Why Unreal Engine 5.4 Is A Life Changer | Asmongold Reacts

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.

the blender donut tutorial has spread so much

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.

Unreal 6: "Hey Unreal, make me a game"

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.

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

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!

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

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

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.

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😂

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!