Unreal Engine 5 Highlights of 2024
01. Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl
If forced to choose one Unreal Engine game that stood out in 2024, I’d opt for Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl. In our review, we described it as a gloriously gloomy use of Unreal. Set in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, the game adopts a grim look with a color palette that could best be described as rust and concrete. The vegetation is impressively realistic, the weather is filthy, with violent storms, and the environment is a character in its own right – and it’s all strangely believable.
02. Still Wakes The Deep
Another title that stood out for its use of Unreal Engine in 2024 was the horror game Still Wakes The Deep. Developer The Chinese Room switched from UE 4 to Unreal Engine 5 during development, and the move paid off. The beauty of the game is in how it blends convincing 1970s period detail with realistic water and vapour physics to make the isolated North Sea oil rig setting believable. Unreal Engine 5’s virtualized geometry system, Nanite, was key to achieving that level of detail, while Lumen allowed real-time iteration for lighting. Everything looks wet, but there’s incredible detail in that wetness: with rust, paint, and cigarette butts in the water and variation in the level of moisture in the air. It makes the harsh, grainy weather feel real.
03. Slime!
Moving on to personal projects, we were intrigued by one tech artist’s mission to use Unreal Engine 5 to make the perfect slime – simply because he "always wanted Splatoon mechanics in dungeons". Asher Zhu quit working on Fortnite at Epic Games to direct Duck Shake Games and work with the green, gunky stuff, and the project is oozing along nicely. It’s a very specific goal, but then that kind of determination can pay off. I already like the look of the mechanics.
04. Fallout
Beyond game development, Unreal Engine is also transforming – and blending – film-making techniques. For Magnopus’s work on Amazon’s Fallout TV series, artists used in-camera VFX and the real-time flexibility of Unreal Engine to create a virtual production workflow to use with 35mm film on hybrid sets that mixed traditional set design with LED volume stages. Actors weren’t shown LED projections before filming to that their surprise would be genuine. And since everything in Unreal Engine is 3D and real-time, it was possible to make changes live on set if needed.
05. Max Beyond
One creator even made an entire film in Unreal Engine in 2024. For Max Beyond, director HaZ Dulull used motion capture suits and rendered the whole thing as final pixels out of Unreal Engine 4.26.2. He thinks Epic’s engine has "democratised film-making". "Scene references and blocking examples from Unreal were important to give detailed direction for the actors," told us. He previsualised the entire plot and visuals in Unreal Engine and he was able to work on almost every aspect of the animation process in one contained environment. "It was really freeing," HaZ said. "We could get each part of the film ready and bring it into Unreal Engine almost at any time. Nothing got wasted."
06. 3D Visualisation using Gaussian Splatting
Gaussian splatting has provided a new method for representing real-life scenes in 3D. One Japanese company got our attention by using technique combined with Unreal Engine 5 to create explorable visualisations. The environmental phototogrammertrist company Studio Duckbill says the footage was converted into 3D Gaussian splatting using the Postshot beta plugin and displayed in UE5. The results show great display quality.
07. Weather Visualisation
Meanwhile, technical artist Nils Bakker used Unreal Engine 5 as part of a clever system that combines multiple APIs to create real-time weather visualisation and time-of-day effects. Enter a city, and the system shows visuals based on the real weather conditions at any given time. Nils used OpenWeather API to get the real-time weather conditions, World Time API for time synchronisation and OpenAI 4o mini for processing the longitude and latitude of the requested city. OpenAI establishes the location, and then the photorealisitc 3D environment is created using Cesium’s photorealistic 3D tiles. Real-time weather data from OpenWeather is used to add clouds, rain, or snow and appropriate lighting for the time of day (via World Time API). Cloud transitions were built with the Ultra Dynamic Sky plug-in.
08. Project Titan
We’ll finish with the massive collaborative project that was Epic Games’ own Project Titan. The ten-week ‘art jam’ saw more than 4,000 artists and developers work to create a spectacular open-world landscape, comprising nine different biomes packed with characters and assets. It showcased Unreal’s potential for real-time collaboration on a massive scale as well as the underlying tech. The Project Titan free sample game can be downloaded from the Fab store.
Conclusion
Unreal Engine 5 has continued to push the boundaries of what’s possible in game development, film-making, and beyond. From the dark and gritty world of Stalker 2 to the photorealistic 3D visualisations of Studio Duckbill, and from the real-time weather system of Nils Bakker to the massive collaborative project of Project Titan, Unreal Engine 5 has shown its versatility and power.
FAQs
Q: What is Unreal Engine 5?
A: Unreal Engine 5 is a game engine developed by Epic Games that allows developers to create high-quality, interactive 3D content for a variety of platforms.
Q: What are some of the key features of Unreal Engine 5?
A: Some of the key features of Unreal Engine 5 include photorealistic rendering, global illumination, dynamic lighting, and advanced physics simulations.
Q: Can Unreal Engine 5 be used for film-making?
A: Yes, Unreal Engine 5 can be used for film-making, as demonstrated by the work on Amazon’s Fallout TV series.
Q: Can Unreal Engine 5 be used for 3D visualisation?
A: Yes, Unreal Engine 5 can be used for 3D visualisation, as demonstrated by the work of Studio Duckbill and Nils Bakker.
Q: Is Unreal Engine 5 free to use?
A: Unreal Engine 5 is free to use, with a 5% royalty on gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product, per quarter.
