the blender donut tutorial has spread so much

A little bit of explanation from a 3D Generalist - the features you see in Unreal 5.4 are not something exceptionally new that you couldn't get in other software but what they are doing is getting rid of the "issues with the pipeline" for assets. Usually to make a game you would need to Make a 3D model and then make sure "The textures will work in the engine", "The Animations import correctly", etc. You had several Software packages from several different companies - and you hoped it all worked out. Unreal 5.4 is basically putting all of the features you need - directly into the engine itself. This cuts down on SO MUCH NONSENSE related to importing assets that it's an incredible time saver. It also is a direct competitor to all the software out there that provides the features. No longer you need to purchase Substance Designer and Substance Painter - you can just make the materials in UE5.4. Same with the motion matching animation. You no longer need to spend a ton of time, making sure the State Machines all work correctly - you just create animations, name them correctly and the system assembles it for you. It's a gigantic time saver. It cuts costs - especially for Indie developers. These updates will directly impact indie Devs in a positive way. You just need a Team that "learns Unreal engine" - and you can all work Remotely, cause there are no pipeline issues anymore. Everyone has assets that work in the engine from the get go. So yeah - very impressive.

Back in the 90's I started smoking because I had nothing else to do while waiting for all the frames to render and make sure they would actually render overnight. When I quit working in CG, I also quit smoking.

It is important to understand (full time game developer here) that while this has the potential to very much reduce iteration speed when it comes to bypassing the lengthly cost of waiting for high quality renders in non-real-time engines, the actual workflow of producing and generating content is still not all that different. This isn't some magic fix for solo devs that want to get into cinematics. It's definitely a big step in a very good direction, and a very cool thing, but for 95%+ of game developers this isn't actually a toolkit of things that have never been available, they're just now much more available in a much more tight nit space, -out of the box-. Previously most developer would buy special packages to be able to do these kinds of things in Unreal and Unity.

So wild . Its like all of a sudden 10 years of game advancement happens in the blink of an eye

We used to say realistic when games came out on ps2, but look where we are now.

5:59 I don't think anyone who is not an animator understands how huge this is but i'm drooling rn

This features are not new, but are all over the place, on lots of software that we use on a pipeline. What we are seeing here is that Unreal is integrating a lot of tools used on a game pipeline inside the same engine, the same thing blender is doing, a single software that does moddeling, sculpt, texturing, rigging, animating, editing and post editing... unreal is doing the same. It still doesnt replace the powerful softwares on the pipeline, but it defnitly makes the process more democratic for new devs. The industry software pipeline is really expensive, and having similar tools, for free, integrated into the engine, even if its not as powerfull as the other specific software, is amazing for new devs or indie devs.

19:18 Bethesda engine losing to a donut is so wild and yet so accurate at the same time 😂

As a Unity Developer for years, Unreal Engine is looking very hot right now.

Most of this technology has already been around for years. What's impressive is that it's packaged into the game engine itself. When I work on games, I use Blender for 3D models, rigging, and animations, Krita/Gimp for textures, and Unity to tie it together with logic. I've also created some of my own procedural terrain generator that works similarly to what was showcased here. We've just never seen all these features as part of the same program before. It mainly means faster workflow and fewer compatibility issues. It's not exactly revolutionary, but very, very convenient!

I swear someone says this every Unreal update.

I had computer programming in high school in the late 1980's. I programmed a stick figure to walk around. Had to program per pixel LOL😂

I just wish they would do good games. Graphics don't make a bad game good.

9:15 I love Asmon looking at the graph as if he has any chance of understanding it.

I remember a dream I had where I was traveling very quickly over a huge amount of land and everything was so beautiful and you just knew life and settlements were all throughout the land and water even though you couldn't see it all. Green and blue in sunlight and everything clean. When I woke up it made me think of video games from the future how good they would be. Gave me that good but weird feeling you get after one of those dreams too.

As a wise man once said “all of it just works”

The engine is a game on itself, I wanna play it

This is amazing because i have been using blender but the load on my rig was always too much even with simple scenes. just previewing my animations with everything turned off like materials, sfx, etc i would get 15 fps. I can not express how happy i am that i can make animations in REAL TIME with normal FPS. not to mention they have drastically improved importing Blender models into Unreal which hindered me using Unreal for a while now. i think this is life changing for a lot of people no joke

The motion animation selectors will work seamlessly with motion actors now. You just create a list of motions for the actors to act out. Drop them into the system and it'll just work.

This technology has existed for a long time, you still need people to make the systems, you still need people to make/clean up the animations, you still need people to set those animations up in script. Nobody is getting replaced, it's just a different way of handling movement & animation, not all games will use this way.

haha good vid but always makes me chuckle to watch people react and get so excited about things are aren’t new, just new to unreal. Like the Ik bone rigging, procedural texture map gen, etc. hahaha I’ve been a cgi animator since 1999 and used to be the reseller in my state for Maya, Studio max, lightwave, and all discreet products(edit*, flint, frost, flame, etc) as well as a post production engineer and manager. It’s has been extremely cool to see how far things have come over the last two decades, especially some of the common tools now that are real time or slider based which have me laughing at how fast they are compared to how much time it used to take to create and then render the same things 20 years ago. Anyone remember waiting to calculate volumetric lighting, radiosity, or hyper voxels? hahaha. Back in the day when clicking the render button and watching the render manager tell you estimated time was 2386 mins per frame just for a simple draft image to test your layout.

The motion matching/procedural thing was kinda done by that one guy who's making that rabbit fighting game (ok youtubed it - Overgrowth) that's always being memed on for being vaporware. He did some cool stuff that seemed ahead of its time.

The parts talking about procedurally generated environments will be used in the Dune Awakening game. They said the PVP zone will have regular sandstorms which change the environment and location of rare resources so clans or the most powerful players can't simply block off areas for other players like they can in games like Ark

I’ve been playing games for at least a decade and a half, and have modeled & animated on different software such as 3DS max, Lua, adobe, etc. Unreal is the best thing to ever happen to not only gaming and animation, but to technology as a whole. It’s so good it must be unreal.

This will add another 5 years of development for Ashes of Creation.

I just love the idea of some game devs creating a huge rpg world. Then forming the games plot around warring factions fighting over the land and its resources. Being able to procedurally generate the land imbetween, at least to my perspective, frees up so much time for the devs to really get into the nitty gritty details of what makes the world. Monsters, dungeons, factions, mechanics, player impact on the world.

18:06 It's worth noting that the donuts did not have any collision, while the video with the milk he was comparing it to did have collision. Collisions between objects is one of the, if not the biggest performance hit. These are just particles with a 3D model, and we've been able to render millions of particles at once for many many years now.

Now this is gaming changing for it. This is basically either gonna cut more "middle management" out of game dev so you can put more experts on something like this to make really good games. OR what they're most likely gonna do is protect their middle management roles and burden like 3 people to make the whole game.

it will allow us to do way more with same amount of ppl. it is basically how cinema and game prods evolved since the introduction of digital tools

I don't know if it's just me, but seeing the evolution of Unreal, and what it is capable of gets me extremely giddy and excited. I got the same way seeing the progress of The James Webb Space Telescope.

I am a bit confused, we dont need blendspace anymore? because what i ve seen from the tutorials, with few of licks, player can have the basic locomotion which can be replaced by old-school blend space. Did i get it right ? And If we can implement the lyra style animation bp loading system , I think new animations are gonna look better and much more optimized? ,

unreal tech has been great for a while now its just getting even better. this will be HUGE for the next decade of games coming out.

The other game companies had this tech for a time now its available to public

9:50 even the far cry map editor you can build a road through the tree generator system. The collection system randomly places tress, bushes and foliage of tropical plants for example without you having to place them all idnvidually and then a road replaces that area. This has been in that game for over a decade.

I used similar programs a long time ago. However, it took about a day to render one complicated frame at high quality, 30 years ago. It's crazy how fast this can go now!

Maybe games will be cheaper if its easier to make

"We had to wait for each screen to render... so lame" "Back in my day... we drew each frame from scratch! By hand! Through the snow... both ways!"

For an open world i think the next step is having the different Nodes(oasis , jungles etc) interreact with one and the other into an even bigger subset. So a river would cut through a hill in some amount of time for instance

its crazy with the animation thing more animations you put in the data base the better moment and more natural feeling it will get

The Witcher 4 is going to be insane...

I can't wait to get even higher quality shovelware be sold at the steam store

the new blend animation, I know the source. it was a dynamic animation driver. its a flow map with context. I can't recall but the concept was an anubis god sitting down on a chair from different angles. this is an extension of that prototype

Saw a paper on the animation stuff last year, they've done amazingly well with it.

Making games easier to create just so they can charge us $150 anyway

I grew up in the early days of 8 bit gaming, where the market was full of quirky little games with weird machanics by solodevs in their bedroom. Then we had decades where for 99% of cases, you needed a fairly large studio to make a game. now with UE5 we're back to a single dev being able to make games in their rooms again. I am excite.

what date did 5.4 release?? i just need to wait for all the plugin i use to get updated before i can update to 5.4

So to help me understand, are people building, animating and rendering the entire end product essentially in UE5 or do the assets all get exported into another tool for this? Can a mac studio m2 ultra run this, or would it need to be PC?

Asmon watches an enormous leap forward in design animation. Him: "Oh, well that's better."

I wonder if they can make a tv show using unreal

i wanna know if the new games will be bigger in space with that new unreal engine soo should i buy the rtx 4090 ti or what ?

A problem i see is that a lot of these tools get you really fast to 80% quality of something you could do before in another way or another tool, but then possibly prevent you from going further, because the detailed control has been abstracted away. Like the 2d Editor, better integrated, but i doubt it is as powerful as photoshop, or the motion matched Animations that could simply stop working as your movement system gets more complicated.

Dude... Blender is going to become irrelevant at the rate UE are going. I do like Blender though :P Upon watching further, they have taken a lot of features from Blender. This is really good. I may finally start playing with the UE engine.

Asmon NEEDS to do a ue5 stream where he tries to learn it, its shockingly easy to understand once you know what everything does.

An all-in-one solution environment for video game development, animation, texturing, graphic design, procedural generation and fool-proof rigging without needing to code. Just hook up a bunch of the appropriate nodes in a graph, tweak it for a while and you're done. The fact that they've also increased output fidelity (in real-time) while increasing performance rate is even more mind blowing. I wonder what kind of ancient eldritch mathematics they've discovered to be able to achieve this XD

Reminds me of some map creators in older games like Age of Mythology, except this is magnitudes above.

Now they can fire all the woke employees!! 😂

My life isn’t changed by this

Uncharted used the motion matching for some cool things.... if near a blazing fire, Drake will shield his face towards the direction of the fire. If he walks close to a wall and he's injured, he will put his hand/arm out to brace himself against the wall while walking along it. I'm sure something similar is used for pushing through crowds. Curious if the newer Assassins Creed games use this.

@10:49 yes definitely. Agreed in full! Regarding the more dynamic animations for players in game. Would that not effect online FPS shooters. In a negative way. I have no clue what I'm talking about but under the fancy graphics it's still basic hitboxes and x and y axis etc they are all built on. With more fancy Insta fluid animations when jumping around not wreak havoc with peoples shots /aiming?

Bethesda's got this. The next Elder Scrolls will be a great game

And this is all FREE. 🤯

When I took a 3D modeling class in the mid 2000s in college, it took like an hour to render each frame. We had to leave our computers in the computer lab rendering overnight, so by the time we had the next class it would be done.

I work with Cinema 4d and UE as a motion designer and also make a lot of product visualisation, new UE is great but still falls behind C4d when it comes to details on renders and those details cheat the eye.

Imagine if Bloodborne got a remake and they use Unreal as the game engine, that shit will break reality. (This will sound a little controversial, but... what if Helldivers 2 was moved to Unreal Engine? Seriously, the game would literally be unreal!)

I like Unreal Sensei but he might be reading too much into motion matching with that "automatically bracing for a fall" statement. It's more like a blendspace that can take acceleration into account, which is cool as heck, but it can't read a character's mind. So if you tried to mix in both animations of a character being throw with a character jumping voluntarily, it would probably confuse the two. It will make your statemachines a whole lot simpler, and remove a lot of the busy work from setting up Animations, but it won't "just work".

Even for unique bodies, in terms of animation... You'd only have to create the stills. After that, the animation loops are generative. Which mean that even when you're working on a single animation scene, this _will_ benefit you. I haven't even processed how insane UE5 is yet, and now, UE5.4 is not just putting in several consecutive home-runs, they're aiming for Hubble and hitting the damn thing. Insane.

5:40 knowing nothing about game development, but everything about Halo...in Halo 2 the melee animation for the Battle rifle is unique because it has a couple different animations that chain together if you keep meleeing without lowering the weapon. I don't know of that's similar to what they're talking about here but it sure sounds like it, and Halo 2 was back in 2004.

Something I will never use and have no interest in ever learning: OMFG THIS IS LIFE CHANGING

I always thought about starting for real in UE, now I am seriously on board.

I downloaded it and thought i was going to build a cityscape. Uninstalled it next day too in depth for my brain. Ill just play em

Overwatch "fan animation" community is going to have blast lmao

When is Unreal A.I. release? Bet that A.I. can create better version of this.

6:40 with motion matching how does the algorithm know if an animation belongs to the forward or backward motion vector? the pressure to learn Unreal over Unity continues to build, especially for me since with UEVR almost any UE4&5 game works in VR

Wow, Exanima developers made the transition between animations over 5 years ago. It turns out this is an incredibly cool thing that I noticed but didn’t know was a breakthrough. I respected these guys even more.

Are they doing something about the shader compilation micro stutters which plague many games made with UE?

Yes, they will be able to lay off a chunk of the industry, however making games will now become cheaper which also means new dev teams will spring up more easily rehiring much of the laid off talent. What this really means for the consumer is more game studios and possibly great IPs that were abandoned coming back.

I hope the future remaster games will use the motion blender. GoW and Uncharted would be cool.

You can make the motion capture animation unique. On top of that. You only have to make 1 dataset for the entire project and persists at the snap of your fingers into others. Nutty

it's basically like MASH from maya and I love it. Finally I can focus like 80% On UE

Looks like our favorite Overwatch animations with the horizontal dance will be produced faster.

10:25 I think final fantasy should try this. Also, Spore was one of the first games to use pcg I believe.

The noise that Blender and Unreal are making today was done by me in 3DS MAX 20 years ago. Just that today we have a modern looking interface and way higher compute power.

The thing about Starfield using Bethesda's engine over Unreal is due to them being able to make it how they want; there is also the topic of modders being more able to work with a system similar to Skyrim and Fallout, which I am all for. For those not aware, Skyrim Special Edition has a multiplayer mod that performs well and quite stable at 20-40 players, and the same team started working on a Fallout 4 one that looked promising, but was discontinued and replaced by a Hogwarts Legacy mod project, which they had just stress tested with over 150 witches and wizards at the time I found out about it; A dev from the same team also ported the code from the Skyrim mod to Starfield, getting to about 70 percent completion, before playing the game, declaring it crap, and posting the unfinished port to Github. The performance gains would be amazing for games like starfield, if it was ported to UE5, but the only reason I planned on buying it was if I could play with friends, be a crewmate on their ship, and help them raid and complete missions.

Will that the next step be to refine mesh editing capabilities? so that people no longer need to learn any 3rd party modeling sofware unless for very specific needs?

9:54 its funny to see because it's like using game maker but more complex. I had to learn c#/c++ to finish my summer rpg back when I was about 14. Game maker wasn't advanced enough and unreal was still in beta I think. This was back when Minecraft was a beta. I actually tried to use minecraft for my rpg.

18:40 the major difference between the donut simulation and anything in starfield is collisions. Collisions are off in this case, but they are one of the more expensive processes computationally-speaking.

With all of this it cuts costs, specially for Indies. Also it cuts time needed to fight each asset working correctly after you imported it

with the WorldScape Plugin you can make whole worlds in an instant in UE the developers of this plugin for UE are also making a game with this which is called Q A N G A its really amazing, you can fly off world no loading screens go to another moon land there etc etc UE will i think even bypass StarEngine from SC V2 is coming

we see this kind of movement in hell divers 2 Imagine this movement animation in warframe, shits gonna look cool as fuck and maybe even cinematic

This is similar advancement to the introduction of the JPG for still images

A big difference between the donut (UE5) and melon (starfield) examples are the settings. Starfield is rendering a much bigger area with a lot more going on. There was a reason they set the donut example in a dark room where you can only see a small section of the floor. However, knowing bethesda, they still wouldn’t even come close, imo. Even still, think the world being less demanding in the in the donut example is worth noting.

so yeah one of the things for this is going to be the creation of things like specific animations for the models to move by, but that is going to eventually be done by procedure as things get more advanced, rather than say you need to have a stagger animation due to tripping, things like this are going to understand what "tripping" is and how it will work on the body and then generate it. What this ultimately will mean for producing content is that it'll allow for a MASSIVE amount of rubbish to be made and that'll flood the market so that the actually skilled creators of tomorrow will be able to use this to make beyond top level videos and animations for their own projects. It's gonna be a very interesting time.

Regarding the generated texture work; you know how in older games the textures are like 64x64 or 128x128, and they look like a blurred mess on a modern HD PC with Bilinear filtering enabled? Well, I kinda think that wont ever become a problem for any game made with unreal 5.4. The game would generate the textures to the appropriate size for the resolution of the monitor. So 20 years from now you play a game made today, it wont look that bad.

I think procedurally generated worlds should be based on a radar function where the starting point has certain qualities, difficulties, rewards, items, rarities etc, expanding outward in a radar ring like pattern.

Nice! Honestly even I am surprised at how fast Unreal is improving

@ 11:20 ; I used to agree about the 80/20 idea, but with all the ai tools we could imagine having AI write an epic saga/story then take that and fill in the details around it aka side quests and poi's referenced in the story, take that and draw the open world based on the story aka mountains rivers distance from each other, fill in villages, towns roads cities castles, generate dialog for all NPCs and the cherry on the cake here is review this multiple times to develop separate dialog and scene ideas based on how you play. Similar to witcher 3 where if you skip something the game knows and thus the dialog changes immediately or later on in the game. Once done generate a list of events that designers/developers can work on and then just final testing and closed alpha etc.. saving the game years and millions in design value.

As a 3D generalist and game developer, I've been using Unreal Engine since 2017. I had to learn around 15 different software applications because, at that time, there weren't many tools for creating 3D models, UVs, cloth simulations, and rigging. I had to create these assets in different software programs and then import them into the engine. Gradually, Unreal implemented everything needed for visualization, cinematics, and development. This is going to save a lot of time 😊.

In Unreal 6 they'll add in an AI assistant and you can just tell it to generate a brick texture proceduraly and it'll just work. That way you can create textures in-engine in minutes instead of hours.

I would guess that rendered would still be better since a lot of the rendering is down to lighting and effects.