Gears of War developer The Coalition showed what the studio – and the Xbox Series X – can do with Epic Games’ new Unreal Engine. In two demos that made it clear to The Coalition that they “are not a game product”, we get an insight into the ultra-realistic character rendering and two important new functions of the Unreal Engine 5: Lumen and Nanite.
The character rendering demo shows an extremely detailed rendered human male character: his body consists of 130,000 triangles, another 31,000 are dedicated to his face alone. His hair, beard and eyebrows eat up another 3.5 million.
In another demo, The Coalition shows the real-time lighting and reflection technology called Lumen in Unreal Engine 5 and Nanite, “which enables an unlimited triangular budget”. Epic Games announced these UE5 features in May 2020 as part of a presentation of the game engine running on PlayStation 5 hardware, but here’s another suntanned, particulate, and glowing mirror-obelisk look at graphics technology in action:
The coalition announced in May that it was discontinuing development Gears of War 5, and the transition to new, unannounced projects with Unreal Engine 5. The coalition said it will develop with UE5 “for several new projects in the coming years”.
Epic announced Unreal Engine 5 last year and previewed the technology in early 2021. A full publication is planned for the end of 2021. Unreal Engine 5 will be available for both current and last generation consoles as well as Android, iOS, Mac and Windows PC. UE5 is being designed with forward compatibility in mind, Epic says, so developers can create games in Unreal Engine 4 and later roll them over to the next-generation engine.
For a full look at The Coalition’s tech demos for Unreal Engine 5, check out the developers One-hour GDC 2021 presentation on YouTube.
