Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5 is now available to download

Epic Games has launched the next generation game engine—The Unreal Engine 5. This will enable developer to create next-generation real-time 3D content. It should be noted that the new features and workflows have already been production-proven for game development in Fortnite and The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine 5 Experience demo.
“Some major new features like Lumen and Nanite have not yet been validated for non-games workflows (this is an ongoing goal for future releases), all creators will be able to continue using workflows supported in UE 4.27. But they’ll also benefit from a redesigned Unreal Editor, better performance, art-friendly animation tools, extended mesh creation, and editing toolset, improved path tracing, and much more,” Epic Games said in a press statement.
Key features
Lumen: A fully dynamic global illumination solution that enables creators to create believable scenes where indirect lighting adapts on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry—for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day, turning on a flashlight, or opening an exterior door.  With Lumen, developers can simply create and edit lights inside the Unreal Editor and see the same final lighting your players will see when the game or experience is run on the target platform.

Nanite: It gives you the ability to create games and experiences with massive amounts of geometric detail. Directly import film-quality source art comprised of millions of polygons—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans—and place them millions of times, all while maintaining a real-time frame rate, and without any noticeable loss of fidelity.
Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM): It provides soft shadows with reasonable, controllable performance costs. Nanite and VSMs intelligently stream and process only the detail you can perceive, largely removing poly count and draw call constraints, and eliminating time-consuming work like baking details to normal maps and manually authoring LODs—freeing you up to concentrate on creativity. For those who did not get a chance to explore Unreal Engine 5 yet, there are two free sample projects the company is offering.

City Sample
The City Sample is a free to download sample project that reveals how the city scene from The Matrix Awakens: An Unreal Engine Experience was built. The project conss of a complete city with buildings, vehicles, and crowds of MetaHuman characters—demonstrates how Epic Games used new and improved systems in Unreal Engine 5 to create the experience. The content is available in separate packs, so you can download just the vehicles.
Lyra Starter Game
Lyra Starter Game is a sample gameplay project, available for free download built alongside UE5 development to serve as an excellent starting point for creating new games, as well as a hands-on learning resource. Epic Games will continue to upgrade this living project with future releases.