[Applause] This is a technological showcase set in the world of The Witcher 4. What you just saw and are going to see now is running on a standard PlayStation 5 at 60fps with rate tracing. So, in the game, you’ll be playing as Siri, a professional monster slayer, a Witcher. She explores the world and hunts down monster for coin. The region we are in is called Kovier and you’ll get to explore it in a game. Right now T is investigating the monster and after gathering new clues, she is heading back to a nearby village. All right, everyone. Meet Kelpy. Let weeds be weeds, Kelpy. So, just like Geralted Roach, Siri has her own loyal companion. We return to town. These two characters needs to feel like one. Since you’re going to explore the world on horseback, riding needs to feel seamless, natural, and just fun. Yeah. And to support that, we’re introducing multi character motion matching in Unreal. So, Siri and Kelpy, they’re perfectly synchronized when mounting from any angle and speed. And we also support root motion movement on Kelpy, so controlling her feels realistic and grounded. And there also some really nice improvements to our Unreal Chaos Flesh Solver and these machine-learned deformations. So you’ve got realistic muscles moving and stretching under Kelpy’s skin without compromising the performance there. So let’s leave Siri behind for a second and talk about the world itself. So much of the Wooter world is natural, organic, especially cover with its dense forest and wild nature. Yeah. And wild nature is hard. And with Nanite Geometry, we’ve freed artists from so many of their old constraints. But we don’t want to rest until everything we do in Unreal has that same spirit of freedom. There’s always more work to do and foliage is a huge piece of that puzzle. So, we are excited to introduce Nanite Foliage. And in order to achieve gorgeous foliage density everywhere while still being memory efficient, fast to render, we believe that a new idea was needed. So instead of the same card approach we’ve been using for the past 20 years, artists should be free to take a nanite approach to foliage, modeling every single leaf and pine needle. And the old LOD tricks of the past, they needed a complete rethink. And in their place, it’s a new adaptive voxal representation in Nanite. It’s volutric. It’s fully 3D. It is super fast to render. And these dense clusters of triangles turn into these cubes, which at a distance, they’re no larger than a pixel. And they react to the changing light of our dynamic sun and our shadows. And they allow artists to render whatever amount of foliage is needed to achieve their vision without compromise. And no compromise means how ambitious we are when it comes to bringing our vision to life with incredible visuals. But more than that, together with Epic, we created faster way to load the world. We can now bring in more content more quickly for the smoothest possible experience as we fly down to catch up with Siri. Welcome to Vest. So Vest is a port town, a hub for fishing, trade, and mining. It’s one of those places where you can meet shady characters or overhear gossip from other lands. It’s also where Chu took on her current contract. Hi tech. Let’s leave here and explore the marketplace and food. I’m so excited we can finally show you some of this stuff. Let’s see what Valdos has to offer. Not her again. creature for me. Not even at the land exit or bear. Now gazes while I present him with a fish for the furry rascal will often wait and be fair grants good guys. Notice how responsive the world is. Character actions directly affect what happens around you. Sometimes even setting off chain reactions. Everything is working together. Oh, look at this poor gentleman being taught how to fly by an angry inkeeper. That’s what happens when you cheat at Gwen. Last of it is it okay so this is the guy who gave the series quest his own like you probably suspect he has his own agenda in all of this tit again Wilfred get your ass A typical day’s toil. Who in a witches? What use of my wagons? My eternity is taken to that damn salt to arrive. I found them. And well, suffice to say, they’ll not reach you. As for the salt, found not one speck. I presume this comes as no surprise to you. Now, now Kavir’s smuggling trade is of no concern to me. Shush. The manticor that flattened your carts and devoured your men. Quite the opposite. Monticor. No. No. Them winged hell spawn dwell in the arand of Kraton. Not here. While Siri decides what to do about that merchant, let’s take a look at the character technology that powers this marketplace. Why don’t we listen in on these fish mongers? They’re selling their wares, chatting up customers. And catch this is we’ll find none. Rugged me ladies after one of them. Get this clean. Got it for you. Mine dearest more. Got micro cards. And there is tons of tech to play here. Even in a simple market stall, metahuman tools, improved Unreal smart objects, chaos cloth, and more. Yeah. And all of this exists to make sure that the gap in quality between Siri and NPCs is as small as possible. Yeah. And closing that gap, it’s not just about fidelity, right? But also authenticity. They should react to changes in the world around them. But the prisoner Impiller isn’t exciting enough for Valest. Let’s grab everyone’s attention with the circus. But the great performance deserves a huge crowd though. Let’s crank it up. So, you are seeing tons of optim optimizations here to many of Unreal systems, including an entirely new Unreal animation framework, allowing us to fit easily in our 60fps budget, not just in rendering, but also with room to spare on the game thread. Over 300 animated skeletal mesh agents all going about their business. And the whole point is to leave breathing room for developers like you to introduce the gameplay and the systems that your players expect, empowering you to make your worlds come to life without Unreal standing in your way. You are right. That’s the open world RPG that we are making. But before we wrap up, how about one final check-in with Siri? We are making this game to be the most immersive and ambitious openw world game ever. And we are making this a reality thanks to our work on Unreal with the team at Epic. I think what we are doing together is going to bring in a new generation of open world RPGs. And I’m so proud of what we accomplished so far. We are too. So, we’re almost done, but before we go, here’s a small gift for all Witcher fans. A first look at [Music] Lanexeta. Onward, Kelby, with what? Thanks, guys. It seriously, it looks amazing. And we’ve also barely scratched the surface of what’s coming in Unreal 5.6. So, here’s Julian to tell you even more. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Hey everyone, great to be here in Orlando. I spent a lot of time on this demo, so I’m happy to be the one to talk about what went into the 5.6 release. An open world like that was just the perfect content to focus on our main goal for the release which was performance. We want the engine to scale to large and rich worlds. We want to preserve graphics quality and of course we want to deliver high frame rates that you and your players expect. So let’s check it out. Starting with rendering. If you all remember when we released Nanite with UE5, it supported static geometry. Last year, we brought skinning to Nanite. And now, we’re working on Nanite foliage. The only way to have a forest that looks as good as this one is to use 3D geometry for all parts of the trees, just like we do for everything else. However, this is a crazy amount of fine geometry. So we had to rethink how trees are created and displayed. To create them, we developed nanite assemblies. These 28 little parts that you see are all that we use to build all the spruces from the forest. They are instanced thousands of time and used like building blocks to assemble trees in different ways. And as you probably noticed with the wind effect, they even support skeletal animation which runs on the GPU. Thanks to assembly, we greatly reduce the storage, the runtime memory, and the rendering cost. Then to display an entire forest, the challenge was to preserve fidelity and performance from any distance. Let’s check up close the level of detail we’re talking about here. lots of details, but this triangle representation is not the most efficient when far away due to the amount of overlapping. And that’s why we made an an adaptive vaual representation. But in reality, you’ll never see those vauels this close since when we move the camera back, they’re barely a pixel. Nite foliage is almost done. We are moving it to the mainline as we speak. and it will be available for everyone in 5.7. Another thing I would like to share is that rate tracing and lumen now run more than twice as fast with no visual trade-off compared to when UE5 was released. And because of that, we can now hit 60 fps on consoles. And finally, we rewrote the rendering pipeline to run asynchronously, so you can increase the richness of your scenes even more. Now let’s talk about chaos physics. For chaos clot, we improve our clot-to-clot constraint solution. This removes a lot of collision evaluation when garments are piling up and interacting with each other. Even for complex setup like Siri, we hit a sub millisecond budget on PS5. With chaos flesh, we introduce procedural muscle activations to make deformation and motion more natural. Your artist will still have control over Petra Hydrol simulation and train ML models that run fast in real time. We now support the baking of fluid surface data into lightweight assets to be played back at low cost. This is going to give you highfidelity water without the performant cost of real-time fluid simulation. For animation, we work on both performance and fidelity. Here you can see how Siri and Kelpy match up in their interaction. Well, that works no matter the angle of approach. That’s our mold character motion matching solution. We also added motion matching in sequencer to build stitch tracks. With them, you can seamlessly transition from gameplay to cinematic. Also, we now have a secondary layer of animation driven by physics in control rig. We used it in Kelp’s rig to drive the main the tail and the saddle backs. And now I’m happy to announce that all these features are already integrated into our new Unreal animation framework which we are releasing as experimental in 5.6. We built it with performance first in mind. animation evaluation are now running in parallel off the game thread which was our bottleneck and for the other character system that are just as costly like movement avoidance state tree behaviors we also move them to worker threads this is really going to help you create scenes that are crowded and lively streaming has always been a big deal regarding performance and the three biggest improvements we made are physics state creation which now runs async improved runtime PCG for ground scatter on GPU and a new fast plugin to stream static geometry and just to take a different example in city sample the streaming time was cut down by 90% while moving at high speed we focus on a lot of areas for performance in 5.6 and mobile is no exception. We work on better defaults and scalability settings for mobile and minimize the default package size. We also improve our workflows with a UI refactor of the viewport toolbar and content browser ondevice iteration workflow and a mobile preview solution. So there you go. Unreal Engine 5.6 is all about performance and it’s available today. Please go enjoy the tech talks and session we have for you guys and come chat with us. And now please welcome Chris from the Metahuman team. Thank you.