Episode 20
Unreal Engine 5.8: The New Features That Got Us Talking
So, here’s the deal: our latest chat dives headfirst into the whirlwind that is Unreal Engine 5.8, and let me tell you, it’s a wild ride! We’re tackling the shiny new features that have everyone buzzing, particularly the revamped crowd system which, honestly, left me scratching my head a bit—who knew the old system was doing just fine? But hey, we’re all about exploration, right? I mean, I’m knee-deep in trying to figure out how to animate those snazzy Metahumans without breaking the bank or my sanity. And as we ramble on, we’re diving into the nitty-gritty of how AI is reshaping our workflows, making it easier to create without losing the magic of storytelling. So, hop on in and let’s unravel this tech tapestry together—who knows what we’ll discover next!
Takeaways:
- It's wild how every time Unreal updates, I think I can just hit record and share my findings, but it turns out there’s way more to learn than I bargained for.
- The new crowd system in Unreal seems a bit like a fancy makeover; I mean, the old one was fine, right? But the upgraded metahumans are just... chef's kiss!
- I’m diving into this full body tracking thing, and man, it’s like trying to tame a wild horse—exciting, but you better have the right gear to ride it well!
- Creating terrain in Unreal is like being an artist, but with a digital brush—let's see if this newfound power can turn my flat worlds into epic landscapes!
- The way AI is changing how we interact with Unreal is mind-blowing; it's like having a coding buddy who actually knows what they're doing, while I just sip my coffee and supervise.
- The transition from blueprints to whatever new system they’re cooking up feels like moving from a bicycle to a rocket ship—exciting but also a little terrifying, right?
contact: cmonkxxx@gmail. com
Transcript
You know, I foolishly thought that it'd be so easy to record after Unreal 5.8 release, but it's quite the opposite.
Speaker A:Just so many things to try to get an idea about, to learn, to explore that I'm just constantly not ready.
Speaker A:And I know I need to publish something because I, I said I would do it regularly.
Speaker A:Every day I'm trying one of those new features and great thing about learning, even things that go away, like a lot of features that were introduced, they change, they are being taken away from Unreal.
Speaker A:They all contribute to a general understanding of the software.
Speaker A:It's really nice to see new feature being released and then you kind of know how to use it.
Speaker A:Even though you know it's like a new interface or new workflow.
Speaker A:Over time you get to understand the logic philosophy behind the software and then it's just easier to learn new things.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So from those new features, they all sound really exciting.
Speaker A:I honestly couldn't decide what to look into first.
Speaker A:I looked into crowd new crowd system which I still don't understand what was so bad with the old one because as far as I understand they were claiming that the previous crowd system that we saw in City Sample was already doing what the new system does.
Speaker A:But maybe I'm missing something I like.
Speaker A:You know, in the new crowd system there is this customization panel where you can customize look of your medah humans and they all look quite different.
Speaker A:I like the variety.
Speaker A:I'm currently using the old crowd mass AI crowd system and they, those characters look really aged.
Speaker A:They don't look very good.
Speaker A:The new crowd metahumans look quite nice.
Speaker A:So I'm excited about that.
Speaker A:It's still early days, so you know, I look at YouTube every day and I discover new tutorials, new demonstrations from people who know Unreal a lot more than I do.
Speaker A:And there'll be a lot of cool things with that crowd system.
Speaker A:I assume it was finicky so people didn't really use it, but now it seemed to be really production ready.
Speaker A:I, I think it's still experimental, but it looks a lot more refined.
Speaker A:So who knows?
Speaker A:I enjoy crowd because it really makes any of those urban environments a lot more alive.
Speaker A:And there is this sense of autonomous environment, like autonomous society.
Speaker A:You know, all those metahumans walk around and they have different characteristics so they move differently or they look different.
Speaker A:So we have those almost like class, social class system in there.
Speaker A:It's really interesting.
Speaker A:In my project I've got crowd and they, they, they do so well.
Speaker A:Anyway, I can't can't wait to tell you more about my project.
Speaker A:But it's, it's never ready.
Speaker A:What can I tell you?
Speaker A:I. I was really looking forward to this full body tracking feature that Epic released.
Speaker A:Oh my God.
Speaker A:It's lovely.
Speaker A:It's really nice.
Speaker A:So a few months ago I was so frustrated with game creation workflows that I decided, well, what if I focus on filmmaking in Unreal, right?
Speaker A:Metahuman is so amazing.
Speaker A:Why don't I just focus on that?
Speaker A:And I don't even need powerful hardware for it because I can render on external machine, right?
Speaker A:How quickly this hit me in the face where I realized, okay, I can set it all up.
Speaker A:But in order to animate Metahuman, you really need to have a lot of hardware.
Speaker A:You really need to Mac to mock your, to track your movements somehow.
Speaker A:And yeah, there is so many interesting solutions where you can track your body, but it's all expensive.
Speaker A:Maybe not like prohibitively expensive, but you know, all those costs add up.
Speaker A:And on top of that, the whole body tracking system used to be really over complicated and finicky.
Speaker A:I did just a quick test with body tracking from the footage, a new feature they, they released like marker less body tracking.
Speaker A:Oh man, it's so great.
Speaker A:It's so good.
Speaker A:Something I was looking forward to see was, you know, tracking fingers and you know, combining face and body.
Speaker A:I, I could tell that face wasn't tracked as well.
Speaker A:But I will definitely be using my head cam to track face separately and it would be really interesting to see how that performs.
Speaker A:Sad reality of working with this system is it takes a lot of time to process.
Speaker A:So you can take footage with anything.
Speaker A:You can take with your camera, your phone and you upload your footage.
Speaker A:And it takes a lot of time for this footage to process.
Speaker A:But you know, fine, fine.
Speaker A:You can, you can set it up, go away for 20 minutes and you've got your scene and it's free, it's on device, it's.
Speaker A:It just works and it's.
Speaker A:The process is not as complicated as it seems.
Speaker A:Something I'm really excited about with this is you can take any footage, right?
Speaker A:So you can take a footage that maybe you lack a scene like somebody's performance in a movie, right?
Speaker A:So you can take that performance and you can use it in your cinematics or your game, or you can AI Generate a scene and use that as a source.
Speaker A:Just so many possibilities, you know.
Speaker A:So there is.
Speaker A:I'll be definitely experimenting more with that as soon as I have some time.
Speaker A:There's this terrain feature that lets you build terrain in a very imaginative, truly 3D sculpting way.
Speaker A:And I'm really excited for that.
Speaker A:It looks very powerful, and I don't know how exciting it is to actually navigate through the landscape.
Speaker A:Maybe it is.
Speaker A:Maybe it's something I need to appreciate.
Speaker A:You know, I've got this open world game that I didn't include any wild terrain because I thought it'd be kind of boring.
Speaker A:But maybe.
Speaker A:Maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker A:Maybe it would be nice to create basically like a vastness of space and like little villages that, you know, player will need to go between and.
Speaker A:And maybe.
Speaker A:Maybe there's something to it.
Speaker A:Maybe I underappreciate it.
Speaker A:I always thought that creating a vast space like that is a bit of cheating because player basically needs to conquer the terrain.
Speaker A:And it's just.
Speaker A:You just walk, right, and you look for fast travel.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:So I don't know how useful that is really, but I will experiment with that because it really feels like playing with play.
Speaker A:D'oh.
Speaker A:And you can create really interesting rock formations and such.
Speaker A:And there's, of course, the light system.
Speaker A:That's something that plays a big role in creating a nice mood in anything.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:I always thought even like in real life, like, if you want to occupy some space, don't think about furniture first.
Speaker A:Think about light.
Speaker A:You know, think about light first.
Speaker A:You've got empty space.
Speaker A:Design your lights first and then introduce furniture or meshes in this case and take it from there.
Speaker A:It's maybe an unpopular opinion, but I found it to be really fascinating to.
Speaker A:To appreciate light design in interior design.
Speaker A:It's.
Speaker A:It's something that I feel very strongly about.
Speaker A:So it seems like in this generation, Unreal Engine becomes even more robust and more optimized.
Speaker A:I mean, there are always people complaining about performance of Unreal Engine.
Speaker A:I. I don't have a horse in this race or in this battle.
Speaker A:Horse in this battle.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:I think Unreal Engine is a powerful system, powerful engine.
Speaker A:There's a lot of things happening under the hood, and I appreciate every process that my computer is mulling through.
Speaker A:I also found that it's due to my ignorance.
Speaker A:I've made Unreal work extra hard.
Speaker A:And I would complain that, you know, my Unreal Engine environment or whatever game is slow, but it was my own fault because I didn't execute it well.
Speaker A:You know what I mean?
Speaker A:Now there is a feature that also.
Speaker A:So I'm trying to.
Speaker A:I also record this video component, and I'm realizing that footage is kind of.
Speaker A:Kind of Dark.
Speaker A:I'll try to brighten it up.
Speaker A:Maybe I can't right now.
Speaker A:Okay, interesting.
Speaker A:Yeah, check me out on YouTube because I realized that I probably should embrace video more.
Speaker A:I know I probably talk about it for the last two episodes and I won't talk about podcasting too much this time around, but There is a YouTube channel as well if you want to look at me for some reason.
Speaker A:Now, feature that normally I would look forward to the most is this McP connector to AI coding agents.
Speaker A:It's incredible feature, man.
Speaker A:I'm not as excited about it right now because I've been using it for a while.
Speaker A:There is this plugin called MCP Bridge that I've been trying out and it's helped me so much.
Speaker A:It not only created interactions for me in my game, but also taught me a lot.
Speaker A:You know, like when you work with AI solves your problems, but it also informs you about how your game is actually working as long as you read whatever it writes right.
Speaker A:In fact, I mean, you, you should know how your game works.
Speaker A:And AI is a great insider because like, you may not be such a technical person, but you should know about architecture of your software when you build it.
Speaker A:That's.
Speaker A:That's my approach right now.
Speaker A:I'm.
Speaker A:I'm the orchestrator and AI coding agent is the executor of, of my project, of my ideas with code.
Speaker A:So I've installed this MCP plugin only today and I haven't really tested it.
Speaker A:Installation was kind of cumbersome.
Speaker A:I was kind of surprised because.
Speaker A:I've used that MCP Bridge plugin, which was like a third party plugin that would connect your AI with Unreal and installation was a lot easier and I think UI and UX of that MCP Bridge was a lot better.
Speaker A:The thing that Unreal or Epic did for us with this native MCP implementation was they're giving skills and different tools for you to use with your agents.
Speaker A:So as before, I would use all possible agents.
Speaker A:To be honest, depending on the task and the price, I would use different ones, but they were kind of agnostic and they would have this kind of generalist approach.
Speaker A:But now Unreal tells AI agents how Unreal works.
Speaker A:Basically that's kind of maybe definition of a skill.
Speaker A:It's a skill of Unreal Engine for your AI agent.
Speaker A:So I'm expecting there will be great results of that implementation.
Speaker A:I'm very tempted to use Unreal Engine 8.5.8 and typically I stay away from migrating like that because, you know, plugins don't work, maybe something's breaking, something is not quite stable, but I just couldn't resist and I started to migrate my project.
Speaker A:And this is so cumbersome.
Speaker A:There's a lot of things breaking in the transition.
Speaker A:Not everything transfers smoothly.
Speaker A:So there's a couple of problems that AI already started to fix for me.
Speaker A:You know, I was getting this error that I would really need to study to see what's.
Speaker A:What's causing the crash, you know, what drags the system.
Speaker A:But Codex told me that, oh, it's because of this ultra dynamic sky plugin, you know, into we need to disable it, try again migration, and then install it again.
Speaker A:It worked.
Speaker A:And also it found that, like I said, I'm using this old mass AI crowd system.
Speaker A:And it told me before, I mean, told me today, that some of those APIs and some of those elements of it are depreciated.
Speaker A:They're no longer supported.
Speaker A:So system is working, but it's very unstable.
Speaker A:I don't know if I'll be able to fix it ever.
Speaker A:And I'm hoping that AI agents will kind of take my crowd logic and it will move it into the new crowd system and it'll be a great test for it, you know, just to kind of see if it can handle it.
Speaker A:My assumption is that it will because he will handle all the problems.
Speaker A:He will take my requirements and he will just do it, informing me what.
Speaker A:What is happening.
Speaker A:You know, my great discovery lately is markdown.
Speaker A:I mean, I knew about it for the longest time, but I never really used it.
Speaker A:But now at everything that I do with AI has to be documented in markdown.
Speaker A:And I'm working with Obsidian, which is like a markdown text reader software.
Speaker A:You create those markdown documents and you basically collect all the information and then you give your AI agent specific markdown files, which are text files.
Speaker A:You give it your AI agents to work with and it keeps your context.
Speaker A:You tell it to update the file with whatever progress it did.
Speaker A:It's magnificent.
Speaker A:And I often feel like I don't need to know C in this case, I don't need to know the code.
Speaker A:I just need to have very good documentation.
Speaker A:And I need to audit my AI agents with another AI to to make sure that everything is okay.
Speaker A:And this is kind of like companies work, right?
Speaker A:If you are a boss of a company, you've got your employees and yeah, you always need to verify their assumptions.
Speaker A:They may have.
Speaker A:They should have, you know, their independent fields of expertise.
Speaker A:But then you need to kind of check if, if they're you know, full of.
Speaker A:Or not.
Speaker A:So that's what I'm doing.
Speaker A:That's what my process is.
Speaker A:You know, I ask my employees to document what they do and then I, I check if they are on the right path because I, I don't know their field.
Speaker A:That's how I work with AI.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Every AI is my employee in this case.
Speaker A:But we don't do money yet.
Speaker A:We don't make any money with this venture.
Speaker A:Yeah, maybe, maybe someday this will come.
Speaker A:Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker A:I'm, I'm, I'm getting closer, I think to, to actually launch something, having all this technology, you know, I can actually produce something that works as a, as a system, as a game.
Speaker A:Whereas before there would be always like, oh, I can do all of those things.
Speaker A:And yeah, at some point I will need to learn how to do some game mechanics.
Speaker A:I don't know about it yet.
Speaker A:Let me just work on the environment yet.
Speaker A:You know, that was always like, yeah, it's nice to work on those easy aspects of your game.
Speaker A:And I will get to the difficult part later on or maybe I'll ask somebody for help.
Speaker A:This day will probably never happen.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Because I mean, know what I mean?
Speaker A:Like, there are those huge bottlenecks in your project that you need to face and waiting will not change anything.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:It's like, yeah, AI is solving this.
Speaker A:AI is your expert.
Speaker A:And I've been thinking about the criticism, you know, the idea that AI is handling all of this stuff and it's removing us from equation.
Speaker A:I respect those perspectives, but I really disagree because look, the code is a step between us and machine to communicate.
Speaker A:It's something we agreed upon that this is the language coding language.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:That we use it to communicate with the machine.
Speaker A:It's now changing.
Speaker A:We changed the way of communication.
Speaker A:We're going to use AI for that now.
Speaker A:And I really believe if you keep good documentation, your agent will be, your AI will be working well.
Speaker A:It will be dependable, it will be trust, trustworthy.
Speaker A:So, you know, I know that people maybe find joy in solving those software issues, in, you know, working with code.
Speaker A:I respect that.
Speaker A:You know, it's, it's fascinating.
Speaker A:I can tell if I knew more about what I, what I, what happens, I could appreciate it more.
Speaker A:But if I just get an understanding of what's happening in the software.
Speaker A:How should I put it?
Speaker A:You cannot treat software as a black box.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:You need to know what your AI is doing with it.
Speaker A:I think we're gonna create a new baseline where, yeah, you're not supposed to know code, but you should know how it works.
Speaker A:That's what I'm aiming for.
Speaker A:That's what I'm striving for.
Speaker A:What I was going to say is.
Speaker A:I stepped into Unreal engine with version 5.6.
Speaker A:I got my powerful computer when that version was released.
Speaker A:And so many tutorials I've saved, downloaded so they don't disappear on me.
Speaker A:You know, so many of them are outdated.
Speaker A:There's so much stuff that's irrelevant and what should I make out of this?
Speaker A:You know, I've put energy into this.
Speaker A:What if I build some systems, I've built some levels or maybe some blueprints that I want to keep, they're kind of useless now.
Speaker A:And I know it's nature of software, but the fact that it can just get outdated, it really bugs me, you know, if I'm being creative with code, why does it get outdated?
Speaker A:Maybe there's something I don't understand, but it's now clear that Epic wants to move away from blueprints, which is fascinating because I feel like they announced blueprints just yesterday.
Speaker A:And it makes sense that they go away from that system because again, it's just one of the languages, how you communicate with computers, with machines, and maybe it just doesn't work well enough anymore.
Speaker A:I feel like it was beautiful idea for blueprints because it was this visual language, but it was so abstract.
Speaker A:It is so abstract.
Speaker A:I find it.
Speaker A:It's impossible to learn.
Speaker A:Just.
Speaker A:There's so many notes, there's so many kinds of blueprints that change when you, when you tweak something, they change their name and, and connectors.
Speaker A:They're just so mad.
Speaker A:They're so insane.
Speaker A:I was really trying to learn blueprints because I thought it's.
Speaker A:This is what.
Speaker A:This is the backbone of, of game production.
Speaker A:But I just found, how am I supposed to even memorize this?
Speaker A:You know, I can learn it.
Speaker A:How am I supposed to remember this?
Speaker A:You know, it seems like in all of those software applications for creatives, the workflow is being simplified and all the difficulties are being removed so we can focus on creating.
Speaker A:And people are afraid that, oh, now it's going to be too simple and everyone will be a creator or we will lose control, everything will become sliders and you can just mess around and come up with something that is kind of cool.
Speaker A:I guarantee that's not the case.
Speaker A:You know, you can have like the most capable system, you can have the most beautiful meshes and, you know, render pipelines, workflows, whatever.
Speaker A:You can Create beautiful visuals.
Speaker A:It's meaningless if, if there is no storytelling in it, if there is no point to that game, if there's no point to that software whatsoever.
Speaker A:It doesn't matter if it's interesting or.
Speaker A:Okay, it might be interesting and that might be a reason for it to exist.
Speaker A:But I feel like there is a lot of like software slop already that we're seeing that's just kind of generic, random, chaotic.
Speaker A:And I think this rule will persist.
Speaker A:You know, we will see a lot of useless software and this, this will be labeled a slop and it will disappear.
Speaker A:And real creators who really want to express something will use those even more powerful tools now.
Speaker A:And AI will be there to help them to just go from point A to B without distractions of dealing with things they just don't want to deal with in the first place.
Speaker A:You know, if I want to tell the story and if I'm a visual artist, do I really need to know how to code?
Speaker A:Can there be no better way of doing it?
Speaker A:If I have a good reference point, if I know what I want, if I know exactly what I want, do I really need to understand computer language to make it happen?
Speaker A:This friction disappears and it's incredible.
Speaker A:I'm really, really happy about that.
Speaker A:And if you're not on the same page as me, I hope to hear from you.
Speaker A:I'm really curious, what are your thoughts about the future of AI in software making?
Speaker A:Maybe, you know, it closes a path for many people like, many people just like to solve problems in software and they don't really care about the creative aspect of the game.
Speaker A:They just want to make game that works.
Speaker A:They want to create systems, right?
Speaker A:So we've got those locomotion systems, for example, which are incredible.
Speaker A:You've got the sophisticated parkour movement systems that you can just build a game on.
Speaker A:I have a lot of respect for people who make these because you need to know your stuff so well.
Speaker A:And you combine animations with different actions, different blend shapes, right, different transitions.
Speaker A:You need to optimize it at all, create nice game logic around.
Speaker A:But as a creator, you don't really have a desire to make actual game.
Speaker A:You just want to build this tool.
Speaker A:Now that thing seemed to be going away.
Speaker A:I think you can, I suppose you could create set of animations and then iterate with AI to, to build system from them, right?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So I think those people are unhappy.
Speaker A:I think people who make tutorials who are educators, they will most likely be largely replaced by AI, right?
Speaker A:I mean there we always educators because you still need to learn Unreal Engine, right?
Speaker A:AI will not guide you through completely through the whole thing because you basically don't know what to ask AI but there'll be less of those.
Speaker A:I'm sorry, but tedious stupid tutorials where they, they don't really teach you anything.
Speaker A:They just tell you what steps to follow and in the end you spend half an hour, maybe you accomplished your goal, but you don't really know how, how you did it.
Speaker A:You didn't.
Speaker A:You.
Speaker A:You didn't really know why you were connecting those nodes, why you were changing those settings.
Speaker A:And in order to do it again, you need to watch the tutorial again because there's no way to understanding and replicating it again, you know, so those tutorials will disappear because why the heck were you supposed to know this?
Speaker A:Like what you were really looking for was the end result.
Speaker A:I often felt like those tutorials were just scam.
Speaker A:These were like attention farming products where people were making them purposely too fast.
Speaker A:So you would watch this video for longer because if those people would really care about giving you solution, they would just give you the code, right?
Speaker A:Hey, you want to make the character open the door.
Speaker A:Hey, I'll show you in 20 minute video how it's done.
Speaker A:And yeah, they share the code, but you need to pay for it.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker A:Yeah, I'm simplifying, but maybe you know what I mean?
Speaker A:I hope you do.
Speaker A:Okay, I think that's all I want to talk about.
Speaker A:It's a bit of a rant, but I'm gonna leave it as that.
Speaker A:Like I said, I. I have a lot to explore with this new version.
Speaker A:With this new release, I'm really glad that there will be no 5.9, that they will just jump directly into Unreal Engine 6.
Speaker A:Which means I really would like to complete my project by then.
Speaker A:And I don't want to do project migration anymore.
Speaker A:I want this to be kind of my.
Speaker A:My last.
Speaker A:Yeah, my last generation of Unreal for that.
Speaker A:Are there still people who use Unreal Engine 5, 4, 5 or 7, whatever.
Speaker A:That was a popular version, right?
Speaker A:I feel like it will be the same die hard mentality when we move to version six.
Speaker A:And people will not want to, you know, leave blueprints behind and there will be resistance to move to version 6.
Speaker A:It's fine, it's fine.
Speaker A:I find it interesting, you know, that's all.
Speaker A:As long as you're productive and creative, so be it.
Speaker A:All right, I'm gonna end it here.
Speaker A:I don't really have anything concrete to say I just wanted to tell you that I'm very excited for this new version and I appreciate that you're listening and watching.
Speaker A:Write me an email.
Speaker A:I appreciate all of them.
Speaker A:I haven't been really active lately, but I'm planning to change this.
Speaker A:There's so many things to learn and do.
Speaker A:Time is limited and we always need to make those choices.
Speaker A:You know, what do we do with time?
Speaker A:I hope you don't have this problem, this issue, you know, envy people who build on day old feature.
Speaker A:You know, they get to do this and I could definitely do it as well, but I made my mind about what I want to work on predominantly.
Speaker A:Anyway, thank you for listening.
Speaker A:Thank you for watching.
Speaker A:Stay creative, stay motivated, and let's get in touch.
Speaker A:Peace.
