 Hey everybody, welcome to GameDevacademy. It finally happened, after teasing it last year, Epic have released the first early access build of Unreal Engine 5 and all the new features it includes. This is the biggest overhaul of the engine since they moved from version 3 to 4 in 2014 so in this video I'm letting you through my top 5 new features of Unreal Engine 5. Starting with number 5, the refresh to the user interface. The Unreal Engine 5 UI manages to feel both new and familiar at the same time. Most of the same features and functionality that you will be used to in Unreal Engine 4 can still be easily found in UE5 but the new layout takes a more viewport first approach and makes it much easier to take advantage of your screen real estate. A great example of this is the change from the content browser being a docked window that always takes valuable space to now behaving like a drawer which you can access when you need it and get it out of the way when you want to be able to see what you're doing. You can also collapse all editor tabs to make your workspace as clean and productive as you like it. Number 4 is Control Rig which is the new in editor animation solution provided by Unreal Engine 5. It is now possible to animate a character wholly within the editor and this was the case for the ancient character which was used by Epic to demonstrate the animation system when version 5 was released. Users will tell you that even if they prefer animating in another package such as Maya, moving their work between applications can be time consuming and at times problematic. Being able to stay within one piece of software to animate your characters has the potential to be game changing especially for smaller developers who can't afford the cost of applications such as Maya. If they keep going like this Epic might just make all of the software obsolete. At number 3 on my list I have World Partition. This is a system that handles the composition of large game worlds in Unreal Engine 5 and offers two main benefits for developers and artists. The first and I think coolest of these is how World Partition handles level streaming. Displaying large environments such as this one requires a lot of computational power and in the past developers would split their levels into sub levels and have them stream in as and when they were needed to save on system resources. This took a lot of work and careful planning to achieve however. The amazing thing about World Partition is that this can now be handled auto-magically. The world is divided into sections called cells which can be dynamically loaded and unloaded depending on the parameters set up by the developer. This cell setup can also be used to make working in a large team more seamless. Having the environment already split into cells means multiple users can load and work on only the parts of the world they need which saves on editor resources as well as avoiding conflicts with other users in the team. Coming in at number two we have Lumen. This is the new global illumination system in Unreal Engine 5. Real-time global illumination has been something that engine developers have been striving to implement for years and artists have been collectively wishing it into existence as quickly as possible. Global illumination means that the light will bounce around your scene or level just as it does in real life and gives a much more realistic look to your environments. It's also fully dynamic which means no waiting for lighting to build like you do in Unreal Engine 4 and the light will update and react realistically to any changes you make to the level. This means that even if a part of the environment receives no direct light at all it can still be illuminated by light bouncing from other surfaces in real-time. That's properly amazing. At number one I have the feature that I believe represents the single biggest leap forward for game developers and artists in creating visually stunning games more quickly and easily than ever before. This is the introduction of Nanite but also the integration of Quixel Megascans assets with Bridge now being built right into the engine. So what this means is that now from within the engine you can access the full Megascans library which is free with the Epic account and then take a mesh which is composed of millions of polygons and drop it straight into the engine. The Nanite system will then seamlessly manage the geometry of the mesh to make sure that there is no more or less detail being displayed than can be seen by the human eye. This kind of clever integration of systems and services means that as an artist you don't have to worry about polygon counts or LODs, you can just take a movie quality 3D scan from the library and drop it into your game. This kind of freedom is going to make game development more accessible than ever and I can't wait to see games being released that really take advantage of the amazing features I have covered in this list. Did I miss out your favourite feature? Which features are you most excited about? Be sure to tell me in the comments down below the like button and we'll continue the conversation there. If you're new here, this is Game Dev Academy, a channel dedicated to the tools and craft of game development. 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