Unreal 5.8 Water 🌊, Slang ML Rendering 🤖
🌊 Cutting-Edge Real-Time Graphics
Insane Real-Time Water in Unreal 5.8: Jesse Pitela’s Niagara Fluids
Real-time VFX instructor Jesse Pitela has unveiled new Niagara Fluids experiments in Unreal Engine 5.8, showcasing water simulations that spawn roughly 1.3 million GPU particles every second. The setup includes advanced foam and splash behavior plus a true force field that dynamically repels water with varying intensity. According to Jesse, Niagara Fluids in UE 5.8 runs up to 30% faster, enabling denser and more detailed liquids. He’s packaging these techniques into his upcoming Niagara Liquids 5.8 course, launching July 8.
Slang & SlangPy: Bridging Real-Time Rendering and Machine Learning
NVIDIA’s Shannon Woods introduces Slang, a cross-platform shading language with built-in automatic differentiation aimed at uniting real-time graphics and machine learning. Slang compiles a single shader codebase to HLSL, SPIR-V/GLSL, CUDA, and CPU, and SlangPy exposes that same code directly to Python and PyTorch. By simply annotating functions as differentiable, graphics code like BRDFs and texture sampling becomes trainable without hand-writing gradients. A practical neural mipmap optimization demo shows how one shader powers both rendering and gradient-based texture training.
🚀 Seamless Experiences & Spatial AR
No More Loading Screens: Unity Multi‑Scene and Bootstrap Workflow
Learn how to turn your Unity game into a seamless experience with multiple scenes running at once. The creator shows why `LoadScene` stutters, then fixes it with `LoadSceneAsync`, additive scene loading, and a bootstrap scene that owns your cameras, lights, and UI. You’ll also learn how to show loading progress, preload scenes using `allowSceneActivation`, and automatically route Play Mode through the bootstrap. Finally, they demonstrate waypoint-based streaming to load and unload sections of a large map around the player.
Unity + XREAL Aura: Building Hands-First AR Games on Android XR
Unity, Google, and XREAL team up to show how developers can build and port OpenXR-based Unity projects to the new XREAL Aura glasses on Android XR. The session explains Aura’s puck-and-glasses architecture, hands-first interaction model, and how to use Unity 6, XR Interaction Toolkit, AR Foundation, and Android XR extensions together. You’ll see MR templates running on real hardware, learn about dimming control, spatial anchoring, and Android XR Hub for live debugging. It’s a practical starting point for both games and enterprise MR apps.