“ Get ready for a glimpse into the future of interactive storytelling and entertainment with UE5,” reads the official description on the Unreal Engine’s site. The demo will properly launch on December 9th, during the 2021 Game Awards. With Lumen, you no longer have to author lightmap UVs, wait for lightmaps to bake, or place reflection captures you can simply create and edit lights inside the Unreal Editor and see the same final lighting as when the game is run on console.After leaking last week, The Matrix Awakens, an Unreal Engine 5 tech demo, is now available for pre-download on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

With Lumen, you can create dynamic, believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry-for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or opening an exterior door.

Next up is Lumen, a fully dynamic global illumination solution. Imagine directly importing in Unreal Engine 5 film-quality source art comprised of millions of polygons-anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans-and placing them millions of times, all while maintaining a real-time frame rate, and without any noticeable loss of fidelity.

Nanite is a virtualized micropolygon geometry system that enables you to create games with massive amounts of geometric detail, eliminating time-consuming and tedious work such as baking details to normal maps or manually authoring LODs. More information on the engine and some of its features, like Nanite and Lumen, can be found on its official website: Unreal Engine 5 is set to power some of the most anticipated games coming in the next few years. It features three different presets optimized for NVIDIA GTX 1080, RTX 2080, and RTX 3080 GPUs, as well as multiple graphics settings to customize the experience. The Unreal Engine 5 Conifer Forest Biome demo can be downloaded by going here. The new forest map uses custom scanned assets and procedural generation within UE5, and looks rather impressive, as showcased in the videos below.

MAWI United, who developed the impressive Birch Forest Map released online last year, released today a new version of their Conifer Forest Biome from 2016, which runs on the new version of the engine by Epic.

Unreal demo download