It's still early, but soon you'll be able to see all sorts of cool little indie projects using UE5. FYI you can use Quixel Bridge, including Meta Creator characters you made. It's not limited in that fashion except some other specialized plugins that are only 4.26 atm(DLSS, etc).
This guy's channel has all sorts of cool UE5 demos...
Yeah, seen some of those; I had been thinking of doing like a "Cool Shit Done in UE5 So Far" thread on GAF, but A) it's still mostly UE4 scenes with Nanite/Lumen turned on, or a billion-triangles model throwdown, and B) it's not actually
that cool of shit yet if you're not into development since they cannot fully control the scene (AFAIK? I never played with Unreal, so there's C, I'm no authority to say what is cool and what is shit.)
But there's lots of cheats still because most of the UE5 experience seems to be locked out or incomplete. (Correct me where I'm wrong, please; I'm just going off glimpses rather than hands-on.)
Like those "Short Films", I believe what they're doing in each is just importing the idle animations they want for the "character interactions". They can't animate or assign AI to the figures, but if they have animation in the character file for idling that they can leave active, and if you cut idle gestures together just right right, it looks like everybody is standing around "talking" instead of just waving their hands around and nodding their heads occasionally. Looks like you can have one hero character who can be assigned to your own character model, and you can move him around your scene, but I have yet to see many dynamic actions (just the standard UE Avatar run/walk/jump moves,) you cannot use a gun or interact physically with an object besides standing on it. And then you can't seem to edit the actual "game" portion, so I've never seen somebody have Echo go off the path or meet the robot in the daytime or have 10 robot bosses instead of just one or have Echo swapped with like somebody's crummy Goku mannequin model.
(It is interesting that
in this scene he was able to get it to throw off some sparks and follow a camera move, and then there's this
Petra Lumen demo where the character is I believe walking around sequences where the GI is moving, either scripted moves or triggered with inputs. So you can do some more stuff than I understand the Early Access editor allows.)
BTW, the "
Essence of Light" demo is the best I've seen so far of interactivity with a project file with UE5, in that there are multiple surface types with interactive effects (a pool of "lit" water, some unplanned emissions from lights on fabric models,) a lightsource you can nudge, and then a grand finale of another UE5 feature. I don't know how many aspects of this demo are "UE4 bits" (there is a bit of amusing "OMG" going on with people looking at some of the UE5 demos and they're basically just untouched UE4 project files that would run just as nicely and prettily in the 4.26...), but this Marvel Masters person has been around and they did some fun stuff with the tools here.
