Destruction
- Ragdoll Physics
- Vehicles
- Physics Fields
- Fluid Simulation
- Hair Simulation
MetaSounds:
Meta Sound Designer windows
Image Courtesy: Epic Games
It is a fundamentally new way of making audio. MetaSounds is a high-performance system that offers complete control over audio DSP graph generation of sound sources. Consequently, This allows creators to manage all aspects of audio rendering to drive next-generation procedural audio experiences.
MetaHuman Creator:
Metahuman Creator. Image Courtesy: Epic Games
A free app for easily designing photorealistic Human characters for Unreal Engine.
Qixel Bridge:
A quickly accessible library of preloaded with Free Megascans and amazing high poly 3d models.
Enough, I am done with my Tech talk.
Finally, What’s My Personal Interest in Unreal Engine 5?
Personally, I have always been a creator myself. From 3d Design to augmented Reality design, by using tools like Adobe full suite, Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Cinema 4D, Daz Studio, Unreal Engine I have tried it all. Sometimes from the personal passion side, and sometimes for a professional project requirement, I had to learn and use these.
FreeFlow Technologies joining the Game
Nowadays, at FreeFlow we have started our small new tech team setup. We have named this part of the team as ‘FreeFlow Technologies’.
This team is already into a Mixed reality game-based project for one of our upcoming startups. Furthermore, they are also doing projects ranges from Web Platforms to Computer Vision. As a CIO of FreeFlow, I have been talking with a lot of startups and henceforth I realized that they need solutions that require to be made by tools like Unreal Engine 5.
Some UE 5 snips from our own systems
There are few startups in my mind who, for sure would love to have solutions built with this. For example, IoT solution startups like Datoms would love to provide an interactive home automation experience to their customer. Embright Infotech one of our Extended Reality Startups is already into using platforms like this. F&B Startups like Jigsaw coffee, Tafreeh would love if their packaged food products can be made purchasable via an online cool 3d store. Edutech platforms whether be it a MasterMentors or a Collegeshala interactive learning is something they all are looking forward to as a future of their business.
At FreeFlow Technologies, our team is now ready to deliver these kinds of solutions for your startup or you can proceed with your own team, we are ready to assist you all.
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Unreal Engine takes a quite amount of processing power. Is there any hack to it?
Hi Sanket,
Surely startup has challenges with the budget. Although there is an unwritten rule that Designing any Good 3D Graphics or Immersive Interactive Experiences = High-end System is a must. But, as a techie, I have found a few ways around that might help.
Firstly, the Minimum system requirement for Unreal Engine 4 is much lower than 5.
You require only 8 GB Ram, Some generic medium range graphics card, and a Quad-core 2.33 GHz processor mainly.
We have really used it on many of our basic software development purpose laptops.
But, for UE 5 Early access version you need something a little better.
We have tried UE5 with our laptop which has 8 GB ram, i7 7th gen processor, Nvidia 940 MX GPU
It ran smoothly except Ray-Tracing feature. Generally, this kind of Laptop and Desktop should not cost you anything more than 60k INR. at best.
Trick 2, You can run UE on Linux machines with lower configuration or with the same configuration but better performance also. you have to build from code for it only.
Trick3, You can use AWS-based Windows Instances (VMs) for this purpose. So, when you are not working you can keep it stopped. by this You can save yourself from Initial high investment.
Lastly, there are older versions always available, which supports budget Machines.
But at the end of the day, The more you want it to be sweet, the more you require the sugar.