"Lumen in the Land of Nanite” Release Request

I signed up to comment here! It would be great if we could deconstruct the “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” demo. Hoping to contribute my small amount of influence to draw some more of unreal’s eyes to this thread.

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For my personal ‘Gee-whiz’ factor, I absolutely would love to see it released. That being said, I can understand some of Epic’s reasoning for not doing so currently.

I’ve watched more than a few of the technical demos explaining how Nanite and Lumen work, including some that revisit Land Of Nanite for example content. While I could be wrong, I believe I heard that LON was significantly bigger than VOTH, largely due to the sheer number of custom assets and content involved, and I infer that it may be cumbersome to release, especially as the 100Gb VOTH demo was already asking a lot for storage. Again, I could be entirely wrong about this, and I am open to correction from anyone with better information than me.

Of course, it could also be a content limitation: LON used a form of far-distance global illumination called the distant scene, based off of a reflective shadowmap cascade I believe. While this technique exists in CVars in 5.0 EA, I think it is deprecated in more recent builds, infavor of their ‘Far field’ tracing method. What I’m saying is LON might also be withheld because Epic doesn’t want to put its artists’ resources into bringing a prototype demo up to standard for 5.1.

All this aside, I would personally love to see it released, massive download sizes, bugs and all. It’s what introduced me to UE5 and the immense possibilities Lumen and Nanite could offer, and aside from unforeseen licensing/legal issues I’m unaware of, I think it would generate a lot of community goodwill if we could all see this amazing work for ourselves.

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Okay… Lets try this again,

Is there anyone at Epic Games that could shed any light on even the possibility of having the “Lumen in the Land of Nanite” “Whole Sample” released for Download for us Devs. Now that UE5 is released officially. I’m pretty sure I can’t be the only person who would like to get a peek under the hood and really see how that demo was put together and play with a lot of the mechanics used… It would be like a one stop shop for a Sample because you are encompassing a large number of features under one roof… Well Sample… I think it would be great to finally get some traction on if this is something that would even be considered by Epic Games. Please someone/anyone from Epic Games read this, talk to whomever you need and reply to this thread. Any answer is better than no response…

Thanks to “someone/anyone” in advance for anything you can do.

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Can you give us a hand Victor? Could you find out why epic haven’t released the lumen in the land of nanite demo? Its a very efficient display of use of Nanite & Lumen. Is there any particular reason why EPIC have chosen not to release it? Are there any plans? As Legend said, any response is better than no response.

@VictorLerp

Lumen in the Land of Nanite (LLN) wasn’t produced with the intention of being released as a sample project. There would be a non-trivial amount of work required to prepare it for release. That time and effort went into Valley of the Ancient and Lyra, which demonstrate all of the features showcased in LLN. Being designed from the ground up as sample projects, they’re better to dissect and learn from.

TLDR; There are no plans to release Lumen in the Land of Nanite as a sample project.

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And for the Niagara creatures (bird flocks, bugs, bats), of which I’m pretty sure they don’t show up in either of those examples, there’s this livestream, where they break many of them down in high detail:

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Knowing the sheer passion and number of fans of it, I almost wouldn’t be suprised if someone attempted a fan remake of Lumen in the land of Nanite. The core technology’s there, Echo herself and much of the VFX (as you mentioned above) are already available, some of the custom assets made it into VOA, and there are videos documenting a fair bit of the level’s construction. It would obviously be a superhuman amount of work, but certainly not impossible.

This is the demo I’ve been looking for! “Windwalker Echo” flying from that temple was one of the first things I remember, that and fighting that giant!! the rock climbing example for one is something I want to look at how to do!!

It was a very fascinating system, definitely. I believe it was primarily to show off the new full-body IK and motion warping system, VOA has a (simplified) version of the technique as well.

That’s cap bro we know you guys hiding the good stuff in there, them fancy nodes

Thank you. However 5 months later. Screen shots of Lumen in the Land of Nanite (LLN) are still being used in new presentations of nanite and Lumen.

Which begs the question that Lumen in the Land of Nanite (LLN) is still considered as a superior demo by UE engineers???

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Really? What’s the most recent video?

And in my opinion, it is, in a lot of ways. Even though we were given the City Scene and Lyra (and VOA), none of them are actually as technically impressive as LON. We have massive cities and crowds with ray-tracing already (the newest patch of cyberpunk 2077 calls that to mind), and we have high-quality shooters and open-world GI. LON was built with a level of visual detail and fidelity that no game demo thus presented has carried in the same way.

More than anything else? LON is simply cooler than all of the other demos. It is visually and artistically spectacular, and it’s the fullest representation of what the next-gen could actually achieve with the time and detail put in, not to mention the incredibly dramatic destruction sequence at the end, which no other demo really matches in size and scope. At some point, I’d like to see it released, even as the mess of beta blueprint code and kludges it probably is. Although this may be an overstatement, I think it will be remembered as a part of gaming history.

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very true I wan LUMEN IN THE LAND OF NANITE PLEAZE JUST DUMP ME THE RAW FILES THANK YOU

7 months laters, I’m begging your team Victor to revisit this. Tim Sweeney made a promise on twitter that he will release it. I’m sure he’s under the impression that it was released. Epic Games has released all major demos in the past, even ones that were not created for developer’s consumption. Because digging through each demo and learning by yourself is like find an amazing looking gold transparent glass. The best part about LILN is that its familiar because its using some old UE Tech in combination with the new. So it will be 100% familiar even if it was a straight dump.

I fully understand not releasing it initially on UE5 release to focus on UE5 new features. But its been over a year since UE5 release. I think its time to dump LILN source files.

The community will be eternally grateful towards you if you push for the dump of LILN. Be our advocate Victor, millions are waiting for that demo. Literally millions and thousands of developers. Its the best looking UE5 demo by far and there is a lot to learn from it, especially the kitbashing technique being used.

Please VictorLerp, be our advocate, push for a complete dump, WITHOUT developer resources being pulled from other projects.

When did Tim Sweeney say that? I’m happy to hear it, I just wasn’t aware.

I actually got to hear a bit about why LILN (LON?) has been largely kept by Epic, and while I still absolutely want them to release it, I can understand more of their rationale now.

Essentially (and I could be somewhat wrong about this, it was explained to me a while ago), Lumen in the Land of Nanite is UE5 development’s archeological dig site. Beyond the content visible to the audience (or seen in most developer streams), the level was apparently used as a significant developer testing platform as the engine was being constructed, so there is a massive amount of content not visible, functional or usable. It’s apparently hidden by the layers system so it hasn’t been visible in any of the streams, but that massive pile of content from UE5’s early days creates some interesting complexities in releasing it.

I am still, unquestionably, all for their releasing the project, and expecting members of the Unreal community to clean up the demo until it’s a bit lighter weight and easier to manage. But, I can also absolutely understand them putting forth VOA and the city sample first, as those are clean, well-documented sample projects as opposed to the titanic technological kitbash of LON.

He said it here in regards to a question about the Demo running on PC:

“It’s way too early to know. Best to wait for the preview release of Unreal Engine 5 next year and go wild benchmarking it.”

I just think we haven’t made enough noise. People want it but they haven’t come together to voice their opinion and no one in Epic is fighting for it.

As you said, the kitbashing is actually one of the reasons why it should be released. We haven’t seen visuals that come close to LILN because we don’t know how they kitbash to achieve it.

People are simply building levels in the same old way which is why things look un-organic and LILN looks so organic.

Even the statue, no one has modeled a statue like that with no normal map with unprecedented details. We need to know precisely how. Let the devs tear it apart. You don’t have to hold our hands.

Just like other project released in the past. They don’t have to do anything but dump it. People have already learned what they needed to learn with UE5, they have already been introduced.

LILN setup would not confuse them, it will help them. Please just dump the project. Let the developers handle it, you have done it several times already.

@VictorLerp

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While I assume a year and a half later this fell on deaf ears, it’s worth another try and saying it’s almost Christmas!! Lumen in the Land of Nanite!!! :christmas_tree:

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I can absolutely agree with the enthusiasm, I do think a more concerted effort will be needed in order to feasibly get it released. As much as I would love to have the raw files, it could be everything from software dependencies to ownership rights to sheer data size preventing them from doing that. Based on what I’ve been told, I’ll estimate it could be a couple hundred man-hours to pull out the old/scrapped content, reconfigure the scripts to work with a newer version of the engine, and adjust the way the level was set up to facilitate working on the current lumen paradigm. I believe they could give it to us, but we’ll need a lot more than this page’s four votes to do it.

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And again, as we’ve said above, not Lyra, the matrix demo, or VOA come close to LON’s sheer visual quality, even with a newer and better engine version. None of them push the technology as hard, and of all of them, only LON represents something truly next-gen in my opinion.

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Something that just occured to me: even if (for technical, legal, or other reasons), LON cannot be released to the public, I think it’d be reasonable to ask for the individual assets themselves to be made available. While many of the assets are megascans freely available from quixel bridge, the art and architectural items and the extremely detailed sculptures would be wonderful to see and play around with from a community perspective. If Epic’s already made them available, then that’s wonderful, but I don’t believe they have.