The biggest improvement is the lighting behavior. Willard demonstrates that in the Unreal Engine 4 light changes based on the properties of the object the light reflects from or passes through. Aside from the obvious bit of photorealistic geekery, this could allow for game designers to have a lot more flexibility with dramatic and theatrical lighting within a game, without having to create a palette swap of a highly detailed room.
Shadows look really good. There have been improvements to shadow rendering over the years. The particle effects are also impressive. At about 2:45 Willard shows off some volumetric smoke that is lit by light from the “sun,” light bouncing off the “world,” and rendered balls of glowy magma from inside the pillar of smoke. The GPU particle effects in Unreal Engine 4 allow for an absurd number of particles as well as complex interactions between the particles. The room Willard demos at 3:08 contains over a million particles which swirl around rendered orbs. While I’m not a huge fan of the sparkly magic aura effect, I can imagine artists having fun with all the rendered flecks of light.
What do you think about next generation of Unreal Engine?
