Unreal Engine 5 is a next-generation graphics engine that has advanced technology which enabled an important leap at the graphic level. Undoubtedly, the most important ones are Nanite, which greatly improves the geometry, and Lumen, which does the same with the behavior of light, although the latter can be so demanding that it is too big even for the PS5 and Xbox Series X.

For all its capabilities and the potential that Unreal Engine 5 offers, it is not perfect, it has some points that could be improved, such as optimization and parallelization capacity at the CPU level, and there is also the issue of NPCs. As a true video game lover, I can tell you that the development that NPCs have seen in recent years has been minimal, so The interactions between NPCs in Fallout 3 and NPCs in Cyerpunk 2077 are essentially virtually identical.

NVIDIA has been working on this for some time, betting on using AI to create what we know as MetaHuman, a species “Humanized” NPCs thanks to artificial intelligence that improves the level of interaction and immersion in games. We’ve already shared an article with you where we talk about this topic, so I invite you to check it out if you haven’t had a chance to read it at the time.

During the UnrealFest Seattle 2024 celebration, NVIDIA announced the launch new plugins for NVIDIA ACE in Unreal Engine 5. These plugins run locally and make it quick and easy to create and deploy MetaHuman NPCs in games. I’ll leave you with a summary of the most important news below:

Plugins for Unreal Engine 5

• Plugin Audio2Face-3D: enables lip sync and facial animation using artificial intelligence within Unreal Engine 5.
• Nemotron-Mini 4B Instruct Plugin: generates answers in interactive dialogs with game NPCs.
• Recovery Augmented Generation (RAG) plugin: offers contextual information to improve NPC interactions in the game.

Audio2Face-3D Plugin for Autodesk Maya

• Makes it easy to create high-quality sound-based facial animations in Maya.
• Contains source code for customization and integration with other digital content creation tools.
• Simplifies the workflow between Maya and Unreal Engine 5.
• Available for download on GitHub.

Unreal Engine 5 Renderer Microservice with Pixel Streaming

• It allows you to take advantage of Epic’s Unreal Pixel Streaming technology.
• It is compatible with the NVIDIA ACE Animation Graph microservice and the Linux operating system in its preview version.
• It allows developers to stream high-quality Meta Human characters to any device via Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC).

All of these changes translate into important advancements and benefits for developers because:

• It simplifies the integration of digital humans (Meta Human) powered by artificial intelligence in games and applications.
• Optimizes microservices for low latency and minimal memory usage on a Windows computer.
• Improves scalability for cloud-based digital human deployments.
• It provides customizable tools and source code to easily meet the specific needs of each developer.